3. Holiness in the People
belong to God, who dwells among
them; they are in a connection of
special nearness to him, are his pos-
session, and have the right of approach
to him (cf.
Ex. xix. 4
sqq.), and consequently are
under certain obligations to exhibit ethical or
religious qualities. Holiness here, therefore, implies
a condition and a demand; it involves both
cultic
and ethical requirements
(Lev. xix. 2,
" Ye shall
be holy: for I the
LORD
your God am holy "). This
is the point of view of the entire Holiness Code in
Lev. m. sqq., especially xi. 44-45, which gives expressly both external ritual and ethical duties.
Thus the double
conception of holiness comes to
light. On the one side Israel, as exemplifying the
holiness of God, is not to touch or deal with certain
impure things, and is to keep certain observances;
on the other, Israel is to honor father and mother,
to do righteousness, to practise charity and eschew
evil. So in
Ex. xix. 5-6
it appears that if Israel
keeps the commands of God it will be God's possession and a kingdom of priests and a holy people,
showing the underlying conception of character as
belonging essentially to
the idea. And this is rooted
in the thought of the possession by God of the people
which is to be holy. The conception of separation is,
therefore, throughout only secondary.
The term
kadhosh
in its application to God, however, implies throughout, both etymologically and
historically, a negative
sense. If things
4. The Primitive Content of "Holiness"
and persons are not in themselves holy,
but are so because they belong to God,
holiness as applied to him must involve
what is essential to his attributes as
deity and what is worthy of him. But
just what this involves is not stated in the Old
Testament in any simple formula which is good for
all steps in
the development which the idea certainly
underwent.
In early times in the mind of the people
the holiness of God implied something fearful and
unapproachable; in the height of the prophetic age,
the content was strongly ethical; in the law and
whatever was connected with it the transcendence
of God came out as the motive of the ritual and
service. The earlier and popular notion comes out
in such passages as
Lev. x. 2-3;
I Sam. vi. 20,
where the idea of God is that of a power who by
destruction punishes those who by coming near to
him invade his holiness. To such a being access can
be had only
through painstaking preparation and
care. The inclusion of this idea in the late Priest
Code proves only how tenacious the idea was.
But this is only one side of the thought. As soon
as God came to be conceived as an ethical being,
kadhosh
came to have an ethical content, not because in itself it meant "pure," but
because it
was applied to deity to whom that quality was at-
