These drawers the priests were to put on whenever they entered the sanctuary, that they might not "bear iniquity and die," i.e., incur guilt deserving of death, either through disobedience to these instructions, or, what was still more important, through such violation of the reverence due to the holiness of the dwelling of God as they would be guilty of, if they entered the sanctuary with their nakedness uncovered. For as the consciousness of sin and guilt made itself known first of all in the feeling of nakedness, so those members which subserve the natural secretions are especially pudenda or objects of shame, since the mortality and corruptibility of the body, which sin has brought into human nature, are chiefly manifested in these secretions. For this reason these members are also called the "flesh of nakedness." By this we are not to understand merely "the sexual member as the organ of generation or birth, because the existence and permanence of sinful, mortal human nature are associated with these," as Bhr supposes. For the frailty and nakedness of humanity are not manifested in the organ and act of generation, which rather serve to manifest the inherent capacity and creation of man for imperishable life, but in the impurities which nature ejects through those organs, and which bear in themselves the character of corruptibility. If, therefore, the priest was to appear before Jehovah as holy, it was necessary that those parts of his body especially should be covered, in which the impurity of his nature and the nakedness of his flesh were most apparent. For this reason, even in ordinary life, they are most carefully concealed, though not, as Baumgarten supposes, "because the sin of nature has its principal seat in the flesh of nakedness." - "A statute for ever:" as in Exodus 27:21.

Exodus 29:6 Parallel Commentaries

mitre. To wrap round, evidently means that covering of the head so universal in eastern countries, which we call turban, which consists of a cap, and a sash of fine linen or silk wound round its bottom.

Exodus 28:36-39 And you shall make a plate of pure gold, and grave on it, like the engravings of a signet, HOLINESS TO THE LORD...

Leviticus 8:9 And he put the turban on his head; also on the turban, even on his forefront, did he put the golden plate, the holy crown...