Garment

A garment is an article of clothing, especially a robe or tunic worn next to the body. The common Hebrew word is beged, "covering" or "clothing." Some lexicographers trace it to the verb bagad, "to deal treacherously," through a root meaning "to cover," while others treat the two as unrelated. Either way, the first clothing in scripture was made to hide: when the eyes of Adam and Eve were opened, they sewed fig leaves into aprons. A quick reading takes covering shame as the whole purpose of clothing in scripture. Yet the aprons were their own work. The garments that mattered were God's, and from then on scriptural clothing marks office, covenant, and glory as much as it covers.

Coats of Skins

The coats God made for Adam and Eve are the first garments of divine making and the pattern for later ones.

It has long been recognized that this act of clothing was a mercy: "Unto Adam, and also unto his wife, did I, the Lord God, make coats of skins, and clothed them" (Moses 4:27). Less often noticed is the word for coat, kuttoneth, "tunic," the same word used for the linen coats of Israel's priests, made "for glory and for beauty" (Exodus 28:40). Adam and Eve leave the garden dressed, as it were, in the tunic of the sanctuary. The skins invited a further reading, since the Hebrew 'or, "skin," sounds the same as 'or, "light." An ancient rabbinic tradition reports that the Torah scroll of Rabbi Meir read "garments of light." Eastern Christian commentators took the coats of skins to be the mortal flesh the couple put on in a fallen world. Both readings make the garment a figure for the body, and Paul develops the figure.

Clothed Upon

Paul describes resurrection as putting on a better garment, an image that bears on how Mormon transhumanists think about changing the body.

Writing of the body as "our earthly house of this tabernacle," Paul moves in one passage from building to clothing: "we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened: not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life" (2 Corinthians 5:1, 4). The Greek ependuomai means to put on over, adding a garment to the one already worn. Paul hopes to keep the body and receive more, which accords with the Restoration's teaching that spirit and body together make the soul and that the risen Christ kept his flesh and bones.

Mormon transhumanists read this hope as an invitation to work. If the present body is an unfinished garment, then medicine, prosthetics, and therapies that extend healthy life are ways of being clothed upon. The image also names the risk. A garment can be treated as a costume, worn for an evening and thrown off, and some advocates of mind uploading speak of the body that way, as a vehicle to discard once the mind can be copied elsewhere. Paul declined the wish to be unclothed. Mormon transhumanists generally hold the freedom to change one's body within two limits: the change must harm no one else, and it must serve the purposes for which bodies are given, such as relationship and joy.

The Rent Coat of Joseph

A garment in scripture also carries the record of the one who wears it.

Israel "made him a coat of many colours" (Genesis 37:3), again a kuttoneth, and his brothers stripped it from him and dipped it in a goat's blood to deceive their father. When Moroni tore his own coat to make the title of liberty, his people tore their garments as a covenant, and Moroni recalled Joseph, "whose coat was rent by his brethren into many pieces," and a prophecy of Jacob not found in Genesis: "Even as this remnant of garment of my son hath been preserved, so shall a remnant of the seed of my son be preserved by the hand of God" (Alma 46:23-24). The garment stands for the man and his posterity. It is significant that the same logic governs the Book of Mormon's language of judgment, in which "there can no man be saved except his garments are washed white," purified through the Redeemer's blood (Alma 5:21).

The Garment of the Holy Priesthood

Latter-day Saints who make covenants in the temple receive a garment that continues the scriptural pattern.

The Church describes it as a simple undergarment, also called the garment of the holy priesthood, worn beneath ordinary clothing for the rest of a member's life. It reminds those who wear it of their connection to God, their commitment to follow his will, and the blessings and protection he has promised. Latter-day Saint commentators have long drawn the correspondence with Eden. As God clothed Adam and Eve before they went out into a fallen world, the temple clothes members before they return to daily life. Isaiah's song names the giver: "he hath clothed me with the garments of salvation, he hath covered me with the robe of righteousness" (Isaiah 61:10). In each case, the garment is God's gift, and the one who receives it wears it into ordinary life.