Breath, Soul, & Spirit (Gen 2:7)

Into and Out of the Garden

⁷ … the breath of life נִשְׁמַ֣ת חַיִּ֑ים

חיים ḥayyim ‘life’ is a quite common word, appearing over 250 times in the Bible. This is the first time we’ve seen it, though we encountered a related form three times in Genesis 1 in the phrase נפשׁ חיה. We will see that phrase again momentarily. The word נְשָׁמָה n’shamah is much less common, appearing just two dozen times, including seven times in the book of Job. It comes from the root נשׁם n-sh-m, the verb that in later Hebrew means “to breathe.” It is found in the Bible only in Isa 42:14, where it seems to be something stronger than gentle breathing.

More fresh air in a moment, but now for something completely different. We’re going to spend a fair amount of today’s post talking about groups of three — one in this portion of the blog, and another after we look at the rest of the verse. First, triliteral roots.

I often show you the “roots” of various Hebrew words. Semitic languages (and, I learned from a Teaching Company course given by John McWhorter, a few American Indian languages from the Pacific Northwest) have groups of consonants, associated in some abstract way with meaning, that can be put into regular patterns to form the actual words one might want to speak. So מלך m-l-k has something to do with royalty and can give us the words king and queen, crown, reign, kingdom, royal and so forth.

Hebrew began to be studied grammatically around a thousand years ago, when Jewish scholars in then-Muslim Spain realized that the grammatical description scholars of Arabic were developing at the time would work for Hebrew too, and quickly adopted the idea of “roots” consisting of 3 consonants as the basis for Hebrew as well.

Meanwhile, Jewish scholars in Christian Europe began thinking about Hebrew grammar as well, but they did not know Arabic. In some word forms, radicals (that is, root letters, from Latin radix ‘root’) may disappear. (You can learn about this in detail from Lesson 10 of my Hebrew course, “How Hebrew Letters Behave.”) So these scholars assumed that roots might consist either of 2 or of 3 radicals. They were wrong!

Or … were they? At least at some stage of the Semitic languages, perhaps long before the development of the Hebrew we find in the Bible, there may have been 2-letter roots. I’m saying that for the following reason: The more Hebrew you learn, the more you recognize roots beginning with the same 2 consonants that seem to be in similar semantic fields. And — back at last to Gen 2:7 — the root נשׁם n-sh-m is part of such a group:

• נשׁם n-sh-m ‘breathe’

• נשׁב n-sh-b ‘blow’ (like wind)

• נשׁף n-sh-p same as the above

And now that I have נשׁף on the page, we are ready for the rest of v. 7 and the word we’ve already seen that has the same 3 radicals as נשׁף.

⁷ … The earthling became a living being וַֽיְהִ֥י הָֽאָדָ֖ם לְנֶ֥פֶשׁ חַיָּֽה׃

If you know your Hebrew — or if you don’t but have been trying to learn, as I hope you have — you already know all the words in this phrase. We have seen every one of them before. We have even seen the phrase נֶ֥פֶשׁ חַיָּֽה nefesh ḥayyah, which I translated in Gen 1:20 as “life.” As we discussed back then, really חיה is an adjective meaning “living,” and that’s how I’ve used it here. It’s a good time to remind you that from a biblical perspective plants are not “alive” in the same way animals are. Animals move themselves around, which plants don’t do. More important from the perspective we must look at now, plants also don’t breathe as animals do.