Holy One of Israel

The title “Holy One of Israel” is used a handful of times outside Isaiah, but regularly in that prophetic book.  What does it mean?

Isaiah 8:9-15 helps.  While the phrase is not used in the passage, verse 13 exhorts Judah that “it is Yahweh of armies whom you should regard as holy.”  The surrounding verses fill in the picture.

Regarding Yahweh as holy means: He is the one who is feared, rather than the nations and their conspiracies (vv. 12-13).  It also means that He is a sanctuary (v. 14; miqdash , a holy place).  Holy places are inviolable, protected; Yahweh is the holy one because His people inhabit Him as a fortress.  Verse 14 modulates from sanctuary to stone.  Yahweh is a sanctuary, like the sanctuary of stone in Jerusalem, and thus He is a stone that is a place of stumbling and a trap for the wicked (vv. 14-15).  In these ways, Yahweh is the Holy One.

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