Thursday, September 18, 2014

Zechariah 12:1 and the Latter-day Saint Doctrine of Preexistence

The burden of the word of the Lord for Israel, saith the Lord, which stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him (Zech 12:1)

In a previous post reviewing Martin Tanner’s debate with James White on deification, I forget to mention one of the exegetical points White attempted to use against LDS anthropology, and that is Zech 12:1. In the view of White, this verse explicitly precludes belief in the personal pre-existence of humans. Kevin Barney offered an exegetically-sound response to another Evangelical Protestant’s appeal to this verse:


The critical question for the meaning of the last line is how we should understand the last Hebrew word of the verse, beqirebbo. Does it modify the verb (i.e., the Lord formed within him the spirit of man), which might be taken to suggest that God actually created the spirit spatially within man’s physical body? If so, this would be most consonant with Christian creationism and would seem inconsistent with a prior existence of that spirit apart from the body. That reading may be possible, but (particularly given the word order) I construe the expression with “the spirit of man” (ruach adam) (the Lord formed the spirit of man, i.e., that which is within him [or in the midst of him; his inward part]). The basic word here is qereb, “inward part, midst,” with the preposition be- “in” and the third person singular masculine pronominal suffix –o, “of him.” To me that word is definitional. The line says that God created the spirit of man, and then identifies or defines the spirit as that which is inside him, that is, his “inward part.” The word does not modify the act of creation; it is simply descriptive of what the spirit is and where it (normally) resides. If the underlying conception here is monistic, then the spirit only resides in the midst of the body; if it is not, then a preexistent existence of the spirit apart from the body is just as plausible as a post mortem one.