On Ruach Elohim
Here's some exegetical work I'm doing on the meaning and translation of rûaḥ Elohim, the Hebrew words translated as "the Spirit of God" in our Bibles. My focus is on Genesis 1:2 in particular (though not exclusively), and I’m using the translation of Genesis by Everett Fox as my starting point.
This work is part of a larger and ongoing exegetical project on Genesis 1 and other creation texts, trying to build the foundation of my creation theology which is the foundation of my gospel project. For a fuller discussion on the Holy Spirit, see my Life in the Spirit.
Introduction
My focus here is on rûaḥ Elohim in Genesis 1:2, but I will be sharing what I’ve done so far with 1:1–3.
You’ll notice that (after thinking long and hard) I’m following Fox in his rendering of 1:1 as a dependent clause. For the best defense and explanation of that reading, see Robert D. Holmstedt’s syntactic analysis in “The Restrictive Syntax of Genesis i 1” where he suggests something like this: “In the initial period that/in which God created the heavens and the earth...” —a rendering very much in line with that of Fox.
Now, this choice doesn’t imply that rendering Genesis 1:1 the traditional way is incorrect. The text does say that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” It just doesn’t seem to say it that way in the Hebrew. It says it more like this: “At the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth…” Which means and implies that “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
Abraham Tal even suggests that “all ancient versions… establish the independent status” of Genesis 1:1 by treating the verb “create” in that verse “in the absolute state, with an adverbial sense.” I'm sure that statement is debatable, but either way, rendering this verse as an independent clause is accurate and appropriate—depending on the aims of the translation, of course. We can also render it closer to how the Hebrew literally has it, which has its own advantages—like revealing the parallelism between Genesis 1:1–3 and 2:4b–7, as can be seen in translations like the NRSV (see below).
You will also notice that I’ve rendered tōhû wābōhû “barren and vacant.” My only issue with it is I wish I had found nouns, as is the case in the Hebrew, rather than adjectives. Victor P. Hamilton, for example, translates it “a dessert and a wasteland.” Fox has “wild and waste” and later revised it to “confusion and chaos” (in his audio recording of Genesis 1 on his personal website).
“Barren and vacant,” is an adaptation of Tsumura’s “unproductive and uninhabited” in his “The Doctrine of Creatio Ex Nihilo and the Translation of tōhû wābōhû.” See that essay by Tsumura for good reasons not to associate tōhû wābōhû with “chaos.” In his article on tōhû wābōhû in NIDOTTE, A. H. Konkel challenges Tsumura’s position. I’m obviously not convinced, except that with all the separating, differentiating and ordering going on in Genesis 1, “chaos” is certainly part of the picture before 1:3. But there are issues with the associations of the term “chaos” in other ancient cosmogonies, and Tsumura as a linguist sees no “chaos” in tōhû wābōhû itself.
Surprisingly, IVP’s New Bible Commentary actually treats Tsumura’s rendering and the traditional “formless and empty” as synonymous: “The earth immediately after creation was formless and empty, i.e. unproductive and uninhabited.” Perhaps, or not so much?
The sense of “unproductive and uninhabited” also fits very nicely with the sense of Genesis 1 as a whole as the account of the beginning of life itself, and of the building of the cosmos as God’s temple-palace: it was barren and vacant at the beginning, and by the end of the chapter it’s full of life, inhabited by God’s fruitful creatures. For the best discussion I’ve found on the cosmos as God’s home, see “Cosmos, Temple, House: Building and Wisdom in Ancient Mesopotamia and Israel” by Raymond C. Van Leeuwen.
See also Genesis 2:4b–7, which parallels 1:1–3 (though you might want to read it on the NRSV, for example, to see the parallel), and notice the state of creation before God’s first creative act: “when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground” (v 5). “Barren and vacant,” it seems to me.
The Meaning of Ruach Elohim
The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew shows that the range of meanings for the Hebrew word רוּחַ (rûaḥ) is thus: 1. wind, 2. breath, 3. spirit. Each, of course, has its own nuances or sub-senses.
“Ruach has a range of meanings, from “wind" to its metaphorical extensions as “breath" and, at a greater distance, "spirit" (which itself has a range of meanings)” (Naomi Seidman).
So the ancient Near Eastern background of the word strongly suggests wind or even breath as the first sense:
This work is part of a larger and ongoing exegetical project on Genesis 1 and other creation texts, trying to build the foundation of my creation theology which is the foundation of my gospel project. For a fuller discussion on the Holy Spirit, see my Life in the Spirit.
Introduction
My focus here is on rûaḥ Elohim in Genesis 1:2, but I will be sharing what I’ve done so far with 1:1–3.
You’ll notice that (after thinking long and hard) I’m following Fox in his rendering of 1:1 as a dependent clause. For the best defense and explanation of that reading, see Robert D. Holmstedt’s syntactic analysis in “The Restrictive Syntax of Genesis i 1” where he suggests something like this: “In the initial period that/in which God created the heavens and the earth...” —a rendering very much in line with that of Fox.
Now, this choice doesn’t imply that rendering Genesis 1:1 the traditional way is incorrect. The text does say that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” It just doesn’t seem to say it that way in the Hebrew. It says it more like this: “At the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth…” Which means and implies that “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
Abraham Tal even suggests that “all ancient versions… establish the independent status” of Genesis 1:1 by treating the verb “create” in that verse “in the absolute state, with an adverbial sense.” I'm sure that statement is debatable, but either way, rendering this verse as an independent clause is accurate and appropriate—depending on the aims of the translation, of course. We can also render it closer to how the Hebrew literally has it, which has its own advantages—like revealing the parallelism between Genesis 1:1–3 and 2:4b–7, as can be seen in translations like the NRSV (see below).
You will also notice that I’ve rendered tōhû wābōhû “barren and vacant.” My only issue with it is I wish I had found nouns, as is the case in the Hebrew, rather than adjectives. Victor P. Hamilton, for example, translates it “a dessert and a wasteland.” Fox has “wild and waste” and later revised it to “confusion and chaos” (in his audio recording of Genesis 1 on his personal website).
“Barren and vacant,” is an adaptation of Tsumura’s “unproductive and uninhabited” in his “The Doctrine of Creatio Ex Nihilo and the Translation of tōhû wābōhû.” See that essay by Tsumura for good reasons not to associate tōhû wābōhû with “chaos.” In his article on tōhû wābōhû in NIDOTTE, A. H. Konkel challenges Tsumura’s position. I’m obviously not convinced, except that with all the separating, differentiating and ordering going on in Genesis 1, “chaos” is certainly part of the picture before 1:3. But there are issues with the associations of the term “chaos” in other ancient cosmogonies, and Tsumura as a linguist sees no “chaos” in tōhû wābōhû itself.
Surprisingly, IVP’s New Bible Commentary actually treats Tsumura’s rendering and the traditional “formless and empty” as synonymous: “The earth immediately after creation was formless and empty, i.e. unproductive and uninhabited.” Perhaps, or not so much?
The sense of “unproductive and uninhabited” also fits very nicely with the sense of Genesis 1 as a whole as the account of the beginning of life itself, and of the building of the cosmos as God’s temple-palace: it was barren and vacant at the beginning, and by the end of the chapter it’s full of life, inhabited by God’s fruitful creatures. For the best discussion I’ve found on the cosmos as God’s home, see “Cosmos, Temple, House: Building and Wisdom in Ancient Mesopotamia and Israel” by Raymond C. Van Leeuwen.
See also Genesis 2:4b–7, which parallels 1:1–3 (though you might want to read it on the NRSV, for example, to see the parallel), and notice the state of creation before God’s first creative act: “when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground” (v 5). “Barren and vacant,” it seems to me.
The Meaning of Ruach Elohim
The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew shows that the range of meanings for the Hebrew word רוּחַ (rûaḥ) is thus: 1. wind, 2. breath, 3. spirit. Each, of course, has its own nuances or sub-senses.
“Ruach has a range of meanings, from “wind" to its metaphorical extensions as “breath" and, at a greater distance, "spirit" (which itself has a range of meanings)” (Naomi Seidman).
So the ancient Near Eastern background of the word strongly suggests wind or even breath as the first sense:
“The Heb. nom. רוּחַ [rûaḥ] occurs 387x in the OT. ‘It is best considered a primitive nom., related to an ayin-vowel root רֻח “to breathe”’ … Similar roots are accounted for in the Ugar. rḥ, Phoen. rḥ, and the Arab. rı̂ḥ, wind, and rûḥ, spirit, which are both derived from rāḥa, to blow; cf. Eth. rōḥa, make a slight wind” (M. V. Van Pelt, W. C. Kaiser, Jr., and D. I. Block, NIDOTTE).
Thus, “one may safely say that the basic concept in rûaḥ is ‘breath’” (Hamilton), so that “the ruah of God is the very breath of God” (William P. Brown).
“The LXX [the Greek translations of the Hebrew Scriptures, used by the apostles in the New Testament] renders this word as πνεῦμα (G4460), wind, spirit, 264x and as ἄνεμος (G449), wind, 49x” (M. V. Van Pelt et al). As for the sense intended in the LXX at Genesis 1:2, Robert Hiebert would suggest “the sense of ‘wind’ rather than that of ‘spirit.’”
We Christians have been rendering rûaḥ elohim in Genesis 1:2 as “the Spirit of God,” and this is appropriate given what the rest of the Scriptures tell us about what this “wind” in Genesis 1:2 might be. Even Everett Fox, a Jewish scholar, can render it “spirit.” It is clear by the context that this isn’t just any wind: “certainly the ruah elohim is not the third person of the Christian Trinity. But neither is it a wind in the meteorological sense” (Michael DeRoche).
One solution is to go with wind, as does the NRSV, but then to nuance it, immediately, with “the breath of God...” so that “we rûaḥ elohim...” is rendered “and a wind, the breath of God...” This way we capture more of what the original audience would have heard, and I think it still carries the rhythmic cadences of the Hebrew, as represented in Fox’s rendering.
NRSV: while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters
Fox: rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters
Potential rendering: while a wind, the breath of God, swept over the face of the waters
So far, so good. The only issue is that the Hebrew verb rendered “swept” in the NRSV— מְרַחֶ֖פֶת (merachefet)—doesn’t actually mean to sweep but more like “to hover.” The only other instance of this word in the Old Testament in this particular form is in Isaiah 32:11, where God describes his relationship to Israel as that of an eagle “hovering” over its young.
So why would the NRSV and others render it “swept”? Hamilton explains that how we understand and render merachefet in Genesis 1:2 depends on how we understand and render rûaḥ in that text, because the former obviously has to correspond to the latter. So that “translations like ‘swept,’ ‘sweeping,’ ‘swirled’ are dictated by the choice of ‘wind’ for rûaḥ.” Well, that explains that. But we can also reason the other way around, letting the semantic possibilities of merachefet put parameters around our understanding and rendering of rûaḥ. Hamilton is helpful here too:
"The only other use is in Deut. 32:11 (in the Piel stem as in Gen. 1:2): ‘like an eagle that stirs up [ʿûr] its nest, that hovers [rāḥap] over its young.’ Scholars have traditionally supposed that this verse concerns how a bird teaches its young to fly, specifically how the parent provokes the young to flight. The parent bird drives the young eagle from the perch by intimidation, by rushing at the young while vigorously flapping its wings. ... But this interpretation may be called into question by the possibility that ʿûr in Deut. 32:11 does not mean ‘to stir up,’ but rather ‘to watch over, to protect,’ as in Ugar. ǵyr.”
So it looks like the intended sense of merachefet in Genesis 1:2 is most likely “hovering,” as in “watching over” or even “brooding” (from Ugaritic usage). If this is the case, then even if the first sense of rûaḥ in classical Hebrew is “wind” or “breath,” the fact that this rûaḥ “hovered” calls for qualification in our rendering; and as such, only the “spirit” sense of rûaḥ works.
But here’s the thing. This exegetical conundrum was no issue for the church at the beginning, because the Greek language also has a word that “binds together” the three senses of wind, breath and spirit: pneuma.
“Translation into Greek was not difficult because pneuma has a similar range. The Latin spiritus, however, begins to foreground the abstract and immaterial secondary meanings of the Hebrew term, leaving behind the more tangible significations of wind and breath; this process was institutionalized and reinforced by Christian theological developments that - privileging abstraction and "spirituality" over more concrete imagery - ultimately left behind the meanings of wind or breath altogether” (Seidman).
Translating Ruach Elohim
So what can we do in our rendering to recover and preserve the original nuances in the phrase rûaḥ Elohim in Gen 1:2? Here’s what I’m doing:
At the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth,
the earth—still barren and vacant,
darkness on the face of a primeval ocean,
and a wind, the breath and spirit of God, hovering on the face of the waters--
God said: Let there be light. And there was light.
Biblical Precedent and Echoes
Here’s some biblical precedent for the association of the Spirit of God with his wind and his breath.
Genesis 2
First of all, if we compare Genesis 1:1–3 with 2:4b–7, which is an intentional parallel in the Hebrew and has a similar structure, the breath on 2:7 (Heb. neshamah) would suggest the sense of breath as also intended in the rûaḥ of 1:2. Not exclusively so, because a breath doesn’t “hover,” but the suggestion is certainly there and on the surface of the text.
1:1 At the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth
2:4b At the time of YHWH, God’s making of earth and heaven
1:2 the earth—still barren and vacant...
2:5 no bush of the field was yet on earth / and there was no human...
1:2b darkness on the face of a primeval ocean
2:6 but a surge would well up and water all the face of the soil
1:2c and a rûaḥ, the breath and spirit of God, hovering on the face of the waters...
2:7 and YHWH, God, formed / blew into his nostrils the breath of life...
1:3 And God said: Let there be light. And there was light.
2:7 and YHWH, God, formed / blew... and the human became a living being.
It’s obviously not a perfect correspondence, but there’s enough correspondence to make them parallel texts, one intentionally echoing the other, not only structurally but also thematically.
Now hear the echoes in the Scriptures (NRSV):
● You blew with your wind [rûaḥ], the sea covered them; they sank like lead in the mighty waters (Exod 15:10).
● As long as my breath [neshamah] is in me and the spirit [rûaḥ] of God is in my nostrils (Job 27:3).
● The spirit [rûaḥ] of God has made me, and the breath [neshamah] of the Almighty gives me life (Job 33:4).
● When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath [rûaḥ], they die and return to their dust.
When you send forth your spirit [rûaḥ], they are created; and you renew the face of the ground. (Ps 104:29–30)
● Then the channels of the sea were seen, and the foundations of the world were laid bare at your rebuke, O LORD, at the blast of the breath [rûaḥ] of your nostrils (Ps 18:15).
● Thus says God, the LORD, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath [neshamah] to the people upon it and spirit [rûaḥ] to those who walk in it... (Isa 42:5).
And it goes on in the New Testament:
● And the Holy Spirit [hagios pneuma—the Greek pneuma translates rûaḥ] descended upon him in bodily form like a dove [which hovers]. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased” (Luke 3:22).
● The wind [pneuma] blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit [also pneuma, but now clearly the capital “S” Spirit of God!] (John 3:8).
● When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit” [hagios pneuma] (John 20:22).
At the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth,
the earth—still barren and vacant,
darkness on the face of a primeval ocean,
and a wind, the breath and spirit of God, hovering on the face of the waters--
God said: Let there be light. And there was light.
(Gen 1:1–3)
the earth—still barren and vacant,
darkness on the face of a primeval ocean,
and a wind, the breath and spirit of God, hovering on the face of the waters--
God said: Let there be light. And there was light.
(Gen 1:1–3)
Notes and Sources
Essay Version
Essay Version
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Image by Alex Berger
