StrongerBible

kippur

כִּפֻּרִים

HebrewH3725“atonement”

Appears 8 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Exo 29:36Exo 30:10Exo 30:16Lev 23:27Lev 23:28Lev 25:9Num 5:8Num 29:11
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradekee-poo-REEMnoun

What kippur means

atonement: the whole work of clearing sin and impurity away, so that a person, a holy place, or a whole people stands right before God again

TranslatabilityPartialCertaintyContested

This is the noun built from the verb "to make atonement" (כִּפֶּר). It never stands on its own in the Bible. All eight times it appears, it fills out a fixed phrase: the day of it, the offering of it, the ram of it, the silver of it. And its plural form does not count up several atonements. It gathers the separate acts of one cleansing into a single name, the way English speaks of a person's "youth" or "old age" as one thing made of many days.

Four phrases use it, and together they show how wide the work is:

  • the day of atonement, the yearly fast when both the sanctuary and the people were cleansed
  • the purification offering of atonement, the goat whose blood did that yearly work
  • the ram of atonement, the animal brought when a wrong done to a neighbor had to be set right
  • the silver of atonement, the head tax each counted Israelite paid to keep his own life safe

What the rites actually accomplish is the oldest argument about this word. An older picture, still common in popular writing, is that atonement "covers" sin like a lid. Most specialists now read the underlying word as scouring or wiping away instead, so the blood works less like a blanket over a stain and more like a cleaning agent, and what gets cleaned is often the holy place itself rather than the worshipper. Others emphasize a second idea, closer to the ordinary word for a ransom (כֹּפֶר): a life stands forfeit, and something is handed over in its place. Recent work has largely stopped choosing and holds both together, since sin both defiles and endangers.

One last thing surprises most readers. The long chapter that describes the yearly cleansing in detail, Leviticus 16, never uses this noun at all; it only uses the verb. The plural name for the day comes from elsewhere, from the festival calendar and the jubilee law, as a later summary label for a ritual that had first been described act by act.

Nuances

1athe act of purging itself: the cleansing that a rite carries out on an altar or a holy object
Exo 29:36
1ban offering named for what it accomplishes: the sacrifice through which atonement is made
Exo 30:10Num 5:8Num 29:11
1cthe silver paid to keep a life safe: the head tax collected when Israel was counted
Exo 30:16
1dthe Day of Atonement: the tenth day of the seventh month, the yearly fast when the sanctuary and the people were cleansed
TranslatabilityApproximate
Lev 23:27Lev 23:28Lev 25:9

What scholars say about kippur

BDB classifies כִּפֻּרִים tersely as a "noun plural abstract atonement, only in P": it is a qittul-pattern nominalization of the piel כִּפֶּר, never a free-standing common noun, and it occurs only in bound phrases (יוֹם הַכִּפֻּרִים, Leviticus 23:27, 23:28, 25:9; חַטַּאת הַכִּפֻּרִים, Exodus 30:10 and Numbers 29:11; אֵיל הַכִּפֻּרִים, Numbers 5:8; כֶּסֶף הַכִּפֻּרִים, Exodus 30:16; with the prepositional עַל־הַכִּפֻּרִים of Exodus 29:36 standing slightly apart). Grammarians classify the plural either as a plural of abstraction (so Gesenius, Joüon-Muraoka, Waltke-O'Connor on the type זְקֻנִים, נְעוּרִים, רַחֲמִים) or as an intensive plural; Lunn (JNSL 42, 2016) argues abstraction fits nouns of this kind better, since no countable singular is in use. Baruch Schwartz explains the plural functionally: kipper covers all three actions of the day (purging the sacred area and its objects, the scapegoat rite, and the cleansing of the people), hence a "day of purifications".

On the underlying root, the nineteenth-century derivation from Arabic kafara "to cover" has largely been abandoned as the primary sense of the cultic verb, on three grounds: the verb's usage purges objects (altars, sancta), which "cover" does not describe; Barr's critique of the root fallacy (The Semantics of Biblical Language, 1961) discredited etymology-driven semantics; and the Akkadian kuppuru "wipe off, ritually purify" (CAD K, 178-179) gave "purge" a stronger comparative footing. Feder (VT 60, 2010) nonetheless denies a demonstrable direct derivation of כִּפֶּר from kuppuru and warns against conflating the concrete Akkadian term with the abstract Hebrew one; his Blood Expiation in Hittite and Biblical Ritual (2011) instead grounds the biblical blood rite in the Hurro-Hittite zurki tradition. Levine, following Landsberger, unifies "wipe off" and "smear on" under a common notion of rubbing. Genesis 6:14 כָּפַר "coat with pitch" is usually treated as a homonym.

The substantive debate concerns what kipper effects. Milgrom (Leviticus 1-16, Anchor Bible, 1991, esp. the kpr excursus at 1079-1084; and his 1976 Revue Biblique article comparing the sanctuary to the portrait of Dorian Gray) argues the חַטָּאת is a purification offering whose blood acts as a ritual detergent on the sanctuary and its sancta rather than on the offerer, with impurity penetrating on a graded scale and the adytum purged only on the annual day. Levine (In the Presence of the Lord, 1974; JPS Leviticus, 1989) roots kipper in כֹּפֶר and foregrounds ransom and substitution, building on Rashi's reading of blood as life. Gese and Janowski (Sühne als Heilsgeschehen, 1982) develop an inclusive-substitution model built on the hand-leaning gesture. Kiuchi (The Purification Offering in the Priestly Literature, 1987) argues against Milgrom that the offering purifies persons as well as sancta, and adds the priest's guilt-bearing role. Sklar (Sin, Impurity, Sacrifice, Atonement, 2005) offers the widely followed mediating position: sin and major impurity both endanger (calling for ransom) and pollute (calling for purgation), so kipper effects both, with the lifeblood doing both jobs. Gane (Cult and Character, 2005; JBL 127, 2008, 209-222) accepts much of Milgrom's framework but argues for a two-phase system and a privative מן in the kipper formula, so that ordinary purification offerings remove sin from the offerer. Gilders (Blood Ritual in the Hebrew Bible, 2004) urges interpretive restraint, treating blood manipulation as indexical and glossing kipper minimally as "effect removal"; Greenberg (A New Look at Atonement in Leviticus, 2019) argues instead for relational repair, and Feldman (The Story of Sacrifice, 2020) consistently renders kipper in P as "decontaminate".

A literary-historical question bears specifically on the noun. Knohl (The Sanctuary of Silence, 1995), followed by Milgrom, assigns Leviticus 23 and 25 to the Holiness School and Leviticus 16 to the Priestly Torah; Leviticus 16 describes the rite at length using only the verb (16:16, 16:20, 16:30, 16:34), never the noun phrase, so the fixed calendrical name looks like a later summary label. Frankel goes further, treating Leviticus 16:29-34a as an H-associated supplement that first fixes the rite to an annual date; Schwartz defends the literary unity of Leviticus 16. In the Septuagint the word group is rendered with the ἱλασ-/ἐξιλασ- family, יוֹם הַכִּפֻּרִים becoming ἡμέρα (τοῦ) ἐξιλασμοῦ (with ἱλασμός in some witnesses at Leviticus 25:9) and כַּפֹּרֶת becoming ἱλαστήριον; the Vulgate's dies expiationum preserves the plural. Mishnah Yoma preserves the plural name while developing a moral-theological account of kapparah, and the ἱλασ- group carries the reception into the New Testament (Romans 3:25; 1 John 2:2; Hebrews 9-10).

Where scholars disagree about kippur

What the kpr word group fundamentally denotes: purgation ("wipe off, scour clean"), ransom ("give an equivalent for a forfeited life"), both together, or, on the older view, covering.

  • majorityPurgation is primary: the blood functions as a ritual detergent on the sanctuary and its sancta, so kipper means "purge", and the annual day is a decontamination of God's house.; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16 (Anchor Bible 3; Doubleday, 1991), 1079-1084; Liane M. Feldman, The Story of Sacrifice: Ritual and Narrative in the Priestly Source (FAT 141; Mohr Siebeck, 2020)
  • minorityRansom and substitution are basic: kipper is denominative from כֹּפֶר, and the victim's lifeblood substitutes for the human life that God could otherwise have required.; Baruch A. Levine, In the Presence of the Lord: A Study of Cult and Some Cultic Terms in Ancient Israel (Brill, 1974); Baruch A. Levine, Leviticus (JPS Torah Commentary; Jewish Publication Society, 1989)
  • contestedBoth, according to context: sin and major impurity each endanger (requiring ransom) and pollute (requiring purgation), so kipper effects forgiveness with an element of purgation in sin contexts and purification with an element of ransoming in impurity contexts.; Jay Sklar, Sin, Impurity, Sacrifice, Atonement: The Priestly Conceptions (Sheffield Phoenix, 2005)
  • minorityMinimal gloss only: the texts do not state a mechanism, so kipper should be rendered no more precisely than "effect removal", and confident theories are gap-filling.; William K. Gilders, Blood Ritual in the Hebrew Bible: Meaning and Power (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004)

Whether the fixed plural name for the annual day is a later crystallization than the ritual it labels, given that Leviticus 16 describes the rite at length using only the verb while the noun phrase appears solely in Leviticus 23 and 25.

  • majorityThe noun phrase belongs to the later Holiness School, which supplied a calendrical summary label for a rite that the Priestly Torah had described purely with verbs; Leviticus 16:29-34a, which fixes the rite to an annual date, is itself a supplement.; Israel Knohl, The Sanctuary of Silence: The Priestly Torah and the Holiness School (Fortress, 1995); Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17-22 (Anchor Bible 3A; Doubleday, 2000), 1319-1364
  • minorityLeviticus 16 is a literary unity, so the annual day is not a later addition and the distribution of noun and verb does not license a developmental reconstruction.; Baruch J. Schwartz, The Holiness Legislation: Studies in the Priestly Code (Magnes, 1999)
In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • Brown-Driver-Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. כִּפֻּרִיםlexicon
  • Koehler-Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (HALOT), s.v. כִּפֻּרִיםlexicon
  • Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16 (Anchor Bible 3; Doubleday, 1991), esp. 1009-1084commentary
  • Jacob Milgrom, "Israel's Sanctuary: The Priestly 'Picture of Dorian Gray'", Revue Biblique 83 (1976), 390-399article
  • Baruch A. Levine, In the Presence of the Lord: A Study of Cult and Some Cultic Terms in Ancient Israel (Brill, 1974)monograph
  • Baruch A. Levine, Leviticus (JPS Torah Commentary; Jewish Publication Society, 1989)commentary
  • Jay Sklar, Sin, Impurity, Sacrifice, Atonement: The Priestly Conceptions (Sheffield Phoenix, 2005)monograph
  • Roy E. Gane, Cult and Character: Purification Offerings, Day of Atonement, and Theodicy (Eisenbrauns, 2005)monograph
  • Roy E. Gane, "Privative Preposition מן in Purification Offering Pericopes and the Changing Face of 'Dorian Gray'", Journal of Biblical Literature 127 (2008), 209-222article
  • Nobuyoshi Kiuchi, The Purification Offering in the Priestly Literature: Its Meaning and Function (JSOT Press, 1987)monograph
  • Bernd Janowski, Sühne als Heilsgeschehen (WMANT 55; Neukirchener Verlag, 1982)monograph
  • William K. Gilders, Blood Ritual in the Hebrew Bible: Meaning and Power (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004)monograph
  • Yitzhaq Feder, "On kuppuru, kippēr, and Etymological Sins that Cannot Be Wiped Away", Vetus Testamentum 60 (2010), 535-545article
  • Yitzhaq Feder, Blood Expiation in Hittite and Biblical Ritual: Origins, Context, and Meaning (Society of Biblical Literature, 2011)monograph
  • Israel Knohl, The Sanctuary of Silence: The Priestly Torah and the Holiness School (Fortress, 1995)monograph
  • James Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford University Press, 1961)monograph
  • Nicholas Lunn, "Differentiating Intensive and Abstract Plural Nouns in Biblical Hebrew", Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages 42 (2016)article
  • Liane M. Feldman, The Story of Sacrifice: Ritual and Narrative in the Priestly Source (FAT 141; Mohr Siebeck, 2020)monograph
  • James A. Greenberg, A New Look at Atonement in Leviticus: The Meaning and Purpose of Kipper Revisited (Eisenbrauns, 2019)monograph
  • The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CAD), vol. K, 178-179, s.v. kapāru, kuppurulexicon

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of כִּפֻּרִים

m p absolute

כִּפֻּרִים

Exo 29:36, Exo 30:10, Exo 30:16, Lev 23:27, Lev 23:28, Lev 25:9, Num 5:8, Num 29:11