Philological Concerns: Breath and Soul

In a departure from my set posting schedule, today, rather than a Main Project post, I’ve decided to post a Philological Concerns essay. The reason for the order switch is that I believe this essay on ancient philology will be crucial towards real engagement with this week’s Main Project topic.

There are roughly 15,000 languages in the world counting both active and dead languages. All of these languages can be categorized into fourteen language families which are characterized by their roots. For instance, Cantonese, Mandarin and Tibetan (and others) are languages which grew out of the Proto-Sino-Tibetan roots.

Modern English (~1800-Present), for instance, is derived from Early Modern English (~1500-1800 AD) which in turn is derived from Middle English (~1100-1500 AD) which in turn is derived from Old English (~450-1100 AD). The Old English is derived from West Germanic (~200-700 AD) which is derived from Proto-Germanic (~500-200 AD) which is rooted in the ancient Proto-Indo-European (PIE) roots dating as far back as 5000 BC.

A not nearly exhaustive list of other languages that come from the PIE roots are German, French, Italian, Russian, Hindi, Bengali, Persian, Greek, Gaelic, Albanian, Armenian, Latin, Sanskrit, Hittite, Tocharian, Gothic and Old Prussian.

But PIE roots are far from the oldest of the fourteen root languages. The oldest of these origin root family languages is Afroasiatic which dates back to roughly 15,000 BC at the end of the Last Ice Age. From these Afroasiatic roots we get languages like Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Eblaite, Arabic, Egyptian, Levantine, Hebrew (Modern and Biblical), Aramaic, Phoenician, Punic, Amharic, Tigrinya, Tigre, Ge’ez, Mehri, Soqotri and other South Arabian Languages.

What I want to point out as important here is that the Koine Greek which the New Testament is written in and the Biblical Hebrew which the Old Testament is written in are not merely differently languages — they grow out of entirely different proto-linguistic roots. So while you might see similarities in German, English, Greek, Latin and French owing to their common PIE roots, there is no linguistic overlap with the Biblical Hebrew which is born of a whole separate language tree.

Between the Afroasiatic rooted languages and the Proto-Indo-European rooted languages there is almost no overlap and

what small commonalities do exist, linguists agree that they are owing to universal linguistic tendencies. Academics generally agree there is no shared origin overlap.

So here is where it gets fun. In both the Ancient Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Ancient Greek of the New Testament, two languages which share nothing in the way of genealogical heritage, the word for “breath” is the same as the word for “spirit” or “soul.”

If you are not one hundred percent sure, yes…that is absolutely astonishing and might be one of the coolest linguistic anomalies known to man. So let’s delve into these words and then come back to why this is important as we get into Genesis 2.

In the Biblical Hebrew, the word ruach (Heb רוּחַ)  means “breath,” wind,” and “air” as well as “spirit,” “soul” and “divine presence.” In the Bible we see it used physically (Gen 2:7) as an actual exaltation of breath as well as metaphorically (Gen: 1:2) as the “spirit of god,” ruach Elohim, and in an emotional sense such as spirit as in a ‘broken spirit” (Psalms 51:17). The word ruach is used as spirit or soul as distinct from the body.

The Afroasiatic root from which ruach stems is the Proto-Semitic r-w-h which is connected to wind and you can see the same root used in the Akkadian word rūḫu meaning spirit or soul.

From the Biblical Hebrew, we turn our attention to the Ancient Greek.

The word for both breath and soul in Ancient Greek is pneuma (Gr. πνεῦμα) from the root pneu- which means to blow on something. Peter Manchester was fond of saying the root meant the gentle blowing one would do to cool soup in a spoon. I can’t back this up but never knew Peter to be wrong in matters of Greek roots. The word pneuma means “breath,” “wind,” spirit,” “soul,” and “life force.” In modern English we can see this as the root of pneumatic and pneumonia, but also psyche has the same root which extends out to English word psychology.

In the Homeric Greek (e.g., Illiad), pneuma refers both to the physical act of exhalation as well as the vital force which sustains life. In the Attic Greek dialect used by Athenian Philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, pneuma denotes a spiritual animating principle — the divine breath or the cosmic soul. In the New Testament’s Koine Greek dialect, pneuma is frequently used to mean “spirit” as in Pneuma Hagion (“Holy Spirit”).

The Proto-Indo-European root that pneuma comes from (in all its various Greek dialects), is penu- which means “to breathe” or bhes- meaning “to blow.” These same roots are behind the Sanskrit word bhāsa which means breath and the Latin word spīrāre which means both “to breathe” and “spirit” and is the root of our “respiration” and “inspiration” as inspiration, etymologically, would be to have the spirit blown into you.

There are two major questions I have stemming from this, one of which I will venture to answer today. The first question is whether or not the other twelve linguistic root languages also have a word which has the dual meaning of breath and spirit. I will, at some point in the near future, take the time to research this and will make a post referring back to this one when I have an answer and, depending on what that answer is, what I think it might mean. But that is a long piece of research for another day.

The question I have now and which is pertinent for this week’s forthcoming Main Project post is: How does it come to be that two ancient porto-linguistic trees find roots such that the word “breath” and the word “spirt” are the same and that the root evolves into those meanings being shared in multiple languages with no common overlap over a vast period of time?

Not only is there no academic consensus on this, but my research through scholarly journals shows there really isn’t any discussion. It is merely acknowledged and left alone.

The reason for the overlap, I believe, is to be found when one plumbs the depths of Genesis 2:7 which will be the topic of this week’s Main Project post.

In the last year alone there have been more than a thousand books and scholarly articles in over a dozen academic fields published on the origin of consciousness. How it is that human beings display self-consciousness and what we should make of it is a topic which sits at the center of the philosophical, scientific and theological endeavors for all of recorded history and very likely long before. As long as man has been aware of his own limitations in time and has had the ability to think self-referentially he has been asking how it happened and what it means to do so. The greatest minds in the history of mankind have spent lifetimes working on this question and we have very little, even now, in the way of answers.

I believe that ancient people saw, correctly, a tight connection between breathing and self-consciousness. On the positive side of this theory it is borne out in the linguistics. Further, the idea that birth and death are the beginning and cessation of both breathing and thought seems a fairly obvious and logical conclusion. Of course, against this idea is the fact that non self-conscious animals also breathe.

I believe that I will be able to show that not only is the former conclusion borne out in the Genesis account of creation but the later objection is handily dealt with. For that we will need to get to our next Main Project article. However, for now we should be content with the connection of these two concepts in non overlapping linguistic traditions and linking of breath and spirit and the particular brand of life that is unique to mankind.

What I really want to hammer home is that our ancient ancestors, much like our contemporaries, were very much focused on what is going on with human consciousness. Their focus on this question is so complete that in two separate linguistic traditions, traditions which would converge, through Rome, in the New Testament, that the answer is built directly into the even more ancient root linguistics of their languages which then influenced languages which would influence languages which would influence the modern languages we now speak.

The search for clues as to how it is we have come to be conscious and just what, if anything, that means begins deep in the very foundation of language itself and is at the very cornerstone of the biblical library. In many ways we can say that the Bible is, in effect, a massive and sprawling discussion on the origin of consciousness, what that means for us and what we ought to do about it.