Lexicon

H5771 - avon

Strong's: H5771 · BLB lookup Pronunciation: aw-vone' Part of speech: masculine noun (from the verbal root H5753 ʿawah, "to bend / twist / pervert / be crooked") Frequency: ~231 occurrences in the Hebrew Bible, heavily concentrated in Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the priestly atonement texts (Lev 16, 26). LXX equivalents: ἀνομία (anomia), ἁμαρτία (hamartia), ἀδικία (adikia), the Greek correspondent varies by context. Triad companions: H6588 - pesha (peshaʿ, transgression / rebellion); H2403 - chattath, chattath, sin / missing the mark / sin-offering.

Semantic range (Brown-Driver-Briggs)

Iniquity / perversity / crookedness, the primary lexical sense; sin viewed as twisted / perverted state, the warping of moral faculties from their right orientation. The verbal root ʿawah means "to bend / twist / pervert."
Guilt, the standing condition of having committed iniquity; the moral-judicial liability that attaches to the sinner.
Punishment for iniquity, by metonymy, ʿawon sometimes refers to the consequence / penal outcome of iniquity (Gen 4:13, Cain: "my ʿawon is too great to bear", ambiguous: my iniquity / my punishment).
Iniquity-bearing, the technical priestly idiom in Lev 16 etc.: to bear ʿawon is to absorb / carry the moral weight of another's iniquity for them; the substitution-vocabulary that drives the Day of Atonement ritual.

Theological force, sin as crookedness, with bearable weight

ʿAwon is the second of the three principal Hebrew sin-words, complementing peshaʿ (rebellion) and chattath (missing-the-mark). The triad's distinctive contributions:

H6588 - pesha (rebellion), the willful breach sense; covenant-treason
H5771 ʿawon (iniquity), the perverted-state sense; moral crookedness, twisted-from-true
H2403 chattath (sin / sin-offering), the missed-mark sense; failure-to-attain; the technical sin-offering

ʿAwon's special theological weight is its bearability. The verb nasaʾ ("to lift up / carry / bear") is repeatedly applied to ʿawon in priestly and prophetic contexts:

Lev 16:21-22, the scapegoat bears (nasaʾ) the ʿawonot of Israel into the wilderness
Lev 5:1, 17, "he shall bear his ʿawon"
Num 14:18, "the LORD... forgiving ʿawon and peshaʿ"
Num 14:34, "you shall bear your ʿawon", for forty years
Isa 53:6, "the LORD has caused the ʿawon of us all to fall on Him" (hifgia, caused-to-strike)
Isa 53:11, "He shall bear (yisbol) their ʿawonot"

The bear-iniquity idiom is the OT vocabulary the New Testament reaches for when it describes substitutionary atonement. Christ bears the ʿawon of His people is the Hebrew-Bible-shaped formula behind 1 Pet 2:24 ("He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree"), 2 Cor 5:21 ("He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf"), and Heb 9:28 ("Christ also, having been offered once to bear the sins of many"). The penal-substitutionary atonement (cf. Penal Substitutionary Atonement) draws its grammar from the ʿawon-nasaʾ pairing.

Notable verses

The mercy formula and the triad

Exodus 34.6-7, the LORD's self-revelation: "forgiving ʿawon and peshaʿ and chattath"
Numbers 14:18, the formula repeated
Micah 7:18, "Who is a God like You, who pardons ʿawon and passes over peshaʿ?"

The Day of Atonement

Leviticus 16:21-22, Aaron lays both hands on the live goat and confesses "all the ʿawonot of the sons of Israel and all their peshaʿim in regard to all their chattaʾoth... the goat shall bear all their ʿawonot on himself to a solitary land"

Isaiah 53, the Servant bearing iniquity

Isaiah 53.5, "He was pierced through for our peshaʿ, He was crushed for our ʿawon"
Isaiah 53:6, "the LORD has caused the ʿawon of us all to fall on Him"
Isaiah 53.11, "He shall bear (yisbol) their ʿawonot"

Psalms, confession and forgiveness

Psalms 32.5, "I acknowledged my chattaʾah to You... and You forgave the ʿawon of my chattaʾath"
Psalms 51:2, "wash me thoroughly from my ʿawon"
Psalm 51:5, "behold, I was brought forth in ʿawon, and in sin (chetʾ) my mother conceived me", the original-sin proof-text in Reformed tradition
Psalm 51:9, "blot out all my ʿawonot"
Psalm 103:3, 10, "who pardons all your ʿawonot / He has not dealt with us according to our ʿawonot"
Psalm 130:3, 8, "if You, LORD, should mark ʿawonot, who could stand?... He will redeem Israel from all his ʿawonot"

Ezekiel, individual responsibility

Ezekiel 18:17, 20, 30, "the soul who sins will die... the son will not bear the punishment for the father's ʿawon, nor will the father bear the punishment for the son's ʿawon"
Ezekiel 33:8-9, the watchman's responsibility for the wicked; bearing of iniquity

Daniel, eschatological resolution

Daniel 9:24, the Seventy Weeks: "to finish the peshaʿ, to make an end of chattath, and to atone for ʿawon", the eschatological resolution of the entire sin-triad

Jeremiah, covenant new

Jeremiah 31:34, "I will forgive their ʿawon, and their chattath I will remember no more", the New Covenant forgiveness promise

NT atonement-language (LXX-Greek absorbing the ʿawon tradition)

1 Peter 2.24, "He Himself bore our sins (hēmartias) in His body on the tree"
2 Corinthians 5.21, "He made Him who knew no sin (hamartian) to be sin on our behalf"
Hebrews 9:28, "Christ also, having been offered once to bear (anenenkein) the sins of many"

Patristic / scholarly note

The Suffering Servant Songs of Isaiah (esp. Isa 52:13-53:12) center the ʿawon-nasaʾ idiom, and the patristic tradition reads them as the controlling OT prefiguration of Christ's atoning work. Justin Martyr (Dialogue with Trypho 13) cites Isaiah 53 extensively. Cyril of Alexandria (Commentary on Isaiah) develops the ʿawon-bearing language into substitutionary-atonement theology. Athanasius (De Incarnatione 9) applies the iniquity-bearing motif to Christ's incarnational mission.

In modern scholarship, the ʿawon-pesha-chattath triad has received renewed attention (Joseph Scharbert, Solidarität in Segen und Fluch im Alten Testament, 1958; Gary Anderson, Sin: A History, 2009). Anderson particularly emphasizes that the OT moves from a weight metaphor (sin as a load to be carried, driven by ʿawon-nasaʾ) toward a debt metaphor in Second-Temple literature, preparing the financial-economic atonement-language that Paul will deploy. The Christian doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement is the natural heir of the OT ʿawon-bearing tradition, with Isaiah 53 as the canonical hinge.

Verses in this codex

See Obsidian's backlinks pane for every verse page linking here. Central anchors: Isaiah 53 cluster (esp. Isaiah 53.5, Isaiah 53:6, Isaiah 53.11); Exodus 34.6-7; Leviticus 16 (Day of Atonement); Daniel 9.24 (eschatological resolution).