I’m continuing my way through Henri Blocher’s In the Beginning. Here are two items that caught my eye:
1. In Genesis 1:26, God says, “Let us create man in our image”. Why does God refer to himself in the first person plural? For Trinitarians, this indicates that God is a plural sort of being—which is consistent with the Trinity. But some think that God is talking to himself, the same way that we commune with ourselves. Blocher cites passages in which (according to him) such occurs. In II Samuel 24:24, David says, “Let us fall into the hand of the LORD, for his mercy is great; but let me not fall into human hands” (NRSV). In Song of Songs 1:11, the lover tells the woman ”We will make” ornaments of gold.
I think the second passage is a convincing example of what Blocher is talking about: a person using “we” to mean “I”. As for the first passage—maybe it does this, and maybe not. An “us” passage is juxtaposed with a “me” passage, and both passages convey the same sort of thought (parallelism). That’s an argument in favor of “we” being used for “I”. At the same time, the punishment would affect more people than David, so “us” could mean “us”, not “me”.
2. In Genesis 2:7, God breathes into man the neshamah of life, something that God does not do for the animals (or, at least, the text does not say that God did so). For Blocher, this affirms that man in ancient Hebrew thought has a dual nature of body and soul, contradicting the scholarly trend from 1930-1960 to affirm that man for the ancient Hebrews did not have a body, but was a body.
Blocher cites Proverbs 20:27, which says that the neshamah of man is “the lamp of the LORD, searching every inmost part” (NRSV). For Blocher, this passage indicates that the ancient Hebrews saw the neshamah as something that had the ability to discern—to think, if you will. It was what we call a “soul”.
My problem with Blocher’s argument is that Genesis 7:22 says that all in whose nostrils was the breath (neshamah) of life died in the flood, immediately after the text mentions the death of animals and man. In Deuteronomy 20:16, the word occurs in reference to the conquest. In the areas around Canaan, the Israelites could take the spoil of women, children, and animals. In Canaan, however, they had to destroy all with a neshamah.
I suppose that, technically-speaking, the neshamah in these texts could be referring only to the humans, not the animals. But the animals appear to be juxtaposed with the humans, so I wonder if the texts could be saying that animals too have a breath of life: a neshamah.
And maybe the word itself could have more than one meaning. It’s the breath that animates us, but it’s also a part of us that discerns.