Sam,
When I saw your post I thought of the following which appears with some frequency in the Old Testament:
[all quotes New American Standard Bible (NASB)]
1 Kings 8:47
47. if they take thought in the land where they have been taken captive, and repent and make supplication to You in the land of those who have taken them captive, saying, ‘We have sinned and have committed iniquity, we have acted wickedly’;
Daniel 9:5
5. we have sinned, committed iniquity, acted wickedly and rebelled, even turning aside from Your commandments and ordinances.
Psalm 106:6
6. We have sinned like our fathers,
We have committed iniquity, we have behaved wickedly.
Solomon, Daniel, and David appear to have in mind three categories of sin:
Sin (#2398, Heb.
Chata) being a general category including inadvertent sin, sins of ignorance, or even inability.
Iniquity (#5753, Heb.
Avah) would include conscious sin such as adultery and Idolatry.
Wickedly (#7561, Heb.
Rasha) is the violent, oppressive, greedy, murderous, the hater of God.
As you can probably see, they depict degrees of sinfulness, from not so bad to totally evil.
Interestingly, the on the Hebrew
Avah the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament comments:
"The remarkable ambivalence between the meanings of "sin as an act" and "penalty" shows that in the thought of the OT sin and its penalty are not radically separate notions as we tend to think of them. Rather in the OT the action of man and what happens to him are presupposed to be directly related as one process within the basic divine order."