GUILT, and by extension the GUILT-OFFERING that answers it — the reparation sacrifice given its own law here (Leviticus 5:14-26), the only offering in this book that required paying restitution IN CASH (plus a 20% penalty) as well as killing an animal. The word runs a real semantic range in this very chapter: with a possessive suffix ('his asham', v6, v7) it names the LIABILITY itself — what a person owes because of the wrong — while the bare noun ('an asham', v15, v18, v25) becomes the PROPER NAME of the specific sacrifice that pays it, the same word doing double duty for the debt and its payment. ⚠ Modern translations split over exactly this range: ESV renders v6 'guilt offering' (a ritual reading), NIV 'he is guilty' (a culpability reading) — for the identical Hebrew. Jacob Milgrom, arguing the offering's real function is compensation rather than purification, translated the sacrifice 'reparation offering' throughout — the same kind of renaming debate chattat gets in the note at Leviticus 4:3. Isaiah 53:10 later makes the servant's own life an asham — a legal-restitution image, something genuinely OWED and paid back, not merely covered. → first discussed at Lev 5:15