Although the key terms workshop is over and things have settled down a bit in the translation department, our work with those key words continues. Yesterday I sent two translation teams out to the community to test some of those ways they want to translate those key terms.
One key term in particular stuck out to me as I was helping a translator prepare for the community testing. That word is holy. I think our first reaction if we tried to define holy would be something along the lines of 'without sin' or 'without blemish'. But when we look at some of the ways that word 'holy' is used in the Bible our definition seems to be missing something. There are holy places, like the temple, there are holy articles, there are holy people, God's name is holy etc. What is the common denominator between all these things? It's not that they are perfect or without blemish but rather that they are all set apart for God. They are holy because God is holy.
So when it comes down to the very basic definition we see that holy really has to do with the fact that God is completely distinct from everything else. He is totally unique and that is what holy means. Everything is holy only when it is set apart distinctly for God. Along with that meaning we can get other meanings, such as the idea of being blameless or sinless but only because God is sinless. Otherwise the word for 'pure' carries the idea of being sinless.
I think that many of us, myself included, sing about God being holy or his name being holy without ever really stopping to think what that means. But if someone would ask us to define exactly what we mean by 'holy' we wouldn't know what to say. This is a bit of what happened to me because all the languages we work with have no word for 'holy'. So I had to explain what 'holy' means in that context and to do that, I had to understand what it means. It was a good challenge to me to really think about some of these words that roll so easily off my tongue.
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