If you are a serious student of the Bible and its key terms
and metaphors, it does not take long before you realize that ‘sin’ is seen as
something more than just a momentary lapse of good judgment resulting in a brief
stupid act.  This of course is how we in
the West have tended to view sin— I think for example of the famous remark of
the British chap when asked to comment on the indelicate matter of illicit sexual
intercourse who said— ‘the position is ridiculous, the pleasure momentary, and
the price exorbitant’.  Well, at least he
got the last part partly right.

            Sin in the
Old Testament is treated as a weighty matter, indeed, as Anderson points out, it is treated as a
weight, a thing of substance. In his second chapter, Anderson comes to grips with this metaphor
which in fact is found early and late in the OT–in the Pentateuch, in Isaiah,
and in the exilic book called Ezekiel. One could say it is the dominant way of
viewing sin in the OT period.  Consider
for a moment the following  chart created
by the good doctor:

Hebrew verb                                Translation                        Number of Occurrences

Nasa (plus awon, hattah, pesa)  ‘to bear/bear away a sin’                108

Salah (plus the
above terms)        ‘to forgive a sin’                             17

Kipper (plus the
above terms)      ‘to wipe away sin’                          6

Kissah  (plus the above terms)     ‘to cover over a sin’                        1-2

Kibbes (plus the
above terms)      ‘to wash away sin’                         1-2

This chart may surprise some, but Anderson is right in his
statistics, and the point he makes is that we need to conceptual things in
terms of a sense unit, by which I mean both the noun for sin, and the verb it
is connected to.  The metaphor arises in
the connection of the verb and its object.

The ‘burden’ of the second chapter
focuses on the notion of sin as a burden or weight to be carried, or carried
away.  In particular there is a conundrum
when it comes to the verb nasa plus
some Hebrew for sin.  On the one hand, in
some cases it means to carry/bear the weight of one’s sin. In other contexts
the same phrase means to carry away/ bear away the weight of one’ sin.   The first can be seen to refer to
punishment, taking the consequences of one’s sin,  the latter can be seen to refer to atonement
or forgiveness— the weight is lifted, put on the pack animal or scapegoat and
borne off into wilderness by a being other than the sinner him or herself.   How can one and the same phrase mean both
things, depending on context?   In the
context of punishment it means one thing, in the context of mercy, quite the
opposite!   For example, in Lev. 5.1 we
hear ‘when a person has heard a curse and he does not give information he shall bear the weight of his own sin’ (nasa awon).  But contrast Exod. 10.17 “bear away the burden
of my offense (nasa awon) just this
once, and plead with the Lord your God that he remove this death from me”.    Obviously the famous scapegoat passage in
Lev. 16 (see the famous Rob Bell YouTube video) has this language used in the
second sense of  bearing away and so
forgiving this weight of a man’s sin.   

Or consider the famous response of
Cain in Gen. 4.13 where again we have the phrase nasa awon.  Should it be
translated–‘the weight of my sin is too great for me to bear’ (with possible
implication, this punishment is too harsh!), or does Cain mean ‘the weight of
my sin is too great to be borne away’ (i.e. it is beyond forgiveness), or does
he simply admit culpability here ‘the weight of my sin is too great to be borne
away (by me)’, which is to say he could not atone for himself, but perhaps God
could have mercy a bit and forgive him (see the discussion on pp. 24-25).
Whatever we make of this story, and whether we see Cain as a whiner or one who
really finally owns up to the severity of his sin, or he cries out in despair
of being able to do anything about the ‘weight’ 
you can certainly see that ‘a text without a context’ can very easily be
mistranslated when you have a Hebrew phrase that can have two such
diametrically opposite meanings.  In any
and all cases— the weight of sin and its consequences has to be borne by
someone or something, whether the sinner, or the substitute.  And forgiveness means still that someone had
to pay the full price—- it just wasn’t you if you went through the scapegoat
ritiual.    I would emphasis as much or more than Anderson that the ‘burden’
weight’ metaphor in regard to sin is dominant in the OT early and late. And as
such, we need to weigh the significance of this for Biblical Theology.