The Origin of Sin

Greece and Rome, Early Judaism and Christianity

David Konstan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350278615
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión antigua

Where did the idea of sin arise from? In this meticulously argued book, David Konstan takes a close look at classical Greek and Roman texts, as well as the Bible and early Judaic and Christian writings, and argues that the fundamental idea of "sin" arose in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, although this original meaning was obscured in later Jewish and Christian interpretations. Through close philological examination of the words for "sin, " in particular the Hebrew hata' and the Greek hamartia, he traces their uses over the centuries in four chapters, and concludes that the common modern definition of sin as a violation of divine law indeed has antecedents in classical Greco-Roman conceptions, but acquired a wholly different sense in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament.

1

The Greco-Roman World: The Unwritten Laws of the Gods

What is sin? In the concrete sense, in which we may speak of “a sin” or “sins,” it denotes a wrongful action. More abstractly, it may connote a guilty state or condition. What is more, the word normally carries religious overtones. Modern accounts of sin (or of the comparable word in other languages) join these two aspects. Take, for example, the definition in the Oxford English Dictionary: “An immoral act considered to be a transgression against divine law.” Or again, this from the Merriam Webster Dictionary: “an offense against religious or moral law…, transgression of the law of God.” The King James Version Dictionary, keyed to the King James Bible, is even more specific: “The voluntary departure of a moral agent from a known rule of rectitude or duty, prescribed by God; any voluntary transgression of the divine law, or violation of a divine command; a wicked act; iniquity.” Foreign lexica offer similar descriptions. In German, for instance, the word Sünde is defined as “a breach in the relationship with God by human beings.”¹ Therese Fuhrer in turn observes: “The German concept of ‘Sünde’ – like the corresponding concepts in other modern Western European languages – designates a reprehensible act by which a person consciously contravenes a divine law or commandment and thereby turns away from God.”² The last clause adds a dimension to sin that goes back to the early commentators on the Bible. Finally, Hermut Löhr, commenting on the Letter to the Hebrews, states simply: “Sin is per se sin against God.”³

To be sure, the word “sin” is also used in an informal way to indicate any kind of offense, though usually one considered serious. Thus, the Oxford English Dictionary, in addition to the primary definition, notes: “An act regarded as a serious or regrettable fault, offense, or omission”; and the Merriam-Webster lexicon likewise adds: “an action that is or is felt to be highly reprehensible …, an often serious shortcoming: fault.” Indeed, in Italian the exclamation peccato! means little more than “what a pity” or “too bad.” Is the religious sense, however, as defined above, in fact specific to the Bible, or was a comparable idea current in the pagan environment of the Greco-Roman world? As it will turn out, there is indeed ample evidence of such a conception of sin in classical Greece and Rome, which on the surface falsifies the claim that sin in the rich, religious sense is somehow exclusively a feature of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The task of this chapter is to lay out the evidence, but it is not, as I indicated in the Preface, my intention to show that, in the final analysis, sin was simply part of the shared heritage of the Mediterranean World and beyond, and that it bears no special significance when we encounter it in the Bible. I mean only to show that sin, as commonly defined in the lexica and handbooks, extends beyond the Biblical texts and may be found in pagan thought as well. When we come to a discussion, in the following chapters, of the Hebrew scripture and the New Testament, we will see that sin has a more particular meaning that in fact is unique to those writings and is not found elsewhere, or at least not in the Greek and Roman texts that have come down to us. To be absolutely sure that sin, as used in the Tanakh and the New Testament, is solely Biblical, it would of course be necessary to examine the religious or moral concepts of a wide variety of cultures, from Egypt and Babylon to regions further afield, like India and China and all the places where a god or gods were worshipped. This is a task beyond my competence, and I do not presume to affirm that nowhere in the world did some analogous conception arise. I will say, however, that I have not encountered an idea of sin in the Biblical sense elsewhere, and scholars learned in the religious thought of many of these rich cultures have assured me that it is not to be found in those traditions. Greece and Rome, then, represent a test case or sounding: they are enough to show, at the very least, that sin as defined in the dictionaries did exist as a religious idea outside the Bible. What is more, the absence of the more restricted notion of sin that we will explore in the following chapters suggests that there was something special about the Biblical concept. If sin even in this latter sense does turn out to have analogues in other societies, then further work will need to be done to explain how and why it arose there as well as in the Bible.

Let us turn, then, to the pagan tradition, and there is no better place to start than Homer’s Odyssey, among the earliest works to survive from classical antiquity. The poem opens with a conversation among the gods on Mount Olympus, in which Zeus complains of the human tendency to blame the gods for their misfortunes: “for in his heart he thought of flawless Aegisthus, whom far-famed Orestes, Agamemnon’s son, had slain. Thinking of him he spoke among the immortals, and said: ‘It’s astonishing how ready mortals are to blame the gods. It is from us, they say, that evils come, but they even by themselves, through their own blind folly, have sorrows beyond that which is ordained.’ ”⁴ Zeus is upset that Aegisthus married Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife, and killed Agamemnon when he returned home from Troy, even though Zeus had sent Hermes to warn him precisely not to do this, or else Orestes, Agamemnon’s son, would kill Aegisthus in turn—which is just what happened (1.29–43). Does Aegisthus’ “blind folly,” by which he ignored the specific instructions of Zeus, the chief deity of the Olympic pantheon, and murdered the legitimate ruler, count as a sin? The phrase “blind folly” in the translation represents the Greek word atasthaliai, the plural of atasthalia. The authoritative dictionary of ancient Greek into English, edited by Henry Liddell, Robert Scott, and Henry Stuart Jones and commonly abbreviated to LSJ (1966), defines atasthalia as “presumptuous sin, recklessness, wickedness,” so sin has seemed at least a plausible translation of the term. We may note here that the great Greek-Spanish dictionary, the Diccionario Griego-Epañol (DGE), under the general editorship of Francisco Rodríguez Adrados, which so far has not got beyond the letter E, offers the more cautious Spanish equivalents “orgullo insolente, arrogancia, insensatez culpable” (that is, “insolent pride, arrogance, culpable stupidity”). Now, ancient grammarians connected the word atasthalia with atê, which means something like “ruin,” “blind and criminal folly, infatuation,” according to the dictionaries. However, that derivation is uncertain, and, as is almost always the case, it is best to interpret the meaning of atasthalia by the way it is used in context rather than rely on possible etymologies, even when they are not as fanciful as some of the ancient examples. In the present instance, then, why not translate atasthaliai as “sins”? After all, Zeus himself sent Hermes, his messenger, to warn Aegisthus not to murder Agamemnon, and Aegisthus ignored the command, to his sorrow. This would appear to be an act of sheer disobedience to a god, indeed the top god of all.

Aegisthus’ fault seems similar to that of the Sodomites, according to the narrative of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah recounted in Genesis. Having heard reports of the goings on in those towns, “the Lord said, ‘The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sins so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know’ ” (18:20–21). He sends some angels to investigate, who are entertained in the house of Lot; but when the inhabitants of Sodom seek to have intercourse with them, refusing even Lot’s offer of his own daughters so as to avoid the greater crime of abusing guests, God wipes out the entire city. The behavior of the Sodomites bears a certain analogy to that of Aegisthus in killing the legitimate king in his own palace. There are differences, to be sure: in the Homeric passage, Aegisthus is punished by Orestes, Agamemnon’s son, whereas in Genesis God acts himself to punish the Sodomites; we might add that the guilt of the Sodomites is collective rather than individual. Still, is the nature of their sins fundamentally different?

In the Septuagint—that is, the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, begun during the third century BC and completed, in all likelihood, in the second—the word that is translated as “sins” is hamartiai, the plural form of the word hamartia. This word will turn out to be the key term for sin in the New Testament and later Christian literature, but in classical texts its meaning is not always so portentous, and may signify simply an error or mistake; the root meaning seems to have been missing the mark, as in archery or the cast of a spear. The Liddell-Scott-Jones dictionary, for example, defines the word as “a failure, fault,” and more narrowly as an “error of judgement.” In a secondary definition, they note that the term may bear the sense of “guilt” or “sin,” but they restrict this significance to “Philosophy and Religion.” As examples from Greek philosophy, the lexicon cites Plato’s late dialogue, Laws (660C, etc.), along with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (1148a3); a little later, we shall examine both these passages, which do not, I believe, conform to the current definition of sin at all, much less to the specialized sense that I will explore in subsequent chapters. The lexicon also offers Biblical passages which bear the sense of sin, beginning with the Septuagint version of Genesis 18:20, which is precisely the account of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorra, and also the Gospel of John (8:46). The Greek to Spanish dictionary that was mentioned above offers “error, falta” as the primary senses of the term, along with “equivocacíon, fallo, delito,” and “hecho ilegal o injusto” (“an illegal or unjust act”). Again, it is only in the secondary definition that it gives as the equivalent word “pecado,” the Spanish for “sin,” but this sense of the word is restricted to “Judeo-Christian literature,” and the first instance of this meaning cited in the dictionary is, again, the passage from Genesis under consideration here, along with a considerable list of other examples. We shall consider in greater detail the use of hamartia (and the Hebrew equivalent) in this connection in the following chapters; here, we may simply note that there is no fundamental divergence in the connotations of the words hamartia and atasthalia, as the latter is used in the proem to the Odyssey.

In the Iliad, Achilles, after slaying Hector in retaliation for the death of Patroclus, drags the Trojan hero’s corpse behind his chariot, defiling it in the dust. His behavior is such as to offend even the gods, or most of them, but “Hera and Poseidon and the flashing-eyed maiden [i.e., Athena] … continued even as when at the first sacred Ilios became hateful in their eyes and Priam and his folk, by reason of the sin of Alexander” (24.25–28).⁵ “Sin,” here, in Murray’s archaizing translation, renders atê, a term that, as we noted earlier, means something like “bewilderment, infatuation, caused by blindness or delusion sent by the gods, mostly as the punishment of guilty rashness” (this is the first definition in LSJ), although the lexicon adds “reckless guilt or sin,” as well as, in a passive sense, “bane, ruin,” and, finally, “pest” or “abomination.” The Spanish DGE is again more circumspect, offering as equivalents of atê “desvarío, ofuscación” (with ruinous consequences), of the sort inspired by a god or demon, or else by wine or passionate love (erôs), along with “locura” or “madness.” In the passive sense, the dictionary gives “ruina, calamidad, desastre,” and in the plural, “desgracias, aflicciones, castigos,” with the further synonyms “ruina, pérdida, perdición,” in reference to financial or other grave losses. It is noteworthy that here again, the DGE studiously avoids assigning the sense “pecado” or “sin” to atê, in line with the d...