“My Spirit Shall Not
Remain in Man Forever”: רוח Versus בשׂר
What does it mean when YHWH
asserts that his spirit118 will not remain in man forever? The history of
exegesis gives evidence of several approaches to interpret the word רוח in Gen
6:3.119 According to some interpreters, YHWH’s spirit is his ethical principle
judging the corrupt nature of mankind. This exegesis pertains to the
translation of ידון as ‘to judge’. Another explanation is that ‘my spirit’
refers to God’s emotions which are stirred up by human sin. Others consider רוח
to refer to the divine substance that YHWH and the angels share. This exegesis
espouses the view that divine and human substances have become mingled by the
illicit sexual unions mentioned in Gen 6:2 which is something God does not
tolerate. According to Tsukimoto, the intention of Gen 6:3 may be to criticize
the institution of kingship in Israel, thereby intimating that God will
withdraw his spirit from the leader of his people whenever that leader abuses
his being anointed with God’s spirit for the satisfaction of personal desires.
Most common is the view that
רוח means the divine breath of life bequeathed to mankind at creation, as is
described in Gen 2:7. Support for this view can be found in several passages:
Genesis 2:7 describes how God breathed life into man. Although Hebrew here uses
נשׁמת חיים) נשׁמה ) and not רוח , the concept is the same, as is shown by
passages in which both words are used in parallel.126 This notion of God’s
life-giving spirit as sustaining human and animal life returns throughout the
Old Testament. It can also be found in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
A further support for better
understanding this is provided in Isa 31:3. Similar to Gen 6:3, Isa 31:3
stresses the contrast between what is the distinctive element for humans,
namely בשׂר , and for God, namely רוח . In unmistakable parallelism, the
message of the fundamental distinction between the divine and the human is
expressed by Isa 31:3 in a situation in which Israel blindly believes in
nothing but the physical strength of horses: “The Egyptians are men אדם) ) and
not God ( אל ), their horses are flesh ( בשׂר ) and not spirit ( .”(רוח The
word בשׂר , here, refers to the transitoriness of life, just as the word רוח
indicates endless divine life-power. The word רוח in the Old Testament is
therefore different from the word ‘spirit’ in Western philosophical tradition
which considers spirit to be the opposite of matter. In the Old Testament, רוח
can refer to powerful phenomena which transcend the distinction of mind versus
matter.130 The vulnerability of mankind in contrast with God is also stressed
in Ps 56:5, 12: “In God I trust … what can ‘flesh’ (vs. 5) / ‘man’ (vs. 12) do
to me?” A similar statement is found in Ps 78:39: “He remembered that they are
‘flesh’, a ‘wind’ that passes and does not return” and in Job 10:4: “Do you
(God) have eyes of flesh? Do you see as man sees?
Gen 6:3 the word בשׂר might
be just another word to denote mankind, especially mankind in its frailty and
transiency. Eslinger suggests that the word בשׂר in Gen 6:3 may refer to moral
depravity. Yet, the texts analyzed above, in which רוח and בשׂר are contrasted,
point more towards a connotation of transiency and weakness, especially in Isa
31:3 where the Egyptian horses (ancient war machines!) are rendered as vincible
in their being only mortal beings. (Jaap Doedens, The Sons of God in Genesis
6:1-4: Analysis and History of Exegesis [Oudtestamentische Studiën 76;
Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2019], 38-40, emphasis in bold added)
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