Hebrew Word Study – Garments of Holiness – Behadrat Kodesh  Beth Hei Daleth Resh Taw     Qop Daleth Shin

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Psalms 29:2: “Give unto the Lord the glory due His name, worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.” 

Oh, how I love to quote this verse as I worship God. I just thrill when I utter the words to God that I am worshipping him in the beauty of His holiness. I get such a blessing from this that I actually hate to figure out what it means.  Right now, I haven’t the foggiest idea what the beauty of His holiness means.  But it sounds wonderful.

The word beauty in Hebrew is behadrat which means a garment. For this reason, commentators expressed the worship of God in a sanctuary or church where the priest and preachers wear beautiful robes and garments.  In fact, it is this verse that serves as the basis for priestly garments or robes worn by ministers in a church.  

I was discussing this issue with one of my passengers on my disability bus today who is Catholic and attends Mass spoken in Latin.  He informed me that His Latin teacher in High School promised to give him a passing grade if he promised never to take another Latin course.  In other words, he can’t understand a word spoken in the service, but he feels he is worshipping God.  I found myself agreeing with him and said, “You know, God is meant to be experienced not understood.” If my passenger happens to experience God in the beauty of His holiness who am I to say he is wasting his time sitting in a service where he cannot understand a word that is spoken?  After all, Jesus said that we worship God in spirit and my passenger’s spirit probably understands Latin. 

There is one problem with applying the word behadrat to garments worn by men.  It is speaking of the behadrat kodesh the garments of Holiness. When you look at the word holy or kodesh you find it means something sacred, consecrated, or set apart. I recently heard a rabbi speak on holiness and he said that some things are naturally holy like the Torah and then there are some things that are not holy like an idol. Most things are neutral that are neither holy nor unholy. It is for us to make it holy.  Our computers are neither holy nor unholy.  We have the choice to make them holy or unholy. We can make our computer holy by listening to worship music, and writing blogs teaching the Word of God and we can make our computer unholy by watching pornography.  A piece of cloth can be consecrated to God, used for purposes honoring God like wearing it to preach a sermon, or unholy by wearing it to impress people with the fact that you are clergy and therefore someone special.  

I personally don’t see how wearing a robe will make a sermon more Godly but what do I know?  I prefer to consider this garment of holiness or sacredness to be our physical lives, you know like our bodies are a garment for our spirit. Hence if we consecrate our bodies to God, then our bodies as the garment of holiness become holy. What would that mean for us? For one thing, it would mean we could worship Him. Worship has two possible roots, shachah and/or sachah.  I believe both apply here and it means shachah which is to physically bow before God and sachah to be surrounded by Him and His presence. When we have a life that is consecrated to Him he can surround us with his passionate love.

I recently published a book entitled “Swimming in the Presence of God” which is a book on the Hebraic approach to worship.  In researching for this book I interviewed worship leaders in various churches of various denominations. Almost without exception when I interviewed a worship leader, I was really interviewing a music leader.  We have come to associate music with worship. Some people are convinced that you cannot worship God without music and will even fire up an old battered boom box with a CD of worship music and try to get their group to worship God with that awful static-filled sound that has music in there someplace.  To my Catholic friend worship is not music but the recitation of something in Latin.  Although he does not know what he is saying he knows they are words of worship.  To him, worship is the reciting liturgy. I spoke with another person who spends hours in prayer and finds music very distracting.  To her worship is prayer to God.

Note that the word kodesh which is the Hebrew word for worship is spelled with a Cheth. This letter represents a bonding and joining with God. The next letter is a Daleth which is a doorway or portal, that leads to the final letter the  Shin which represents God’s passionate love.  When we are holy before God, we can join or bond with Him so that He can open a portal to his passionate love.  When that happens, sachah happens and we are immersed or surrounded by his loving presence.  

Shachah and sachah comes from a Ugaritic word.  In graduate school, I translated a Ugaritic poem about a goddess Anat who fell in love with a mortal man. When that relationship was consummated, the word sachah was used, the very word that the Hebrew adopted to express what happens when we “worship” or sachah God.  This does not mean a sexual relationship with God, but it does mean the deepest possible intimacy that we can experience with God. 

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