What is sin?
My American Heritage Dictionary defines it as follows:
sin (sĭn) n.
- A transgression of a religious or moral law, esp. when deliberate.
- Theol. A condition of estrangement from God as a result of breaking God’s law.
- An offense, violation, fault, or error.
There is a great deal of agreement across religions on what constitutes sin. We all agree that murder is a sin. Adultery and theft are sins, but there are also a great many things on which we do not agree, such as polygamy.
We also don’t always agree on when or where things are sinful.
Sin, in the Bible, comes from God and is both eternal and unchanging (Malachi 3:6; Psalm 119:89–90, 142, 160). Moses did not create the Judeo-Christian moral order. That morality is woven through Genesis (4:7–11, 18:20, 20:6–9, 39:7–9) and was passed down orally for untold millennia before Moses was even born (Genesis 18:19; Deuteronomy 6:6–9). Moses only wrote it down (Exodus 24:4; Deuteronomy 31:9, 24).
This article is going to compare and contrast the Abrahamic religions as they pertain to sin. It is not going to focus on the specifics of what acts are or are not sins, but on the nature of sin.
We will ask several questions: Did the moral order exist before it was recorded, or did it emerge over time? Is the moral law eternal, or does it change in the afterlife? Is the religious leader inside the moral order, or outside of it? Does the moral order ever change on the fly? And finally, how many moral orders are there within each religion?
Note that the Laws of Moses included moral law, ceremonial law, and civil law. Judaism and Christianity share the same moral law. Where they differ, other than ceremonial and civil law, is not in the rules of morality, but in the rules of redemption. I had a New Testament professor in college who likened Jewish rules of redemption to using a credit card. When you sin, you take on a debt that must be repaid, and some Jewish ceremonial law covers how those payments are to be made.
With Christians it is more like a debit card in the sense that Christ already paid for our sin. No debt is incurred. What Christians have is a personal relationship with Jesus under which, every time we sin, we increase the suffering Jesus endured on our behalf. Sin, to a Christian, is akin to giving Jesus another lash.
Islam, interestingly, does not deal with redemption at all. Islam simply says that even Muhammad did not know if he would go to Paradise or hell (Sahih al-Bukhari 3929), and that Allah will make that judgment for each person, outside their control (Sahih Muslim 2816a–b).
Let’s start with the first question: Did the moral order exist before it was recorded, or did it emerge over time?
The Bible answers that question very clearly. Cain murdered Abel long before Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments (Genesis 4:8–12). God did not tell Cain that murder would become wrong once Moses wrote down a law against it. The same thing happens with adultery. When Potiphar’s wife tried to seduce Joseph, there was no written commandment against adultery. Moses would not be born for generations. Joseph still knew it was wrong. He asked her how he could commit such a wicked act and “sin against God” (Genesis 39:7–9). It actually goes back even before Eden. In each step of Creation, God “saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31).
Islam can claim that a moral order existed before Muhammad, as it borrows from the Bible, but it cannot claim its own moral order existed before Muhammad as Muhammad could not reveal it until after it was revealed to Muhammad.
In Islam, very clearly the moral order emerged over time.
Things get even more interesting when we move to the second question and look at sin in the afterlife.
Christians do not believe sin can exist in Heaven (Revelation 21:27, 22:3). This is partially because the conditions that produce sin, such as material scarcity, won’t exist, but, more than that, Christians believe our desire to sin will be removed from us (1 John 3:2; Hebrews 12:23). Sin does not change—only our desire to commit it does. Christians then spend eternity in personal and collective fellowship with God (Revelation 21:3–4, 22:3–5).
There is also no marriage or sex in Heaven, as procreation is unnecessary (Matthew 22:30; Mark 12:25; Luke 20:34–36).
The afterlife in Islam is very different.
Islamic sources are not entirely clear about the number of women a man receives in Paradise. The Qur’an promises beautiful female companions, or houris, but gives no specific number (44:54, 52:20, 56:22). Authentic ahadith describe men in Paradise with two wives (Sahih Muslim 2834a), while another well-regarded hadith promises Muslim martyrs 72 wives from among the houris (Jami at-Tirmidhi 1663). Other traditions extend the number 72 to all men in Paradise (Tirmidhi 2562; Sunan Ibn Majah 4337), but 72 is sometimes the minimum. One enlightening source, though considered “weak,” says that “An inmate of Paradise will have 500 Hurs, 4,000 unmarried women and 8,000 widowed women.”
Whatever the number, the houris are pleasure creatures. They are created companions of Paradise who never lived earthly lives (Qur’an 56:22, 35–37) and are described in explicitly sexual terms, including as virgins untouched by any man or jinn before their husbands (55:56, 72–74; 56:35–37). More scurrilously, however, despite some Western translations describing them as having “swelling breasts” in 78:33, the Arabic word used to denote their breasts is kawa‘ib, which the tenth-century scholar Ibn Faris says refers to a girl “when her breasts begin to develop.” This means that the houris of Paradise are actually not women, but rather prepubescent children at the very dawn of their sexual development. This comports perfectly with Muhammad’s marriage to his wife A’ishah—described as his “favorite” wife—at the age of six and consummation of the marriage at the age of nine (Sahih al-Bukhari 5134).
Meanwhile, earthly women get to rejoin their husbands if they go to Paradise (Qur’an 43:70). Some traditions say that earthly wives will be superior in beauty to the houris because of their worship of Allah, although the hadith supporting this claim is also considered “weak” (at-Tabarani, al-Mu‘jam al-Kabir, 23/367; al-Bayhaqi, al-Ba‘th wa’l-Nushur, no. 390).
There are also rivers of wine in Paradise, which is odd given that alcohol is forbidden in Islam, and it is a wine that does not provide over-intoxication or hangovers, so one can drink as much of it as one wishes (Qur’an 47:15, 56:18–19). People also get rivers of milk and honey, and every pleasurable thing they may ever wish to eat or drink (Qur’an 47:15, 43:71). There are no bathrooms in Paradise, but there is a need to relieve oneself from time to time, which is done through belching, and through “fragrant perspiration” (Sahih Muslim 2835a, 2835c).
Even the lowest-ranking person in Paradise is told to desire whatever he wants. After he has finished listing his desires, Allah gives him what he desired and an equivalent amount besides (Sahih Muslim 182c).
Many of the things someone may want to do in Paradise would be sinful if done on Earth, but in Paradise Allah radically changes the concept of sin such that a man can spend eternity drinking and fornicating to his heart’s desire, all while in open fellowship with Allah. It almost appears that the ability to spend eternity doing things that were sinful in life is the whole point of Paradise—and the main motivation for getting there.
Historically, there was some discussion of the question of homosexual relations in Paradise. The Encyclopaedia Iranicanotes that Hanafi jurists considered the possibility that homosexual intercourse might, like wine, be a pleasure forbidden in life but available in Paradise, but they ultimately rejected it. This is presumably less of a problem for the man than for his wives, who presumably spend much of eternity bored.
Some behaviors remain sinful in Paradise, and, as with Christianity, the desire to sin is removed, but the morality in Paradise is still vastly different from the moral system Islam demands on Earth.
With Christianity, God’s moral nature predates Creation and is eternal (Genesis 1:1–4; Malachi 3:6; James 1:17), but in Islam, not only did the moral system diverge from that of the Judeo-Christian world as soon as Muhammad began to reveal it, but it also changed over the course of Muhammad’s life (Qur’an 2:106, 16:101).
Early Muslims could drink alcohol. Qur’an 2:219 said alcohol contained some benefit, but also “great sin,” with the sin outweighing the benefit. Qur’an 4:43 prohibited approaching prayer while intoxicated. Finally, Qur’an 5:90–91 ordered believers to avoid intoxicants altogether, calling them Satan’s handiwork. The nature of alcohol did not change, but the morality surrounding it did.
Finally, Muhammad’s opinion of polytheism changed over time. He speaks of the oneness of God, but then comes the infamous incident of what has become known as the “Satanic Verses.” According to the biographer Ibn Sa’d, Muhammad “was anxious for the welfare of his people [the pagans of Makah], wishing to attract them as far as he could.” Hoping to woo them to Islam, Muhammad claimed that three pagan goddesses named al-Lat, al-Uzzah, and Manat were “the exalted Gharaniq [cranes] whose intercession is approved,” meaning that his fellow Arabs could pray to them and they would fly like birds up to Allah to deliver their prayers. This moved some of the pagans to convert, but Allah, through the Angel Gabriel, disapproved and scolded Muhammad. Still, Allah reassured Muhammad by telling him that it was Satan who had told him to say that new converts could pray to the goddesses, and “God will annul what Satan has suggested.” In other words, Muhammad had demanded monotheism, then endorsed idolatry when it looked like it would gain him converts, got out of the pickle by blaming it all on the devil, and then went back to demanding monotheism. This shameful story has been buried in the Islamic sources for well over a millennium, and is the reason Ayatollah Khomeini issued the fatwa for Salman Rushdie’s murder in 1989: Rushdie’s novel of the same name exposed Muhammad’s humiliating pivot to the world.
Did the moral order exist before it was recorded, or did it emerge over time? Is the moral law eternal, or does it change in the afterlife? Is the religious leader inside the moral order, or outside of it? Does the moral order ever change on the fly? And finally, how many moral orders are there within each religion?
This brings us to the next two questions: Is the religious leader inside the moral order, or outside of it? Does the moral order ever change on the fly?
Christ absolutely lived within the same moral order that applied to everyone else. What made Christ unique was not a special set of rules. Christianity claims that Christ was tempted as we are, but never sinned (Hebrews 4:15; 1 Peter 2:22). Christ then became the perfect sacrifice, or “unblemished Lamb,” that was sacrificed for the sins of all mankind (1 Peter 1:18–19; 1 John 2:2).
It turns out that some of the changes to the moral system were only relevant to Muhammad, and these changes tended to occur on the fly, in ways that were beneficial to the prophet.
Qur’an 4:3 limits ordinary Muslim men to four wives. Muhammad had more than four, and Qur’an 33:50 explicitly creates marriage rules unique to him. Classical Islamic commentary acknowledges this directly: the four-wife restriction did not apply to Muhammad (Tafsir at-Tabari on Qur’an 33:50; Tafsir Ibn Kathir on Qur’an 4:3 and 33:50). Muhammad could marry a believing woman who offered herself to him, if he wanted her (Qur’an 33:50). The Qur’an then says this provision is “exclusively for you, not for the rest of the believers” (Qur’an 33:50). At-Tabari’s commentary likewise says that this was something permitted to Muhammad but not to ordinary Muslim men (Tafsir al-Tabari on Qur’an 33:50).
Then we have moral changes made on the fly that did apply to all men, such as in the case of Zainab.
Zaid was an Arab slave of Muhammad whom he then freed, but, having grown fond of him, Muhammad began to treat him as his adopted son (Qur’an 33:4–5). Zaid then married Zainab, a young cousin of Muhammad. One day, Muhammad came over to Zaid’s house to speak with him, but his adopted son was not home. Zainab was there instead, in a state of relative undress, causing Muhammad to immediately lust for her. Learning of this, a deeply embarrassed Zaid decided to divorce her so that Muhammad could marry her, which he then did (33:37). At the time, the Arabs considered a man marrying a woman who had been married to a male relative of his a form of incest—like the scandal of King Claudius marrying his murdered brother’s widow Queen Gertrude in Hamlet—but Muhammad had gone ahead and done this anyway. Qur’an 33:37, however, does not merely permit the marriage but says Allah gave Zainab to Muhammad in marriage in order to establish that believers could marry the divorced wives of their adopted sons. Traditional Islamic commentary openly describes Muhammad’s marriage as the mechanism through which the previous social prohibition was broken (Tafsir Ibn Kathir on Qur’an 33:37; Tafsir al-Tabari on Qur’an 33:37). But that wasn’t enough for Muhammad. Even though men could now marry the divorced wives of their adopted sons, Muhammad, needing to silence the allegations of incest, then abolished adoption forever (Qur’an 33:4).
A man with multiple wives was also expected to divide his time fairly among them (Qur’an 4:3; Sahih al-Bukhari 5212). Qur’an 33:51, however, gave Muhammad more freedom. He could postpone the turn of whichever wife he wanted, receive whichever wife he wanted, and later bring back a wife he had set aside.
According to Sahih Muslim, Muhammad permitted Muslim men to enter temporary marriages for a fixed period (Sahih Muslim 1405b). This amounts to a form of prostitution in which a man can give a woman something of value or use to her in exchange for “legalized” sex. One report says he permitted it for three days during the campaign of Awtas and then prohibited it (1405f). Sahih Muslim’s chapter heading summarizes the Sunni tradition as: temporary marriage “was permitted then abrogated, then permitted then abrogated,” with the final prohibition lasting until the Day of Resurrection (Sahih Muslim, Book 16, chapter on mut‘ah; Sahih Muslim 1406l). Nevertheless, nikah mu‘tah, or sigheh in Farsi, is still practiced regularly in certain forms amongst both Sunni and Shi‘ah Muslims.
The punishment for illicit sex also changed on the fly.
Qur’an 4:15 ordered women found guilty of sexual immorality to be confined to their homes until they died, unless God later provided “another way.” Qur’an 4:16 prescribed punishment for the guilty but said to leave them alone if they repented. A later revelation, Qur’an 24:2, prescribed 100 lashes for fornication, while the Hadith tradition established a different punishment for married adulterers. The underlying act remained sinful, but God’s prescribed response to it changed over the course of Muhammad’s life.
This brings us to our final question: how many moral orders does each religion have?
Christianity has just one. The moral order existed before Moses recorded it, which is why Cain could sin (Genesis 4:7–11) and Joseph could call adultery a sin against God centuries before the Law was given (Genesis 39:7–9). Jesus did not receive exemptions from it. Christianity claims that He lived within it perfectly (Hebrews 4:15; 1 Peter 2:22). Nor does the moral order reverse itself in Heaven (Revelation 21:27, 22:3–5).
With Islam this is harder to count.
There is one moral order for ordinary Muslims, but even that order changed during Muhammad’s lifetime. Things could be permitted, prohibited, and sometimes permitted again, most slickly through the mechanism of abrogation (Qur’an 2:106, 16:101; Sahih Muslim 1405f, 1406l).
There was another set of rules just for Muhammad (Qur’an 33:50–51). Muhammad seemed to be able to carve-out exceptions for himself whenever he liked (Qur’an 33:50–51).
Then there is Paradise, where many sins stop being sinful (Qur’an 47:15; 55:56; 56:18–22, 35–37).
That leaves Islam with at least three distinguishable moral orders: the changing order revealed for Muslims on Earth (Qur’an 2:106, 16:101), the special order that applied to Muhammad (33:50–51), and the order that applies in Paradise (47:15; 55:56; 56:18–22, 35–37).
And that brings us right back to where we started: what is sin?
If sin is doing something Allah has prohibited at a particular time, for a particular person, under a particular set of circumstances, then Allah can prohibit something today and permit it tomorrow. He can prohibit something for you and permit it for Muhammad, or can prohibit something on Earth and permit it in Paradise.
That is a very different conception of sin from the Christian one. Christianity begins with an eternal God whose moral nature does not change. Sin is not wrong because God happens to prohibit it for now. God prohibits it because it is contrary to who God is, and to who God desires for us to be.
The real difference, though, is not about wine, marriage, sex, or any of the other specific examples of specific sins. The real question is whether God’s commands reveal an eternal moral order, or if God’s commands create the moral order only as and when they are given.
The bottom line is this: If God’s nature does not change, neither can the moral order that flows from it.
