Perversity , i.e. (moral) evil
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עָוֺן (ʿāwōn) is a Hebrew noun for iniquity, guilt, or the consequence and punishment attached to wrongdoing. Genesis 4:13 can be translated with Cain saying his punishment is greater than he can bear or his iniquity is too great to bear, illustrating how the word can hold deed, liability, and burden together.
Reader summary
Full entry for עָוֺן (H5771) · Open the biblical lexicon
עָוֺן (ʿāwōn) is a Hebrew noun for iniquity, guilt, or the consequence and punishment attached to wrongdoing. Genesis 4:13 can be translated with Cain saying his punishment is greater than he can bear or his iniquity is too great to bear, illustrating how the word can hold deed, liability, and burden together.
The BSB source-word alignment has 232 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include the iniquity (27), iniquity (17), their iniquity (10), my iniquity (8), for their iniquity (6).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at Genesis 4:13. Its strongest book concentrations include Ezekiel (44), Psalms (31), Isaiah (25), Jeremiah (24).
This entry includes 6 verse guides that explain exact original-language forms in context.
עָוֺן (ʿāwōn) is a Hebrew noun for iniquity, guilt, or the consequence and punishment attached to wrongdoing. Genesis 4:13 can be translated with Cain saying his punishment is greater than he can bear or his iniquity is too great to bear, illustrating how the word can hold deed, liability, and burden together. Genesis 15:16 speaks of Amorite iniquity not yet being complete, and First Samuel 3:13 names the iniquity of Eli's house in relation to tolerated abuse of priestly power.
Exodus 34:7 places ʿāwōn inside God's self-revelation: the Lord forgives iniquity, transgression, and sin, yet does not simply clear guilt and visits iniquity across generations. Exodus 20:5 qualifies its generational warning in relation to those who hate God, while Jeremiah 31:30 and Ezekiel 18 insist on personal accountability rather than a mechanical transfer of a parent's guilt to an innocent child. Harmful patterns and consequences can cross generations, but these texts do not authorize fatalism, inherited moral blame without personal action, or “generational curse” diagnoses detached from evidence.
Ritual, poetry, and prophecy address how iniquity is borne and forgiven. Leviticus 16:22 says the live goat bears Israel's iniquities to a remote land. Psalm 32:5 joins acknowledged iniquity to God's forgiveness, and Psalm 51:2 asks to be washed from iniquity. Isaiah 53:6 says the Lord causes the iniquity of all to meet upon the servant, and verse 11 says the righteous servant bears the iniquities of many. Micah 7:18 praises God for forgiving iniquity. These passages ground serious teaching about atonement and pardon, but the noun alone does not settle every atonement model or remove the need for repentance, justice, repair, and protection of victims.
ʿĀwōn can foreground the crooked act, the guilt it creates, or the consequence borne. Law, narrative, lament, ritual, and prophecy keep those dimensions connected while distinguishing personal responsibility, communal effects, forgiveness, and representative bearing.
Cain's statement can foreground either the enormity of his iniquity or the weight of its punishment, exposing the noun's act-and-consequence range.
God's proclaimed character holds abundant covenant love and forgiveness together with refusal to treat guilt as inconsequential.
The rite sends Israel's confessed iniquities away on the living goat into an uninhabited region.
The wilderness generation bears the consequences of its iniquities over forty years after rebellion at the land's boundary.
Eli's house is judged for iniquity he knew about and failed to restrain, joining leadership knowledge to responsibility.
The psalmist acknowledges sin and no longer hides iniquity, and the Lord forgives the guilt of sin.
The servant song says the Lord lays or causes to meet upon the servant the iniquity of all who have gone astray.
Within the servant song, the righteous figure's suffering is joined to carrying communal guilt and to many being set right.
The prophet rejects a proverb of transferred blame by affirming that each person dies for personal iniquity.
God is praised as incomparable in forgiving iniquity, passing over transgression, and delighting in steadfast love.
BSB source-word alignment connects this entry to exact verse rows, English rendering, source form, transliteration, and parsing.
How English Renders ItA compact distribution from source-word alignment before the full evidence tables.
Verse-level guides showing how this original-language form works in its specific context, including grammar, verse function, and guarded interpretation.
Hebrew word. Moral perversity or crookedness; iniquity as both the act of wrongdoing and its consequent punishment or liability
Moral perversity or crookedness; iniquity as both the act of wrongdoing and its consequent punishment or liability
perversity, i.e. (moral) evil BDB: iniquity Usage: fault, iniquity, mischeif, punishment (of iniquity), sin.
How this word appears across different grammatical cases and numbers.
Selected passage-level study witnesses for this word. This section is not the full occurrence list.
Showing 6 selected witnesses from 232 lexical occurrence verses.
עָוֺן is built from this root:
Judgment addresses real and accumulated moral guilt.Hosea 10:9-15
Discipline aims at removal of covenant-breaking guilt.Hosea 14:1-3
Dragging iniquity with cords portrays intentional attachment to guilt rather than accidental failure.Isaiah 26:19-21
Identifies the root cause of exile and separation.Isaiah 27:7-13
Defines covenant violation requiring reckoning.Isaiah 5:18-23
Acknowledges moral culpability.Isaiah 50:1-3
Compound and idiomatic phrases that include this word. Follow a link to study the phrase and how its parts work together.
ʿĀwōn gives preachers language for wrongdoing that bends relationships and creates real liability. It can expose the false comfort of treating sin as a private mistake with no communal consequence. Eli's failure shows that knowingly tolerating abuse is itself accountable. At the same time, Jeremiah 31 and Ezekiel 18 prevent leaders from assigning automatic guilt to children, families, ethnic groups, or victims.
Psalm 32 offers a movement from concealment to acknowledgment and forgiveness. Leviticus 16 and Isaiah 53 create a canonical account of iniquity borne and removed, which Christians read in relation to Christ. Pastoral use must never shift an abuser's guilt onto the harmed person or demand that pardon erase safety, reporting, accountability, lament, and repair.
Exod.34.7
H5771 can refer to the wrong, the guilt resulting from it, or the consequence and punishment borne. Translation must follow the clause rather than force one English term everywhere.
New Testament writers receive Isaiah 53 in relation to Jesus' representative suffering and speak through several Greek terms about sin, guilt, condemnation, forgiveness, and bearing. Those texts develop rather than mechanically reproduce every sense of H5771.