With Footnotes

When a man or woman commits any of the sins of mankind, acting unfaithfully against the Lord, and that person is guilty, then ^[a]he shall confess ^[b]his sin which ^[c]he has committed, and he shall make restitution in full for his wrong and add to it a fifth of it, and give it to him whom he has wronged.  Numbers 5:6-7

Confess – Did you notice the footnotes?  Each one of them tells you that the subject is plural (they, their) not singular as the translation indicates.  Why does this matter?

Hold that thought while we investigate the verb.  It’s also a plural of the stem yādâ.  What does yādâ usually mean?  To know, to declare.  But it has a very wide range including sexual connection (“the man knew his wife”).  If we were to be quite strict in this translation, we would render it, “then they will know their sin which they have committed.”  But that doesn’t fit our modern idea of repentance, so the translators assist us by converting the plural subject and verb to the singular.  Why do they do this?

The answer is quite simple:  for us confession is personal.  Confession is an individual action before God.  Guilt is singular.  Oh, yes, an entire nation can be guilty.  A group can be guilty.  But group guilt is the collected guilt of each individual.  After all, don’t the prophets declare that no man can be guilty of another man’s sins?  So the translators reason that even though the text is plural it must mean individual guilt and confession.  But what has really happened is that our idea of personal guilt and individual confession has been inserted into the text.  What the text says is collective public acknowledgement, not confession as we understand it today.

Notice the penitential lens employed by Alexander in his comment in TWOT:

The root verb is employed three basic ways. First, it was used to convey the acknowledgment or confession of sin, individually or nationally. The basic idea was clearly observed in David’s personal confession described in Ps 32:5 in which the poetic parallelism demonstrates that confession was making known the sin to God and not hiding it. It is important to note that the confession of sin is to be made to God. . . Second, this verb was predominantly employed to express one’s public proclamation or declaration (confession) of God’s attributes and his works. This concept is at the heart of the meaning of praise. . . the o.t. does not have our independent concept of thanks . . . tôdâ.  This cognate noun, being derived from yādâ, basically means “confession,” either of sin or of God’s character and works. The term was employed uniquely in reference to the sacrificial system of Israel.^[1]

Why does Alexander think a verb which has no “independent concept of thanks” should carry the independent idea of confession?  Why does he believe that Psalm 32 is personal confession the way we think of personal confession?  Notice that the term is employed in the sacrificial system, rituals of public acknowledgement and cultic expiation.  Why would the text use the plural form if it wanted to convey the necessity of individual confession?

Perhaps Lambert is right:

“Interpretive tendencies survive because readers share elements of a common cultural background but also, more specifically, certain strategies, protocols for generating meaning.  These strategies appear natural to the communities who use them.  They simply seem to be a component of what it means to read, though in fact they too are contingent—the product of historically bound assumptions.”^[2]

Is it possible that we read the Bible according to our current religious paradigms rather than according to the cultural views of its ancient authors?  Lambert believes this to be the case, with devastating consequences:

Finally, and most importantly, we need to consider what a discourse around repentance brings into effect.  By attributing to the human being an interior space, “repentance” grants autonomy that, ultimately, can be used to bind the now readily transformable individual to a broader project of adherence to communal discipline.  It corresponds to a period of governmentality in which the sect no longer rules the lives of its members through the prospect of including and exclusion or the cultic site through that of access and royal power.  Now a “religion,” with its stated series of beliefs and practices, must seek to compete in a crowded marketplace by offering a relatively low barrier of entry and, at the same time, by ensuring compliance, a solidity of identity, through means that no longer readily include forms of external compulsion.  “Repentance” offers such an opportunity.  Powered by a focused repudiation of past identities and deeds, the penitential self transforms and then monitors itself in accord with religious or communal affiliations.[3]

We have all grown up inside religious paradigms.  Even if we were pagans, the ideas of religion and religious behavior were still part of our existence.  We assumed a lot.  We thought we knew what we believed and why we believed it.  Then we encountered someone who carefully forced us to reconsider, to look again at the incredible differences three thousand years of human history have produced, to remember that East is not West and ancient Semitic cultures are not European post-Enlightenment replicas.  Most of all, we must remember that the Bible(s) is not a book written for us.  We came to the text with lots of baggage.  We have a lot of unpacking to do.

Topical Index: repentance, confess, sin, yādâ, Numbers 5:7

^[1] Alexander, R. H. (1999). 847 יָדָה. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 365). Chicago: Moody Press.

[2] David Lambert, How Repentance Became Biblical: Judaism, Christianity, & the Interpretation of Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 4.

[3] Ibid., p. 152.