common: ordinary rather than holy, not claimed by God and so free for everyday use
Israel's priests worked with two separate pairs, not one sliding scale. The first pair asks whether something belongs to God: holy (קֹדֶשׁ) or common. The second asks whether it is fit to come near him: clean (טָהוֹר) or unclean (טָמֵא). This word sits on the first pair, and it is the neutral half of it. Common does not mean dirty, sinful, or offensive. It means that a thing has not been handed over to God, so ordinary people may use it in ordinary ways.
Most of its seven appearances belong to one job description. The priest is to mark the line between what belongs to God and what does not, and to teach the people where that line runs. Leviticus 10:10 sets the task, Ezekiel 22:26 charges the priests with failing at it, and Ezekiel 44:23 hands it back to them as a duty in the restored temple. Ezekiel even builds the line into stone: the wall around the temple area exists to keep holy ground and common ground apart (Ezekiel 42:20).
The word can also simply label a particular thing as everyday:
- bread anyone may eat, as against the loaves kept for the sanctuary
- a journey that is nobody's sacred errand
- land assigned to the city for houses and pasture rather than to the temple
None of those are insults. They are the plain, unremarkable world, which is exactly what makes the holy stand out against it.
Movement runs both ways across the line. Consecrating something lifts it out of the common and into God's keeping. Profaning it (חָלַל) drags it back down into common use as though God had no claim on it. Being common is not the offense; treating what belongs to God as if it were merely common is.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether the word names a neutral third category, permitted for ordinary use, or carries the negative overtone of something profaned.
- majorityA neutral category. Priestly law works with two independent pairs, holy versus common and clean versus unclean, and the common is the permitted default state of whatever God has not claimed.; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16 (Anchor Bible 3; New York: Doubleday, 1991), on 10:10; Philip Peter Jenson, Graded Holiness: A Key to the Priestly Conception of the World (JSOTSup 106; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1992)
- minorityThe noun leans negative, closer to profaneness than to mere ordinariness, since it is built on the root behind the verb meaning to profane; older lexical glosses reflect this.; BDB, s.v. חֹל