hagios

BDAG gives the primary sense as pertaining to being dedicated or consecrated to the service of God, and the mainstream of recent scholarship (Bauckham; David Peterson, Possessed by God; Jo Bailey Wells, God's Holy People) treats the core as relational, with moral purity as its entailment rather than its definition. Otto Procksch's TDNT article (TDNT 1:88-115) remains the classic treatment, arguing that holiness is properly God's and only derivatively that of things and people, and insisting on an energy in the holy that the merely clean lacks; James Barr's critique of TDNT method applies to its developmental synthesis. Rudolf Otto's Das Heilige (1917) supplies the vocabulary of the numinous for the otherness dimension, with Isaiah 6 as its paradigm text. On the Semitic background, NIDOTTE (Naude) treats holiness as marking what belongs to the divine sphere rather than the human, while TWOT and Pedersen caution that the root qdsh is virtually never used in a secular sense, so the traditional separation etymology cannot bear much weight; Snaith stressed the negative sense of separation, Eichrodt the positive sense of belonging, and O. R. Jones concluded that holiness involves separation but is rarely equivalent to it. On the Greek side, LSJ notes the word is absent from Homer, Hesiod and the tragedians and rare in Attic, its principal classical attestation being Herodotus of temples; Frisk and Beekes connect it with hazomai and Sanskrit yajati and reject any link with Latin sacer; Moulton and Milligan document its use in inscriptions of Eastern deities and observe that the Jewish derivatives were free of pagan association. Trench (Synonyms of the New Testament, section 88) sets out the standard distinctions from hieros, hosios, semnos and hagnos. For the plural as a self designation, Hurtado notes the pointed New Testament preference for hoi hagioi over hoi hosioi, and Bauckham with Trebilco trace the title to Daniel 7; Collins's reading of Daniel 7's holy ones as the angelic host, together with the Qumran language of sharing the lot of the holy ones, is why the referent is genuinely disputed at 1 Thessalonians 3:13, Colossians 1:12 and Jude 14. Botner (JBL 2017) argues that ho hagios tou theou functioned as a messianic title in Mark 1:24, a minority proposal. On the cultic side Jenson maps the priestly graded system of holy and profane against clean and unclean, and Milgrom argues that the Holiness Code democratizes and moralizes holiness as imitatio of God.