Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
avon
Iniquity. The act, the guilt, and the consequence, in one noun.
Psalm 51:2, in every translation this tool compares.
He'll pay for that. English fuses the offence and the consequence in an idiom. Hebrew fuses them in a noun.
Because English needs three words for what this one covers, and the collapse is why a verse can say someone bears his iniquity and mean he suffers for it.
Versions read iniquity, guilt, or punishment according to context.
עָוֹן avon · H5771
Avon is from a root meaning bent or twisted. It covers the crooked act, the guilt incurred, and the punishment that follows, and Hebrew does not mark which is meant.
English separates deed, guilt and penalty into different words, so a sentence that means all three reads as ambiguous rather than as compressed.
When a translation footnote offers punishment as an alternative to guilt, the word is probably covering both and the sentence may not be choosing.
Iniquity is the majority rendering; guilt and punishment appear where context forces them.
- avon as punishment: Genesis 4:13; Leviticus 5:1
- avon as guilt: Psalm 32:5
- avah, to bend or twist
