The conception of sin has Babylonian – Magian – Persian origins. The Chaldæan theologians developed sin as a theologoumenon idea in order to answer their 11th century BCE question of theodicy: how to reconcile divine justice with the suffering of good people. Sin, as a metaphysical conception, was originally Persian and has been replaced with pre-Socratic and biblical refined philosophical awareness. But first, an account of the Chaldæan theologians’ shrewd insights requires exposition.
Being arose out of non-being. In other words, creation and creatures, gods and mortals, devolved from non-being. Moirai (Hellenic version of fate as absurd) reigned over the metaphysical realm of non-being, which was also the fountainhead of the young gods, as well as abstractions like freedom, creativity and ethics. The Enuma Elish describes gods emerging two by two from a formless, watery waste, which was also considered to be divine. Prior to the existence of the gods or human beings, a sacred, raw material had existed eternally. This realm was also the origin of the spirit of man.
There was never such thing as ex nihilo, creation out of nothing, in the ancient world. Our modern presumption of freedom, Meonic freedom, is the fulcrum of ethics and creativity which emerges from our being, and is the inception of intelligence. Hellenistic philosophy collapsed this realm of non-being to a divine Nous. The Christian philosophers identified this divine Nous with their Semitic god of Jewish/Christian/Islamic religion. Zoroastrianism also inherited some remaining vestiges of this original conception.
The ancient Semitic mentality conceived of freedom in three contexts: freedom from slavery, from taxes and as another term of biological desire or warfare. The notion of freedom was developed in order to justify the Semitic intuition that man was a sinful being.
