ḥattat

This is the word's most common use, built on the root idea of missing a mark or failing to reach a goal. Applied to a person before God, it names the failure itself and the guilt that clings to it. The same word can point to a single wrong act, to a settled habit of wrongdoing, and to the heavy weight of sin a person carries until it is dealt with.

These shades are one core concept, not separate ideas. A confessing worshiper says "my sin is ever before me" without distinguishing the act from its lingering guilt, because in this word the deed and its stain are one thing. The penitential parts of the Bible pair it again and again with two neighbors, one meaning twisted wrongdoing and its guilt (עון), the other meaning rebellion against a rightful Lord (פשׁע), so that the three together cover the full range of human failure.

In the histories of Israel and Judah the plural becomes almost a refrain for national apostasy, above all in the repeated charge that a king "walked in the sins of Jeroboam." The prophets inherit this moral sense and sharpen it, weighing a people's sins and announcing their removal. None of this requires an altar: the word here is about the wrong done and the guilt incurred, whatever is later done about it.

The same word names the central purgative offering of Israel's worship. Older English Bibles call it the "sin offering"; many recent scholars argue "purification offering" captures it better, because the rite is required in cases where no moral fault is involved, such as recovery from childbirth or skin disease, and because its blood is applied to the holy objects rather than to the worshiper. On this reading the offering scours away the contamination that sin and impurity leave on the sanctuary, while the worshiper is declared forgiven or clean.

The two ideas are bound together in one word on purpose. In a single sentence the priest may bring an animal for his sin and that animal is itself called the same word: the failure and its remedy share a name. The fullest expression is the annual Day of Atonement, where the rite cleanses the holy place of the people's accumulated sins.

This is a genuinely distinct meaning from the failure itself: here the word is a thing brought and slaughtered and burned, not a deed done. A reader needs a different English phrase for it, which is why translations reach for "sin offering" or "purification offering." It is concentrated in the worship laws and in the temple visions, and stands alongside the other named offerings as a fixed part of the sacrificial system.

In a few places the word slides from the wrong itself to its consequence, the penalty that the wrong earns. This is a natural extension: where one Hebrew word can hold a deed and the guilt it leaves, it can also reach to the punishment that guilt invites, so that to bear one's sin is to bear its penalty.

The clearest case warns that any nation refusing to come up and keep the festival will have "this for their punishment." The boundary with the ordinary moral sense is soft, and careful scholars treat several of these as plain figures of speech rather than a separate dictionary meaning, so this meaning is held lightly and scholars are divided over where each verse belongs.