Your Holy One

Yahweh is the Holy One. Many interpreters suggest that this means that He is transcendent, other, separated from creation and all that is unholy and unclean. Holy things and persons and places are separated to Yahweh: To call them holy is to say that Yahweh claims exclusive rights to them.

Let’s grant those definitions of “holy.” But then we have the marvelous genitive uses of Isaiah. Yahweh is not just the Holy One flat out, but the Holy One of Israel (Isaiah 1:4; 5:19, 24; 10:20; 12:6; 17:7; etc.). He is ” your Holy One” (43:15). The Holy transcendent One who claims allows Himself to be claimed.

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