Inspiration and Respiration: Man Becomes a Living Soul

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. (Gen. 2:7)

And just like that, here in Genesis 2:7, God creates man. Like with so many of the biblical stories, the brevity of the sentence belies the tremendous wealth contained within. So let’s dig in, shall we?

God, having extracted habitable order from the chaotic watery potential below, set about the creation of the world. Having made the world from stars to starfish, God turns his attention to the creation of man.

Man, a living soul, is a strange sort of creature at this point in the story. He is somehow more than the animals, but he is not yet in the possession of the self-consciousness which is a result of the fall. Let’s take a look at what might be accounting for the difference. As it often is, the details are in the langage.

There are multiple words used in Genesis to describe the creative activity of God. For the creation of sea creatures and less tangible elements like “heavens and earth” (Gen 1:21) the word that is used in the Biblical Hebrew is bara. The word bara specifically refers to divine creation ex nihilo and is typically used with God as the subject, emphasizing his unique power to bring something into existence. For the creation of animals as well as more tangible entities like the sun, moon and stars (Gen. 1:16-25) the word that is used is asah. 

We also see asah used in terms of human labor as in “six days you shall labor and do (asah) all your work” (Ex. 20:9) and “they do no iniquity” (Psalms 119:3) where asah is used as performing an action.

However, in Genesis 2:7 when God forms man of the dust of the earth, neither bara nor asah are used. The word in the Biblical Hebrew which is translated as “formed” in 2:7 is yatsar which specially denotes a hands-on shaping

or forming. This, along with god breathing the breath of life into him, separates Adam from the rest of the world God creates. There is a sense of artistry in the word yatsar and it is frequently used to describe the work of potters (Jeremiah 18, Isaiah 45). Later Christian interpretations (Augustine, Calvin) refer to God as the Master Potter and point to Christ’s acceptance of the father’s will is that of clay’s acceptance of the potter’s will despite not understanding the reason behind it.

Right here in the first words of the sentence we begin to see a clue. God’s creation of man is hands on in a way that the creation of the rest of the world is not. Man is also not created ex nihlio which would have meant the use of bara. In Genesis 1:26 God says: “let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness” (the plural here is a bit tricky. The Hebrew word is Elohim. There are two schools of thought on this. Dennis Praeger, an excellent Old Testament biblical scholar, notes that the word “Elohim” is like the English word “fish” in that it can be plural or singular. I have no reason not to believe Praeger on this. That said, Mircea Eliade talks about how the earlier parts of Genesis are coming out of the polytheistic cultures and Elohim represents a concept of all of the gods in unity owing to a single logos and I find Eliade’s full analysis to be very convincing. As is so often the case in the biblical stories, one valid explanation does not invalidate another as there is room for multiple levels of analsysis). And so with the goal of making man in his own likeness, God sets aside a particular, hands on, creative process for man which he does not use anywhere else in the creation.

Now that we have looked at the creative process by which God makes man, our next clause gives us information as to the material man is made of — dust. So why dust? I am inclined to agree with St. Augustine’s explanation. In his Confessions (397 AD), Augustine gives four separate reasons for the dust and I think he does an excellent job thoroughly investigating this issue. His first explanation is that man is made of dust to show his humility. He points to Christ being a Nazarene as being analogous to man being made of dust. More importantly, Augustine says that God’s creation of man from dust hammers home that humanity has no inherent worth apart from God’s creative act. God could have made us out of anything. The material of which we are made is in no way relevant to our humanity which is fully dependent on being a gift of God and a product of his creativity.

Augustine further points to the dust man is made of with regard to the dual nature of humanity…material and spiritual. The dust is the material and stands in stark contrast to the breath of God which is our soul and distinguishes the life of a human from mere matter.

Augustine further points to the use of dust as foreshadowing post-fall man’s mortality and the consequence of sin referencing Genesis 3:19 “for dust you are and to dust you will return.” Augustine says that the creation from dust  serves man as a constant reminder of his fragility and the need of redemption through Christ.

Finally, Augustine says that man’s creation from dust showcases God’s omnipotence and artistry. Augustine spends some time in the Confessions marveling over God’s ability to take a material as base as dust, not even dirt, and fashion it into a living being capable of reason and communication with him.

With the special manner of creation which God uses to form man combined with the material which was used (and which I believe Augustine’s explanation is correct), we move on to the next part of Genesis 2:7 where God “breathed into the nostrils the breath of life.” In my last post, I discussed the linguistic connection between breath and soul. The massive body of literature dedicated to human consciousness (Erich Neumann’s The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949) being one of my personal favorites) not withstanding, the biblical answer is really something for a single sentence.

Human consciousness is a product of the soul and the soul of man is the breath of God willingly given. You can spend a solid year in contemplation of this single sentence and barely scratch the surface.

At this stage we have God using a hands on technique, unique to the creation of man, to form dust into the human being and then quickening him by willingly breathing the divine breath into his nostrils making him, as we see at the end of 2:7, a living soul. An interesting correlate to this breath of life (Gr. πνοὴ ζωης) is the Gospel of St. John 20:22 where Christ “breathed on them and said to them, receive you the Holy Spirit.” Once again it is the divine breath which imparts the spirit in a way that in our last post we noted was such an ancient and deep concept that it is embedded into multiple languages which originate out of entirely separate linguistic roots. That spirit is divine breath is one of, if not the, most ancient ideas of man.

As a living soul man shares his life with animals. But it is man alone who receives his life from “the breath of God.” It is this which imparts onto man the distinctive higher principle of being as compared with the existence of animals.” In our next essay we will discuss how the biblical relationship between man and animal as commanded by God has been misused and how it can be properly construed.

The latin spirare, spirit and breath, is the root of our word respiration. However, what I feel is more telling is that it is also the root of our word inspiration. Breath, inspiration, the soul, God, ideas, creativity these are concepts which are all so deeply connected that they do not just form the basis of western civilization, but are woven directly into the language as well as the conceptual framework which defines both the biblical and scientific epistemological epochs. So deep is the link between respiration and inspiration and spirit and God that even the epistemological epoch eclipse does very little to dim its shine.

With this we bring Genesis 2:7 to a close and we have the origin of man in the world and we can turn our gaze to the question of what this newly created world and this special creature, man, are up to.