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Anathema

The word anathema has two main meanings. One is to describe that something or someone is being hated or avoided. The other refers to a formal excommunication by a church. These meanings come from the New Testament, where an anathema was a person or thing cursed or condemned by God. In the Old Testament, an anathema was something or someone cursed and separated from God because of sin. These represent two types of settings, one for devotion, the other for destruction.

Anathema derives from Ancient Greek: ἀνάθεμα, anáthema, meaning "an offering" or "anything dedicated", itself derived from the verb ἀνατίθημι, anatíthēmi, meaning "to offer up". In the Old Testament, חֵרֶם (chērem) referred to both objects consecrated to divine use and those dedicated to destruction in the Lord's name, such as enemies and their weapons during religious wars. Since weapons of the enemy were considered unholy, the meaning became "anything dedicated to evil" or "a curse".

In New Testament usage a different meaning developed. St. Paul used the word anathema to signify a curse and the forced expulsion of one from the community of Christians. By the 6th century, the liturgical meaning evolved again to mean a formal ecclesiastical curse of excommunication and the condemnation of heretical doctrines, the severest form of separation from the Christian church issued against a heretic or group of heretics by a Pope or other church official. The phrase Latin: anathema sit ("let him be anathema"), echoing Galatians 1:8–9, was thus used in decrees of councils defining Christian faith.

Examples include:

In 1526, the word anathema appeared in modern English for the first time and was used in the sense of "something accursed". The "consecrated object" meaning was also adopted a short time later, but is no longer widely used. Its most common modern usage is in secular contexts where it is used to mean something or someone that is detested or shunned.

Examples include:

The Old Testament applied the word to anything set aside for sacrifice, and thus banned from profane use and dedicated to destruction—as, in the case of religious wars, the enemy and their cities and possessions. The New Testament uses the word to mean a curse and forced expulsion of someone from the Christian community.

The Septuagint uses the Greek word ἀνάθεμα (anathema), meaning something offered to a divinity, to render the Hebrew word חרם (herem). The word appears in verses such as Leviticus 27:28 to refer to things that are offered to God and so banned for common (non-religious) use. The Hebrew word was also used for what was devoted, by virtue of a simple vow, not to the Lord, but to the priest. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia (1901–1906), with the rise of the synagogue as the organizing principle of Jewish life circa the Maccabean period, the sense of the word herem changed from "an instrument of communal purification" to "an instrument for the promotion of personal conduct as well as the enforcement of public morality [...] an instrument of ecclesiastical discipline"; see Herem (censure).

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