Sin appears to be enjoying a recent surge of popularity, and not just among the religious. From Oxford University Press's popular series on the seven deadly sins to Alan Jacobs's Original Sin: A Cultural History,2 these books address a contemporary ambivalence about the traditional religious language of sin, even as they make a case for the continuing relevance of historical conceptions of sin. To this body of literature, Gary Anderson's Sin: A History is a distinguished addition. Like the books mentioned above, it is written to be accessible to a lay audience. Unlike them, however, it is much more explicitly theological and built on a much deeper scholarly foundation. While Anderson's title is provocative, it is possibly misleading. The issue of sin is protean, and much of the recent literature has focused on the moral psychology of sin. That is not Anderson's area of concern. Rather, his focus is specifically on the operations and implications of a key metaphor for describing the relationship that sin creates between a person and God. The metaphor in question is that of sin as debt. The history that Anderson traces is the emergence and development of this metaphor both in Jewish and in Christian theology and religious practice.