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  • From: Bearpecs AT aol.com
  • To: b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re: Gen 1:2
  • Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2001 01:19:15 EDT

In a message dated 8/22/01 5:09:42 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
tmcos AT hotmail.com writes:
 I was just thinking about Gen 1:2


From "People Today and the Jewish Bible:  From a Lecture Series"
Martin Buber (November 1926)
in:
_Scripture and Translation_
by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig
translated by Lawrence Rosenwald with Everett Fox
Indian University Press, 1994

pp. 15-16

What, however, does ruah mean?  Opinion has been divided from the beginning
betyween "wind" -- whether a wind from G-d or a wind called "G-dwind" on the
basis of its force -- and "spirit" -- whether *the* spirit of G-d or *a*
spirit of G-d.  Luther, keeping the quesiton always in motion, has first
"wind" and then "spirit."  Both interpretations rest on the notion that we
have to choose between them.  But we do not.  The dynamic meaning of ruah,
which alone enables us to comprehend the passage -- a passage, by the way,
which even radical source critics have judged "very old" (Gunkel) and "very
ancient (Procksch) -- is the meaning of a "breathing," a "blowing," a
"surging," a "rushing."  It is as such that early biblical man perceives not
only winds but spirit also -- or rather, what is originally one later divides
itself into a natural and a spiritual meaning.  But here, in its first
appearance, it manifests not the distinction between the two but their
association.  Ruah e-lohim, the breathing, blowing, surging, phenomenon, is
neither natural nor spiritual but both in one;  it is the creative breathing
that brings both nature and spirit into being.  The Bible here thinks not
lexically but elementally, and would have its readers think in its manner,
would have the movement from G-d that precedes all differentiation
undifferentiatedly touch the hearing heart.  Here at the beginning of the
Bible, ruah e-lohim stands as a great, unformulated, latent theological
principle, expressed only by implication:  that G-d is to be assigned neither
to the realm of nature nor to the realm of spirit, that G-d is not nature and
is not spirit either, but that both have their origin in him.  But even
afterwards, where the two meanings of the word appear only in separation, the
Bible again and again -- in the "naive realism" into which all ideas must be
plunged in order to be reborn -- seeks to evoke the orignial dynamic unity,
the single happening from G-d that ferments the heavens into storm and is
blown into the essence of earth

The Bible does this again and again; but its intention is most compellingly
presented in the passage of revelation history in which a spiritual
manifestation and a natural manifestation adjacent to it are strangely welded
together into a single story, namely in Numbers 11.  G-d  "takes of" the ruah
that descends from him to Moses, at Moses' plea -- he cannot, he says, alone
stand up to his rebellious people -- and distributes it to the "elders."  And
when complaints are brought to Moses regarding individuals who, having been
possessed by ruah outside the assemblage of elders, are now behaving
precisely like those possessed by it inside the assemblage, Moses -- who has
just wished for his own death on account of his intolerable people -- rejects
the complaint as follows: "who would give/ that all HIS people were
prophets,/ that HE would give his ruah over them!"  And almost immediately
after, without transition -- without transition because only thus does what
the Bible is saying here become perceptible -- there begins the story of the
punitive granting of the wishes of precisely the same people: "a ruah moved
from HIM/ that drove quails from the sea...."  Shall we then translate "G-d's
ruah"as "G-d's spirit" and "a ruah" as "a wind"?  No; that simply will not
do.  The translation must let us feel how a spiritual divine act and a
natural divine act are related to each other: the necessary renderings are
rather, "his rushing-of-spirit," "a rushing-of-wind."

[end of quotation.  Buber goes on to discuss what Luther, Goethe, and
Holderlin said about spirit, and how ruah is used elsewhere in Bible.  Before
the quoted passage, Buber had discussed in Chapter 1 the verb used with ruah
as the subject.]



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