"In this meticulously argued book, David Konstan takes a close look at classical Greek and Roman texts, as well as the Bible and early Judaic and Christian writings, and argues that the fundamental idea of sin arose in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, although this original meaning was obscured in later Jewish and Christian interpretations. Through close philological examination of the words for sin, in particular the Hebrew hata and the Greek hamartia, he traces their e uses over the centuries in four chapters, and concludes that the common modern definition of sin as a violation of divine law indeed has antecedents in classical Graeco-Roman conceptions, but acquired a wholly different sense in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. The Hebrew word hata, rather than denoting just any offense against divine injunctions, refers more narrowly to the violation of the covenant, which takes the form of chasing after foreign gods. As such, it pertains above all to the Israelites, who alone are parties to the covenant. Those who have fallen away can earn forgiveness by repenting of their error and confessing before God - a paradigmatic script for sin and its remission that is entirely absent from the Greco-Roman tradition. The Greek word hamartia again reflects the tripartite structure of sin: an offense, a change of heart, and salvation. In the New Testament, however, and above all in the Gospels, sin is not a falling away from God, but rather a failure to turn to Jesus. Confession and repentance give way, in the Gospels, to the idea of conversion.

This Biblical idea of sin was interpreted and largely transformed by later commentators in the early Jewish and Christian traditions, acquiring the more general sense of an offense against Gods laws that it retains today"--.