Holiness

Holiness describes the condition of a person, place, or thing set apart from ordinary, everyday use and designated exclusively for God. Moses was told to “make a plate of pure gold, and grave upon it, like the engravings of a signet, Holiness to the Lord,” and to set it “upon Aaron’s forehead, that Aaron may bear the iniquity of the holy things… that they may be accepted before the Lord” (Exodus 28:36-38).

The engraved phrase, qodesh la-YHWH, joins the noun qodesh, “apartness” or “sacredness,” to the divine name. The adjective qadosh and the verb qadash, “to set apart” or “consecrate,” describe what is withdrawn from common use for the Lord’s service, as when Moses learned that “the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” Popular usage equates holiness with private moral purity or pious withdrawal. James E. Faulconer has observed that “holiness derives from being set apart, not from the character of the object in question.” The plate’s gold was ordinary metal until it was engraved.

Ye Shall Be Holy

Hedcut illustration of Leviticus 19:35-36 links holiness to fair economic practice, including “just balances, just weights, a just ephah.” — Leviticus 19:35-36 links holiness to fair economic practice, including “just balances, just weights, a just ephah.”

In the Holiness Code of Leviticus, the Lord extends the plate’s office to every household: “Ye shall be holy: for I the Lord your God am holy.” The commandments that follow explicitly define it. The harvester leaves “the corners of thy field” for “the poor and stranger”; “the wages of him that is hired shall not abide with thee all night until the morning”; no one may “put a stumblingblock before the blind”; and the market keeps “just balances, just weights, a just ephah” (Leviticus 19:2, 9-14, 35-36).

That which was considered holy was also potent, though its potency ran in an unexpected direction. The Lord declared that “whatsoever toucheth the altar shall be holy.” Yet when Haggai asked the priests whether holy flesh carried in a garment’s skirt would hallow bread it touched, they answered no; asked whether a man defiled by a corpse would defile the same food, they answered yes (Exodus 29:37; Haggai 2:12-13). Uzzah, steadying the ark when the oxen stumbled, died for handling holiness outside its appointed order. Under the Mosaic law, defilement traveled more readily than sanctity, an asymmetry the prophet Zechariah foresaw reversed.

Upon the Bells of the Horses

Zechariah’s final vision deliberately carries the inscription from the forehead into the street: “In that day shall there be upon the bells of the horses, Holiness unto the Lord; and the pots in the Lord’s house shall be like the bowls before the altar,” and “every pot in Jerusalem and in Judah” with them (Zechariah 14:20-21). The vision closes with “no more the Canaanite in the house of the Lord.” The Hebrew kena’ani also denotes a merchant, and several modern translations render it “trader.” Christian interpreters have heard that line fulfilled when the Savior commanded, “make not my Father’s house an house of merchandise.”

Latter-day Saints took the prophecy literally. Bradshaw notes that the phrase “was never used as part of any ancient building”; it first appeared on a temple in 1845, when Brigham Young had a stone bearing it set in the Nauvoo Temple. In the Great Basin, Elder D. Todd Christofferson recounts, the Saints placed the words “on seemingly common or mundane things”: sacrament cups, “the head of a hammer,” the doorknobs of Brigham Young’s home, and the display windows of Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution.

The Body of Christ

New Testament Greek renders qadosh with hagios, which also names the people set apart. Paul addressed whole congregations as “called to be saints,” hagioi, holy ones, the title Latter-day Saints carry in their name. The Apostle Peter applies Leviticus to scattered Christians: “as he which hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation; Because it is written, Be ye holy; for I am holy” (1 Peter 1:15-16). The word rendered “conversation,” anastrophē, means a manner of life. Peter thereby locates holiness in daily conduct, and hagiasmos names consecration as a continuing process.

A revelation to Joseph Smith declares that “all things unto me are spiritual, and not at any time have I given unto you a law which was temporal” (D&C 29:34). The same logic applies to the body, a temple that “is holy, which temple ye are.” President Russell M. Nelson, observing that “Inscribed on each temple are the words ‘Holiness to the Lord,’” cautioned that “it may be easier to ascribe holiness to a building than it is to a people.”

Instruments in the Lord's HAnds

Lincoln Cannon states the metaphysics that carries the inscription further: “There’s no such thing as immaterial matter, all spirit is matter.” If spirit and matter are continuous, the engraved hammer head has successors in gene editors, neural interfaces, and software, each of which may be set apart or left to common use. Leviticus supplies the terms. Cochlear implants and retinal prostheses serve the deaf and the blind; a labor platform can pay its workers before morning; a lending algorithm can keep a just ephah. A feed engineered to exploit compulsion, by contrast, sets a stumbling block before the blind.

Haggai’s ancient inquiry remains as relevant to modern systems architects as it was to the temple builders returning from Babylon: sanctity does not reside passively in the instrument itself, nor does an artifact automatically hallow the activity conducted through it. Just as Aaron wore the golden plate upon his forehead to bear the iniquity of Israel before the Lord, those who design, deploy, and govern emerging technologies incur a genuine moral debt for the downstream consequences of their creations.