evil that comes to nothing: the emptiness, harm, and wickedness of a life set against God
This is one of the Hebrew Bible's darkest words, and English needs many words for it because it works on more than one level at once. At its root it points to what is hollow and worthless, something that promises and produces nothing good. From that core it spreads in two directions the Bible holds together: the trouble and ruin a person suffers, and the wickedness a person commits. The same word can name the harm and the evil that causes it, because in this way of thinking they are one thing seen from two sides.
Most often the word names moral wickedness, the active doing of evil. The Psalms repeatedly speak of "workers of" this word, people whose whole way of life is given over to doing wrong, and Job and Proverbs use it for the schemes of the corrupt and the grief those schemes bring back on their own heads.
A second strand narrows to deceitful, empty speech: lies, slander, and mischief plotted with words. The mouth that is full of this word is full of talk that looks like substance but is only a trap.
A third strand, sharpest of all, brands false worship with this word. To the prophets an idol is the very picture of emptiness, a nothing dressed up as a god, so they call idolatry and hollow ritual by this name. The play on the town Bethel, mockingly renamed Beth-aven ("house of nothingness"), turns the word into a verdict on worship that has lost its God.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether this word is one polysemous term or several unrelated homonyms (a "wickedness" word, a "trouble" word, and an "idol/nothingness" word).
- majorityOne ancient word with a single core idea (emptiness or what comes to nothing) that develops into the linked senses of trouble, wickedness, and false worship.; HALOT, s.v. אָוֶן; K.-D. Schunck, "אָוֶן," in TDOT, vol. 1
- minorityThe senses cluster under one entry but reflect at least two originally distinct roots later drawn together, so the unity is more editorial than etymological.; BDB, s.v. אָוֶן