Clean
The Hebrew word most often translated as "clean," ṭāhôr, also describes the pure gold of the tabernacle furnishings and the brightness of heaven itself. When Moses and the elders of Israel saw the God of Israel on Sinai, the pavement beneath his feet was "as it were the body of heaven in his clearness" (Exodus 24:10). The word for clearness, ṭōhar, comes from the same root. In biblical usage, cleanness is the condition of a person or thing fit to come near the divine, and its counterpart, ṭāmēʾ, names the condition that bars such approach.
The New Testament uses the Greek katharos and the verb katharizō, from which English takes "catharsis." It is this verb Jesus speaks to a leper who asks to be healed: "be thou clean" (Mark 1:41).
Purity Codes and Their Failure Modes
Modern readers often equate uncleanness with dirt or with sin, and the purity laws of Leviticus support neither reading. A person became ritually unclean by touching a corpse, giving birth, contracting certain skin diseases, or experiencing a bodily discharge. None of these was a moral failing. Uncleanness concerned access: the unclean person withdrew from the sanctuary, washed, waited, and in some cases offered sacrifice before returning.
Because purity laws governed access, they could also be used to rank people. Boundaries meant to separate the sanctuary from the ritually unclean invariably separated Israelites from one another and Israel from its neighbors. Isaiah condemned those who said, “Stand by thyself, come not near to me; for I am holier than thou” (Isaiah 65:5). The Gospels record the same pattern in Jesus’s day. He was criticized for eating with tax collectors and sinners (Mark 2:15–17). When a woman who had suffered a flow of blood for twelve years, and who was therefore unclean under the law, touched his clothes in a crowd, he did not rebuke her. He told her that her faith had made her whole (Mark 5:25–34; Leviticus 15:25).
Peter’s vision at Joppa made the correction explicit. He was told, “What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common,” and he came to understand that the vision concerned people rather than food: “God hath shewed me that I should not call any man common or unclean” (Acts 10:15, 28). The danger the passage addresses is not confined to one era. A community that treats cleanness as a status some possess and others lack will tend to exclude the very people its standards were meant to bring near. The measure of a purity standard, on this reading, is whether it helps people approach the presence of God or places that approach beyond their reach.
Cleanness in the Restoration
The Book of Mormon expresses cleanness through the image of garments. The resurrected Christ tells the Nephites that "no unclean thing can enter into his kingdom," and that only those who have "washed their garments in my blood" will enter his rest (3 Nephi 27:19). Donald W. Parry, writing in Interpreter, observes that garments in such passages stand for the person who wears them. To wash one's garments is to be remade. Moroni describes converts as "cleansed by the power of the Holy Ghost" (Moroni 6:4), placing cleansing within the continuing work of sanctification.
Early Latter-day Saints understood cleanness to involve the body as well as the spirit. The revelation that organized the School of the Prophets commanded the Saints to "cease to be unclean" in the same verse that told them to retire early and rise early, so that their bodies and minds might be invigorated (D&C 88:124).
Toward the Presence of God
The elders on Sinai saw beneath God's feet a brightness the Hebrew calls ṭōhar. In the Restoration's account of human destiny, that clarity describes a condition people may grow into. Cleanness on this view is progressive and communal. It involves body, mind, and conduct, and it prepares human beings to dwell in the presence of God and to become like him.