a turning away from God: the disloyalty of a people who walk off from the one they belong to.
This word is built straight from the ordinary Hebrew verb for turning around and going back (שׁוּב), the same verb the prophets use when they call a people to come back to God. Made into a noun, it names the opposite motion: not the coming back, but the walking off. All twelve appearances are accusations, and all but one belong to Hosea and Jeremiah.
It does that work in three ways:
- Sometimes it names a fixed condition, a people settled in the wrong direction, which Jeremiah 8:5 can even call permanent.
- Sometimes it is plural, a running tally of separate betrayals rather than one great desertion.
- Four times in Jeremiah 3 it stops being a description and becomes a name, so that the nation is addressed simply as Turning-Away.
The sound of the word is doing theological work. In Jeremiah 3:12 God says, in effect, "Turn back, Turning-Away Israel," and in Jeremiah 3:22, "Come back, you sons who keep turning back, and I will heal your turnings-away." The diagnosis, the people addressed, and the cure are all made of the same handful of sounds. No English translation can carry that, which is part of why translators disagree so much over what to call it.
Twice, at Hosea 14:4 and Jeremiah 3:22, God promises to heal the turning away itself. That is more than pardoning what was done. The habit of walking away is treated as an illness, and God offers to cure the very tendency that makes coming back impossible on one's own.
Nuances
Whether the word at Proverbs 1:32 carries its full prophetic force, so that rejecting Wisdom counts as abandoning God, or a milder sense of drifting.
- majorityFull prophetic force. The wisdom teacher deliberately imported the prophets' term, because personified Wisdom speaks as the voice of Yahweh, so refusing her is functionally covenantal defection. Waltke adds that the poem itself sets up the reversal: Wisdom had called the naive to turn at her rebuke in verse 23, and this is the turning they made instead.; Michael V. Fox, Proverbs 1-9, Anchor Yale Bible 18A (2000); Bruce K. Waltke, The Book of Proverbs: Chapters 1-15, NICOT (2004)
- minorityA milder waywardness. The naive addressed here have never formally attached themselves to Wisdom, so they cannot properly be said to defect from her; the neutral directional sense suits the passage better.; Roland E. Murphy, Proverbs, Word Biblical Commentary 22 (1998)
Disputed
Whether the word names a decisive break with God or a gradual, repeated drifting, and which English rendering follows from that.
- majorityA decisive defection from the covenant. The noun works as the technical negative counterpart of the covenantal use of the verb "to return", and Jeremiah 8:5 can call the condition perpetual, so "apostasy" carries the right weight and "backsliding" is too weak.; William L. Holladay, The Root SUBH in the Old Testament: With Particular Reference to Its Usages in Covenantal Contexts (Leiden: Brill, 1958); HALOT, s.v. משׁובה; BDB, s.v. משׁובה; Heinz-Josef Fabry and Axel Graupner, "שׁוב sub," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (TDOT), vol. 14
- minorityA relational betrayal inside a marriage bond. "Apostasy" sounds too institutional and "backsliding" too weak for the imagery of Hosea 1-3 and Jeremiah 2-3, so "faithlessness" better fits a personal covenant treachery.; John Bright, Jeremiah, Anchor Bible 21 (1965); Walter Brueggemann, A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming (1998); Gerlinde Baumann, Love and Violence: Marriage as Metaphor for the Relationship between YHWH and Israel in the Prophetic Books (ET 2003)
- minorityPrimarily a relational and cultic defection rather than an inward moral lapse. Early prophetic use of the root denotes reorientation of worship toward or away from Yahweh, not the introspective repentance of later Jewish tradition, so the noun should not be moralized.; David A. Lambert, How Repentance Became Biblical: Judaism, Christianity, and the Interpretation of Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2015)