He said to he, "This is the place where the priests shall boil the guilt offering and the sin offering and where they shall bake the grain offering, in order that they may not bring them out into the outer court to transmit holiness to the people."I wonder how the phrasing on this works in the original Hebrew. Here, it makes it sound like holiness is a disease, something the people should be afraid of. Why should they fear holiness so; isn't it what everyone should want to have?
I think the problem is that holiness can't coexist with sin. So, if someone who is sinful contacts something that is holy, one of the two has to change. Either the holy thing is corrupted, or the sinful one is affected. Since holiness isn't able to improve by mere contact, the only other option is for the sinful one to be destroyed, as light destroys darkness. In this way, maybe the analogy to a disease wasn't so wrong after all.
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