“Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.”
— King James Bible translators, Book of Isaiah (1611)
Context
In the year that King Uzziah died, the prophet Isaiah sees the LORD enthroned in the temple, with six-winged seraphim hovering above. The seraphim call this antiphon to one another — the line that became the Trisagion of Eastern Christian liturgy, the Sanctus of the Western Mass, and the Kedushah of Jewish prayer. The English here is from the 1611 Authorised Version, rendering a Hebrew text far older.
How the repetition works
Every other quote in this catalogue uses epizeuxis to register psychological rupture — grief, terror, weariness, defiance. This one does the opposite. Biblical Hebrew has no comparative or superlative inflection: to say "holiest" one repeats the adjective, and to say "holiest of all" one repeats it three times. The threefold 'Holy' is therefore not emotional emphasis but a grammatical superlative made literal. The same rhetorical move that elsewhere marks language failing here marks language reaching for its highest possible degree of reverence.