C. H. Dodd contended that kipper or kopher in the OT and hilaskesthai in the LXX and in the NT meant expiation and the forgiveness of sins. Leon Morris argued that these words meant propitiation or an appeasing of God’s wrath. The overwhelming evidence is the meaning of propitiation of God’s wrath.
N. T. Wright has taken up the mantle of C. H. Dodd in his 2016 The Day The Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus Crucifixion. Throughout his book, Wright disparages the penal substitutionary death of Christ and the doctrine of propitiation. For example, referring to kapporeth, Wright argues that “older interpretation suggested ‘covering.’ But recent research has challenged this, connecting the Hebrew word with the root kipper, meaning ‘cleanse’ or ‘purge.’… there is less, because this context, in and of itself, says nothing about punishment” (p. 328-329). Wright is correct when he writes that “the Hebrew word kapporeth was rendered in the Greek translations of Scripture as hilasterion.” But then again following the argument of C. H. Dodd, Wright writes “So when Paul writes in Romans 3:25 that God put Jesus forth as a hilasterion, he does not mean that God was punishing Jesus for the sins of Israel or the world” (pp. 328 and 330). Wright also argued against propitiation, when he commented about Romans 3:21-26: “the ‘propitiation’ readings of 3:24-26 are straining” (p. 330). “Paul is not here saying, then, that God has punished former sins, whether of Israel or the Gentiles, certainly not that he has punished them in Jesus. There is no mention here of such a punishment then exhausting the divine wrath” (p. 331).
A lexical word study of the OT kipper and a lexical word study of the NT word hilasterion will settle this debate.
Sources used for this Old Testament lexical study are The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon, Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, Vol. 1, and Leon Morris’ The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross. New Testament lexical sources are mentioned at the end of this post. Because the authors of BDB were liberal theologians, can their work be trusted? Charles A. Briggs, for example, was excommunicated from the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church for heresy. Among some of his heresies was the rejection of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. Nevertheless, their lexical work is recommended by conservative scholars. The conservative editors of Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, R. Laird Harris, Gleason L. Archer, Jr., and Bruce K. Waltke refer to BDB as the “long-time standard.” BDB also agrees with R. Laird Harris’s conclusion that kipper has the meaning of propitiation of God’s wrath rejecting the meaning of expiation.
The OT word for atonement is kipper or kopher. BDB states that its Arabic roots mean to cover which has a similar parallel in the OT. The Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, Vol. 1 agrees and adds “On the strength of this connection it has been supposed that the Hebrew word means ‘to cover over sin’ and thus pacify the deity.”[1] The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament also agrees with this conclusion in its discussion of kipper and kopher leading up to its examination of hilaskesthai. However, the Theological Dictionary of the NT says the meaning of hilaskesthai in the NT changed from propitiation to expiation. We will discuss the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament in our New Testament Lexical Study of the New Testament Word for atonement.
On the Day of Atonement, God covered the sins of Israel for one year.
The Aramaic root has the idea of washing away, obliteration, and expiation. This introduces the debate over the meaning of OT kipper and kopher and the LXX use of hilaskesthai. Do these words for atonement mean expiation or propitiation? The overwhelming evidence is the meaning of the propitiation of God’s wrath.
The semantic range of meaning of kipper or kopher according to BDB includes the price of a life or ransom. One of the references BDB gives is Job 36:18 where Elihu warns Job that even a kopher could not take away God’s wrath.
Another meaning given by BDB is to cover over, pacify, make propitiation as in Genesis 32:20. Here Jacob sent a gift that might “appease” [kopher] Esau’s anger. Another example of kopher satisfying someone’s wrath is in Proverbs 16:14: “A king's wrath is a messenger of death, and a wise man will appease [kopher] it.”
BDB notes that kopher includes the meaning of atoning for sin without sacrifice. This is the meaning in Numbers 25:1-3 when Israel committed adultery with the Moabites and worshiped their gods at Shittim “and the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel.” When Phinehas killed an Israelite man and Midianitish woman in the very act of adultery, God said that “Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest has turned away my wrath” (25:11).
These OT words for atonement also mean to atone for sins and persons by legal rites as on the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16. In 16:30, the purpose of the Day of Atonement is given: “For on this day shall atonement be made for you to cleanse you. You shall be clean before the Lord from all your sins.” The satisfying of God’s wrath is not explicitly stated in this verse but the propitiating of God’s wrath is found in the context of the Day of Atonement. Leviticus 16:1 opens with the warning that Aaron’s two sons back in 10:12 had been killed by the fire from the Lord for not following the instructions for making offerings. The warning in 16:2 is that Aaron could also be judged and killed by God if he does not follow the instructions.
The scapegoat on the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16:22 bore away the sins of Israel i.e., the consequence of sin which was death. The Hebrew word is nasa. In Leviticus 7:18, if an Israelite did not follow the instructions for presenting an offering, that Israelite would “bear [nasa] his iniquity” which according to 7:21 meant he “shall be cut off from his people” or he would, like Nadab and Abihu, be judged by God. So the Day of Atonement was a satisfaction of God’s wrath.
BDB notes that in the family of kopher is kapporet which was translated in the OT as “mercy seat” and in the LXX hilasterion or propitiation. The author of Hebrews 9:5 used hilasterion to refer to the “mercy seat.” R. Laird Harris in Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament wrote that kapporet meant mercy seat (Exodus 25:17) and “this noun is used twenty-seven times and always refers to the golden cover of the sacred chest in the inner shrine of the tabernacle or temple ... the translation ‘mercy seat’ does not sufficiently express the fact that the lid of the ark was the place where the blood was sprinkled on the day of atonement. ‘Place of atonement’ would perhaps be more expressive.” Again, the satisfaction of God’s wrath is inherent in these texts. The reason God’s mercy is needed is that God judges sin unless His justice and wrath are propitiated.
Leon Morris in his The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross cites much more evidence from the non-biblical Greek, concerning the theme of the wrath of God in the OT, the hilasterion word group in the LXX, the non-cultic use of kipper, and the cultic use of kipper to argue convincingly that the meaning of OT kipper and kopher and the LXX and the NT use of hilaskesthai is the propitiation of God’s wrath.
The lexical sources for the NT word, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, BDAG (Third Edition), and New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology were consulted for the Greek word group of hilaskomai. Both Theological Dictionary of the New Testament and BDAG (Third Edition), reject the propitiation meaning of satisfying God’s wrath. The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology defends the biblical meaning of propitiation.
Vern Poythress warns that lexicons can fail in their primary purpose which is to report “to the professional as accurately as possible the semantic senses within the ancient setting.” He issues this warning in his article in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society. The title of the article is “How Have Inclusiveness and Tolerance Affected the Bauer-Dander Greek Lexicon of the New Testament (BDAG)?” Poythress argues that BDAG, Third Edition (Poythress notes that this accommodating translation philosophy was not true of the first and second edition) allowed the desire for political correctness to influence its accuracy in interpreting and translating some loaded words. What BDAG does with “father” and “brother” it has also done with atonement words. BDAG, according to Poythress, yielded to cultural pressure and gave up accuracy.[2]
The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology strongly defends the propitiation view of hilastarion word group. We will discuss NIDNTT in our next post.
Therefore, we must be careful using lexicons. Name brands are not always reliable.
[1] R. Laird Harris. Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, Volume 1 (Chicago: Moody Press,1980) ed. R. Laird Harris. 452.
[2] Vern Poythress, “How have inclusiveness and tolerance affected the Bauer-Danker Greek Lexicon of the New Testament” (BDAG)?ETS 46/4 (December 2003) 577-88