Temporary “Wind” (Gen 6:3)

Adam’s Aftermath

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³ YHWH said, “My wind will not remain in the humans forever.”

 וַיֹּ֣אמֶר יְ׳הוָ֗ה לֹֽא־יָד֨וֹן רוּחִ֤י בָֽאָדָם֙ לְעֹלָ֔ם

In our last episode, the sons of the gods had married the daughters of the humans, apparently without asking God’s permission. YHWH is once again facing the likelihood that humans will be more and more like him. The solution is to make humanity less like him — starting with restrictions on their use of his רוח. I’ve translated that word rûḥi as “my wind.”

Wondering what that means? In all honesty, I am too. My translation strategy, as you know, is to upset the applecart from time to time to make us stop and think. So let’s talk about this word for a moment.

We saw it first very close to the beginning of our journey. When the curtain went up on creation — already, apparently, in progress — what we saw in 1:2 was God’s rûaḥ (a God-wind, I called it) hovering over the water. The next time we saw the word was in 3:8, which showed us YHWH God walking around Xanadu Park ‏לְר֣וּחַ הַיּ֑וֹם l’rûaḥ ha-yom, a phrase that literally means “to the rûaḥ of the day,” which I translated as “when it was time to relax.” NJPS and NRSV think of the word here as meaning “breeze,” giving the wind a more relaxing feel.

You can learn more about the word, and focus in specifically on Gen 1:2, on pp. 23–29 of my book The Bible’s Many Voices, or by listening to Episode 5 of the companion podcast. Now we’ve found just the third occurrence of this word in the Bible and all of a sudden this God-wind is in the human beings. How did that happen?