Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Bearpecs AT aol.com]

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.]