Despite the wide-ranging and potentially titillating title (for which I imagine we are indebted to the publisher rather than the author), this subtle and learned study has a precise and illuminating focus: the differing metaphors for sin in the Bible and in Jewish and Christian antiquity. Anderson shows how the Bible's most common metaphor for sin, a weight that a person must carry, began to be transformed within the Bible in the exilic and post-exilic period into the notion of sin as a debt that must be repaid. This latter metaphor is then further developed in rabbinic and patristic literature of the second to sixth centuries ce. A corollary to sin as a debt was the understanding that virtuous activity could be conceived as a credit. Within these ancient texts, from the biblical precedent of Daniel iv onwards, almsgiving to the poor became the prime act which could be a credit. Anderson gives appropriate space to the Reformation controversies that surrounded this understanding and practice, and offers fresh ways of conceptualising the issues: despite the temptation to view the moral life as part of a zero-sum economy, the ancients thought in terms of a different kind of economy whereby generosity meant that both giver and receiver were graciously enriched. Anderson concludes in the Middle Ages with Anselm's Cur Deus Homo, one of the most famous and influential discussions of the atonement, and shows how, in the light of the material previously studied, Anselm's conception of sin as debt both should, and should not, be understood. Throughout the study, philological precision (where it is finely demonstrated how knowledge of the ancient languages is foundational to interpretation) is combined with conceptual precision. The result is a distinctive and distinguished contribution to the history of Jewish and Christian thought.