Integrity

Integrity is the quality that holds a thing together under strain, so that a beam bears its load, a vessel keeps its contents, and a person remains one and the same in private and in public. The Latin integer, “untouched” or “whole,” survives in the mathematician’s whole number, and engineers still speak of a building’s structural integrity. The Hebrew words rendered “integrity” in the King James Bible, tom and tummah, come from tamam, “to be complete,” kin to tamim, the word for an unblemished sacrifice; the Thummim of the high priest’s breastplate is commonly traced to the same root. Common speech equates integrity with honesty, yet the Hebrew vocabulary describes an entire life in which heart, word, and deed are undivided.

Abimelech and Job

The word first appears in the King James Bible on the lips of a foreign king. When Abraham, sojourning in Gerar, presented Sarah as his sister, Abimelech took her into his household, and God warned him in a dream that he was a dead man. Abimelech protested that “in the integrity of my heart and innocency of my hands have I done this,” and God accepted the plea: “Yea, I know that thou didst this in the integrity of thy heart; for I also withheld thee from sinning against me” (Genesis 20:5-6). The narrative pairs heart and hands, intention and act. God claims a share in Abimelech’s preservation, presenting integrity as a wholeness that providence guards even outside the covenant.

The book of Job makes integrity its central question. The Lord commends Job as “a perfect and an upright man” who “still holdeth fast his integrity,” while Job’s wife urges him to let it go and die. Job’s reply becomes an oath: “till I die I will not remove mine integrity from me. My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go: my heart shall not reproach me so long as I live” (Job 27:5-6). The adversary had wagered that Job’s piety was held together by prosperity and would come apart without it. Job’s integrity thus functions as a load-bearing structure under deliberate testing, and the book shows a whole person keeping its form after every external support is gone.

The Just Weight and the Single Eye

Proverbs sets integrity among the instruments of the marketplace. Its eleventh chapter opens by declaring that “a false balance is abomination to the Lord: but a just weight is his delight,” and two verses later it teaches that “the integrity of the upright shall guide them: but the perverseness of transgressors shall destroy them” (Proverbs 11:3). The juxtaposition is deliberate. A merchant’s stones had to weigh what they claimed to weigh, and the Law of Moses forbade a bag holding “divers weights,” one set for buying and another for selling, the archetype of a divided character. Integrity guides by making conduct consistent: the upright carry a single standard into every transaction, and the perverse carry two and are at length undone by the discrepancy.

The Savior described the same wholeness in terms of sight: “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light” (Matthew 6:22). He added at once that “no man can serve two masters.” The single eye fixes on one object and fills the whole person with what it sees. The Epistle of James names the corresponding disorder: “A double minded man is unstable in all his ways” (James 1:8). Latter-day revelation enlarges the promise, teaching that when the eye is “single to my glory,” the body filled with light “comprehendeth all things.” Integrity in this teaching is a condition of perception as well as of conduct, and its opposite is a self divided among competing loyalties.

The Integrity of Hyrum Smith

In January 1841 the Lord spoke of Joseph Smith’s elder brother in terms recalling the verdict over Abimelech: “blessed is my servant Hyrum Smith; for I, the Lord, love him because of the integrity of his heart, and because he loveth that which is right before me” (D&C 124:15). Hyrum’s subsequent life gave the commendation the shape of Job’s oath. In June 1844 Hyrum is remembered to have refused Joseph’s urging that he flee with his family to Cincinnati, and three and a half years after the revelation he died beside Joseph at Carthage Jail. The revelation’s wording indicates that divine love answered a heart whose desires and deeds had become one.

The Book of Mormon applies the same quality to a company. Helaman’s two thousand young warriors were “exceedingly valiant for courage, and also for strength and activity; but behold, this was not all⁠—they were men who were true at all times in whatsoever thing they were entrusted” (Alma 53:20). Mormon defines their integrity by what it allowed others to do, since those who entrusted the young men with a charge could rely on its fulfillment. Their fathers had buried their weapons under oath, and the sons’ covenant to defend Nephite liberty carried that fidelity into a second generation. A Zion society depends on such reliability, for consecration places goods, offices, and lives in the keeping of stewards whose faithfulness no one can continually inspect.

Code, Body, and Trust

Modern software rests on a comparable trust. Much digital infrastructure depends on open-source components maintained by a few volunteers, a model Eric S. Raymond defended with the maxim that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” In March 2024 the engineer Andres Freund noticed that secure logins on a test system were running slow and traced the delay to a backdoor hidden in xz Utils, a compression library found in most Linux distributions. The code came from a contributor calling himself Jia Tan, who over roughly two years had won the trust of the project’s overburdened maintainer, Lasse Collin, while other accounts pressed Collin to share control. The attack succeeded by counterfeiting the integrity on which that commons depended.

Transhumanists such as Ray Kurzweil anticipate bodies sustained by software and by nanoscale machines, a hope already partly realized. In 2017 the FDA approved a firmware update for some 465,000 implanted Abbott pacemakers after researchers showed that their radio interfaces could be reached by someone other than the patient’s physician. As implants, neural interfaces, and programmable therapies multiply, the integrity of code becomes the integrity of the body, and a compromised dependency becomes a wound. It falls to those who write such code to be true at all times in whatsoever thing they are entrusted, building systems whose inward operation matches their outward profession, and to the communities that rely on them to sustain their maintainers so that none stands alone against a patient deceiver.