Meritorious Human Acts Generate Credit Towards the Debt of Sin

The King James Version (KJV) is mostly used in these lessons. Click here to access the KJV online.

Anderson acknowledges this development of “credit” as “a doctrine of merit” which “leads to an increased role for the agency of human beings in counteracting the ravages of sin.”²⁷ This development of a doctrine of merit does not go unrecognized in rabbinical writings. For example, in Exodus 32, after the golden calf incident, Moses appeals to Yahuwah to change his mind about the punishment of the Israelites by saying: “Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, and how you swore to them by your own self, saying, ‘I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky; and all this land that I promised, I will give your descendants as their perpetual heritage’” (Exodus 32:13). In commenting on this text, rabbinical writings did not focus on what Yahuwah had promised. “[R]ather, Moses asks Yahuwah to remember what these men had done. By this was meant the great acts of piety they had once accomplished that generated a vast surplus of credit in heaven, credit that was more than sufficient to counterbalance the debt Israel now owed.”²⁸ Thus, human agents through particular acts could generate credit towards the debt of sin

Having considered sin as debt and the possibility of human merit as credit, one final etymological consideration is necessary. This concerns the term for “redeem,” which in Aramaic is praq.²⁹ The Aramaic term originally meant “to buy oneself out of slavery.”³⁰ In Hebrew the word for “redeem” is gāʾal. This term appears in Leviticus 25 when discussing how a person can become a debt-slave.³¹ “When your kindred, having been so reduced to poverty, sell themselves to a resident alien who has become wealthy or to descendants of a resident alien’s family, even after having sold themselves, they still may be redeemed by one of their kindred, by an uncle or cousin, or by some other relative from their family; or, having acquired the means, they may pay the redemption price themselves” (Leviticus 25:47–49). The English words “redeemed” and “redemption” are translated from the Hebrew root gāʾal.³² Leviticus 25 provides an understanding of how one “redeems” oneself, through one’s own means or the means from one’s family, from being a debt-slave.