SIN — and literally a MISSING: the root is the ordinary verb for an arrow falling short of its mark (Judges 20:16 uses it of slingers who could NOT miss). It is the least dramatic of the Hebrew words for wrongdoing and the most common, and its very first appearance personifies it as a waiting predator: 'if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door — its desire is for you, but you must master it' (4:7). ⚠ The identical word is also the technical name of a SACRIFICE — Leviticus 4 gives the sin-offering (chattat) its own full law, the first of the book's two atonement sacrifices (the other, asham, 'guilt-offering', begins at Leviticus 5:14), a wordplay that chapter's own note leans on. That name is genuinely disputed: the same offering is required for ritual impurity carrying no moral fault at all (a woman after childbirth, Leviticus 12:6, already on these pages — the case where the difficulty is sharpest, since she has done nothing wrong at all), which is why the modern scholar Jacob Milgrom argued for 'purification offering' instead — even NIV footnotes the alternative while keeping 'sin offering' in its main text. Psalm 51 later opens by stacking three of them that are not synonyms — pesha (rebellion, a breach of relationship), avon (guilt, the crookedness itself) and chatta't (missing) — and asks a different verb against each: wipe out, wash, cleanse. ⭐ Numbers 32:23 personifies it a second time, a whole book after Genesis 4’s own crouching predator: ‘know that your chatta’t will FIND you’ — the identical hunting image, now aimed at a whole armed nation rather than one brother. ⚠ The shelf splits on the verb’s edge: KJV, ASV and Geneva all keep the detective sense, ‘your sin will find you out’, word for word alike; NWT crosses to ‘your sin will catch up with you’ — and on this one point the ENTIRE Spanish shelf (both Reina-Valera editions, both TNM editions) agrees with the NWT’s English rather than the KJV’s, all reaching for ‘alcanzar’, to overtake. Both trace to the identical Hebrew verb, matza, ‘to find, to reach’. → first discussed at Gen 4:7