a ransom: a price paid in place of a life that is forfeit, to spare it from the death or penalty it owes
At its heart this word names a price that stands in for a life. When a person's life is owed, whether to a court, to an injured party, or to God, a payment of matching worth can be accepted in its place, and the penalty passes to the payment instead of falling on the person. This is why English Bibles most often translate it "ransom."
The same word turns up in a surprising range of settings:
- a legal payment that spares the life of a man whose ox has gored someone to death (Exodus 21:30)
- a sacred payment each Israelite owes when the nation is counted, to guard his life before God (Exodus 30:12)
- money a corrupt judge pockets to let the guilty walk free, where a lawful ransom has curdled into a bribe (Amos 5:12)
Two threads run through all of it. First, the ransom is often supplied by God himself rather than paid to a captor: he gives whole nations in Israel's place (Isaiah 43:3), and he finds a ransom to spare a dying man (Job 33:24). Second, there is one life that can never be ransomed. A deliberate killing may not be bought off with any payment (Numbers 35:31), because a life already taken can be answered only by the life of the one who took it.
The word is closely tied to the Hebrew term for a redemption-price (פִּדְיוֹן) and, in the Greek New Testament, to the ransom that buys back a captive (λύτρον).
Nuances
Disputed
How tightly this ransom-noun is bound to the biblical language of atonement. The verb usually translated "to make atonement" (kipper) is written from the same three consonants, and scholars disagree over whether it derives from this noun, so that atonement is at root a life given in place of another, or from a separate idea of wiping clean, so that atonement is at root the decontamination of holy things.
- minorityThe atonement verb is denominative from this ransom-noun, so blood atonement functions as a substitute life offered in place of the worshipper's own.; Baruch A. Levine, In the Presence of the Lord, SJLA 5 (Brill, 1974), 56-77; Bernd Janowski, Sühne als Heilsgeschehen, 2nd ed. (Neukirchener, 2000)
- majorityThe atonement verb derives from a separate root meaning "to wipe clean" or "purge" (Akkadian kuppuru), so the ritual removes defilement from the sanctuary rather than paying for a life.; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16, Anchor Bible 3 (Doubleday, 1991), 1079-84
- contestedBoth dimensions hold at once: sacrificial atonement is a purifying ransom and a ransoming purification, since sin and impurity both pollute the sanctuary and endanger the worshipper's life.; Jay Sklar, Sin, Impurity, Sacrifice, Atonement (Sheffield Phoenix, 2005), 44-49, 181-87