JCR: Yes. Dr Davila once told me his view of this 'wind of God'. He believed the expression to be a hebrew idiom which basically meant 'massive wind' or 'strong wind' or something like that. Unlike his circular reasoning for the meaning of barah he actually had quite a convincing arguement for this idiom. He drew from other examples of similar constructs in other parts of the tanak where the meaning is clearly an idiom for great size. I can't remember exactly where in the tanak it is but he gave the example of a place where it talks about 'mountains of god' where the meaning is something like 'great mountains' or 'big mountains' or something like that.HH: But even where )LHYM modifying a word like "mountain" could suggest something like "big mountain" by connotation, the word "God" does not lose its meaning. It is the bigness of God that implies the mountains are big. However, the logic for "big wind" in Gen 1:2 seems extremely weak. This same phrase RWX )LHYM has the Holy Spirit as its referent almost always the OT (I will give the other 15 occurrences at the bottom of my e-mail). Furthermore, God's Spirit is associated with acts of creation and new life elsewhere in the Bible, and Genesis 1 is describing the creation of the world. It is wholly appropriate that the Spirit of God would be present:
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