ra

This is the word at its most ordinary. Long before it ever means wicked, it simply means bad: a thing that falls short of what it should be, or that works against the person who meets it. Rotten figs, foul water, ugly and starving cows, a blemished animal not fit to offer, a buyer running down the goods to drive the price low: these are all this word, and none of them carries any charge of sin.

The senses here spread along one line. At the plain end the word judges quality, the opposite of sound or fit. From there it shades into what does harm to the body, a grievous disease or a painful wound, and then into what is simply hard or sad to live through, a stretch of bleak years, a downcast face, a day a person would rather not have.

What ties the whole range together is a measure, not a moral verdict. The fig is bad against what a good fig should be, the water against what water should do, the face against the cheerful look expected of it. The word always names a falling short of some standard the context supplies, which is exactly why the same word can later name the falling short that is moral wrong without changing its basic shape.

Here the word names not the badness of a thing but the bad that happens: misfortune, ruin, the disaster that strikes. This is the harm a person suffers, set opposite peace and well-being rather than opposite goodness. It is the trouble that overtakes one life and the catastrophe poured out on a whole people, and it gathers most thickly in the prophets and the stories of judgment.

This is where the word's hardest translation problem lives. When a verse says God brings this on a city, or relents from bringing it, the meaning is disaster, not authored wickedness. God sends or withholds calamity; God does not sin. The clearest test is the company the word keeps: in Isaiah 45:7 it stands opposite well-being, so the sense is ill-being or woe, and the prophets repeatedly picture God as ready to turn back the harm if a people turns back from its wrong.

The range inside this meaning runs from the personal, the affliction that overtakes an individual, to the national, the judgment that levels a city. In every case the focus is on harm undergone, not on wrong committed. Some translations reach for evil here, which is why English readers sometimes hear God charged with authoring sin where the text only says God controls disaster.

At its weightiest the word names moral wrong: a wicked deed, a wicked intent, a wicked person, measured against what God calls good. It is a standard term for evil behavior, set opposite goodness, and it can rest on a single act, a settled disposition, or a whole generation. What makes it moral here, rather than merely bad or merely disastrous, is the standard it is measured against: God's good.

Two features mark this use. First, much of the wrongdoing in the historical books is named by the recurring verdict that someone did this in the sight of the LORD, where the wrong is defined by the covenant relationship, breaking faith with God, especially through other gods, rather than by an abstract code. Second, at the deepest level the word reaches the bent of the heart itself, the inward leaning toward wrong that Genesis says marks humanity.

This moral sense also stands in the famous pairing of good and this word for the knowledge gained at the tree in Eden. There the two words together name a range, the mature human capacity to tell beneficial from harmful and right from wrong, more than a bare metaphysical knowledge of wickedness. The word keeps its broad shape even at the most theological point: it is still what is set against good, now in the realm of human conduct before God.