# Consecrate

Discover how consecration bridges ancient Hebrew ritual and radical economics—filling hands with stewardship, not dispossession—to build a world without poverty.

[Image: To consecrate is to set apart, to make something God’s in a real, binding, and actionable way. The Hebrew root *qadash* carries this sense of holiness through separation.]

The concept of consecration operates through dual linguistic lenses. The Hebrew root *qadash* denotes holiness achieved through separation—setting an object or an individual apart for a divine purpose. However, the priestly ordination texts of Exodus 29 employ a different, more concrete idiom: *male yad*, meaning "to fill the hand." Aaron and his sons are consecrated by having something placed in their hands to hold and to offer. Holiness, in this context, is fundamentally linked to stewardship, which is defined by what a person receives and how they choose to administer it.

Mormon scripture extends the word beyond ritual into economics. Doctrine and Covenants 42 establishes the law of consecration, under which members deed their property to the church and receive back a stewardship sufficient for their needs, with the surplus directed to the poor. Consecration in this usage denotes an economic order whose stated aim is the replication of Enoch’s Zion, a society where the people “were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them” (Moses 7:18).

## Stewardship In Lieu of Dispossession

[Image: The *male yad* idiom in Exodus 29 links holiness to stewardship: Levite priests were consecrated and entrusted with sacred items pertinent to their calling.]

The revealed law preserves individual agency and actively resists institutional absorption. Property is governed by covenant, and the resulting stewardship demands genuine discretion and accountability from the individual. Members are allocated resources “according to their families, according to their circumstances and their wants and needs” (D&C 51:3), which assumes differing situations rather than uniform allotment. This arrangement resists both the concentration of wealth and the erasure of the person into a collective. Doctrine and Covenants 104:13 states the logic plainly: every man is to be made accountable as a steward over earthly blessings. Consecration therefore amplifies responsibility instead of transferring it upward to a centralized authority.

## The Materiality of the Sacred

Because Mormon theology shuns the idea of spirit-matter dualism, consecration does not remove things from the physical world into a sacred one. It redirects physical goods toward sacred use while they remain physical. Land stays land, labor stays labor, and both become holy through purpose. This rules out the reading in which devoting something to God means withdrawing it from practical work. Consecrated bread is eaten. Consecrated oil is applied to a body. Consecrated fields are farmed.

## Consecration of contemporary assets

The imperative to "fill the hand" (*male yad*) extends directly to contemporary assets absent from nineteenth-century revelations. Modern stewardships encompass research datasets, open-source code, distributed computing networks, patented therapeutics, trained artificial intelligence models, and specialized cognitive labor. Life extension technologies or cognitive enhancements restricted to the elite fail the metric of Zion. True consecration requires that these capabilities be democratized.

*See also*: [Covenant](/topical-guide/covenant), [Holiness](/topical-guide/holiness), [Ordination](/topical-guide/ordinance), [Purpose](/topical-guide/purpose), [Sanctify](/topical-guide/sanctify), [Temple](/topical-guide/temple), [Worship](/topical-guide/worship), [Zion](/topical-guide/zion)