Keeping now to the, exact terms of the funda- mental and principal passage, Gn 2’, we learn from this, in the form of narrative, that Jahweh at first formed a man [proleptically for ‘a human body’] from clods [not ‘dust ’] of the field, and then breathed into his nostrils breath of life, so that man became a living being. In view of this, there can be no doubt that Gn 27 assumes a dichotomy in man’s personality. As far as concerns his bodily substance, man is earth, and must accord- ingly return at death to the earth (3%). But his breath of life emanates directly from an inbreath- ing of that of God, and ceases at the man’s death, when God calls back this His spirit of life to Himself. We must not, however, think of the ‘return of the spirit to God who gave it’ (He 12") after the manner of the Christian hope of im- mortality, as if it meant a passing of the indivi- dual spirit to be with God, but only as a reabsorp- tion in the creative Divine spirit which pervades the whole Universe. We should even be reminded here of the pantheistic doctrine of the world-soul, were it not that any such thought is excluded by the OT conception of God which lays such em- phasis on His living personality.
* Of the special works on the subject, Beck’s Umriss der biblischen Seeleniehre (Stuttgart, 1843, 8rd ed. 1871) is based. partly on Roos’ Fundamenta Psychologice eax Sacra Scriptura collecta, 1769 [Germ. tr. 1857, under title Grundztige der Seelen- lehre aus der heiligen Schrift]. Worner in his Bibl. Anthro- pologie (Stuttgart, 1887) builds largely upon Beck. Franz Delitzsch’s System der bibl. Psychologie (Leipzig, 1855, 2nd ed. 1861) is not without a certain mixture of theosophy. More im- partial are the accounts of Wendt, Die Begrijfe Fleisch und Geist im biblischen Sprachgebrauch (Gotha, 1878), and West- phal, Chair et esprit (Toulouse, 1885). J. Koberle’s Natur und Geist nach der Auffassung des AT’: eine Untersuchung zur historischen Psychologie (Munich, 1901) is a very thorough and valuable discussion of all questions relating to the conception of the external world and the life of the human soul, the attri- buting of a soul to nature, mythology, and the notion of the spiritual, together with the influence of religion upon all this,
666 RELIGION OF ISRAEL
RELIGION OF ISRAEL
(c) Not only human but also animal life in general depends upon the possession of the Divine breath of life. Passages like Ps 104%! and Job 3414 leave no doubt on this point: Jahweh is a ‘God of the living spirits of all flesh’ (Nu 16” 2715), Accordingly, the question presses itself upon our attention: What, then, is the precise difference which under all circumstances must be assumed to exist between man and beast? It is not in the manner of their origin that the differ- ence lies, at least according to J. While P (Gn 1°08) makes water-animals and birds spring into being at the simple fiat of the Creator, and land- animals proceed from the earth, J (2!) records a forming process exactly as in the case of man (v.7), that is to say, an individual creation of the animals. In the case of the latter, however, he makes no mention of an animating by the in- breathing of the Divine breath of life, and in this alone—even if we must assume here the result of reflexion on this question—the distinction between man and beast may be seen: man received the breath of life immediately from God, and on that account he has a far more direct share in the Divine being and life than the animal, in whose ease nothing more than a general animating (of the whole species) is assumed. By the theory that the man first formed was directly animated by God, expression was given to the perception which—although without a clearly defined philo- sophic terminology—had evidently established itself at an early date, that man alone possesses individuality, and is therefore a being capable of individual communion with God, whereas the animal always represents only an example of its species.—J, however, gives expression in another way to the notion of the inferiority of the animal world to man when (Gn 2) he quite unambigu- ously describes animals as having been created on man’s account and named by him, with the result, however, that there could be found among them none corresponding to man, and thus suitable to be a ‘help’ to him.
(a) From God’s direct animating of the first created human being we are not, however, to infer that the same thing is presupposed for each particular human individual. The OT has been wrongly burdened with this so-called ‘Creationism,’ which supposes God to create a special soul for every newly begotten body, and to unite it about the 40th day with the embryo. On the contrary, the OT from first to last is based upon ‘Tradu- cianism’: he who begets the body implants at the same time the germ of the life or the soul. Other- wise, the view would be impossible by which the OT is unquestionably dominated, that through the process of generation even moral weakness, the inclination to sin, passes as an inheritance from parents to children. This is not ‘original sin’ in the sense in which it is mostly taught in Protestant confessions, namely, as implying the imputing of the guilt of Adam to all his posterity, but original sin in the more general sense, according to which that term is applied to the strong and almost irresistible inclination to sin, which appears to be inseparably bound up with human nature as such, and consequently looks as if it were the result of descent from parents of like disposition. Thusit is intelligible why allusions to this hereditary sinful disposition are introduced for the most part as furnishing a motive for the forgiveness of sin. In view of the fact that ‘the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth’ (Gn 821), God cannot apply the strictest standard of judgment. In addition to Ps 517) (‘ Behold, in guilt was I born, and in sin did my mother conceive me’), the Jocus classicus for this doctrine of the natal quality of sin, we have to take specially into account for the