sin: a wrong that fails a rightful standard, along with the guilt it creates and the penalty it earns
This is the masculine noun for sin, less common than its feminine relative but sharper in focus. At its core it names a concrete offense: a specific wrong act that misses the mark of what God or the law requires. It is not mainly an inward mood or a vague religious failing but something done, often something a court could weigh.
From that core the word reaches in two directions that English usually splits into separate words. Because the offense makes a person answerable, it can mean the guilt or liability the wrongdoer now carries. Because guilt calls for a reckoning, it can also mean the punishment that must be borne. Hebrew keeps the deed, the guilt, and the consequence tied together in one word, so the same term that names a crime can name the sentence for it.
That range is clearest in a stock phrase, to bear one's sin, which can mean either to be held guilty or to suffer the penalty, and the two shade into each other. When someone dies in his own sin, or a wrong is called worthy of death, the word has moved from the act toward its outcome. Reading it well means asking, in each place, whether the writer has the offense itself, the guilt of it, or the price paid for it in view.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether the guilt and punishment uses represent discrete lexical senses or facets of a single deed-and-consequence nexus in which the sin, its liability, and its outcome are one continuum.
- majorityDistinct senses (offense, guilt, punishment) are lexicographically separable and should be glossed as such.; BDB, s.v. חֵטְא; HALOT, s.v. חֵטְא
- minoritySin, guilt, and its consequence form one built-in continuum, so the shifts are facets of a single fabric rather than separate meanings.; K. Koch, 'חטא chata',' in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, vol. 4