The Origin and Transmission of Human Life. Gen 2:7
Genesis 2:7 is a key verse for understanding the
creation of man and the foundation for understanding many things about the
nature of man, the origin of the soul and the transmission of human life. This
gets into some very important, very technical questions, laying the foundation
for many ethical situations which face people today.
We always have to remember that the Word of God is the final authority in any
area that we study, so we have to be sure to understand what the Scriptures
teach, exegete the Word clearly, and then use the Word to evaluate other areas.
“And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the
ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a
living soul.” Here we see that God forms the human body from the chemicals of
the soil. It is very important to distinguish the fact that there are two acts
of creation in this verse. There is the first act by God [Yahweh Elohim]
where the emphasis is on God as the God of Israel. In Genesis chapter one we
find only the term Elohim, but in Genesis chapter two we
are introduced to Yahweh for the first time, and this always would bring to mind to
the Jews the fact that this is a reference to the covenant God of Israel who is
an ethical God, who is the God who gave not only the ten commandments at Sinai
but He is the God who gives the singular commandment in the garden of Eden.
“ … the LORD God formed man
of the dust of the ground…” This is clear from Scripture. Again and again this
same principle is reiterated. For example, in Isaiah 43:1, “But now thus saith
the LORD that created thee, O Jacob, and he that formed [yatsar]
thee, O Israel.” Yatsar is a word that portrays God as a
potter. It has to do with forming or shaping a physical object, something that
is already created. “ … Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee
by thy name; thou art mine.” So the Jews would identify the creation of Genesis
2:7 with the God who created them as a unique nation. This verb yatsar
is an important verb because, as noted, it portrays God as a potter with clay.
It indicates several things about His creative activity. He is precise,
deliberate, has a predetermined plan as to what the physical body of man should
look like. In fact, God is thinking about the fact that, to anthropomorphize,
as He is working the clay, that this is the body my Son will incarnate Himself
in. This is also the body the Holy Spirit will indwell and make a temple for
the indwelling presence of the Lord Jesus Christ. So He is going to be
designing the human body in such a way that it will allow the second person of
the Trinity, who is infinite and eternal, to become finite and localized in one
body and to express all the nature of deity in this finite body. So that the
physical body itself is best designed to be that instrument through which the
immaterial image of God is expressed.
Too often we so emphasize the soul
that we tend to de-emphasize the body, and that goes back to the old Platonic
heritage that we have that the immaterial is more important than the material.
What this is showing us is that we can’t make that bifurcation or stress it too
much, because if you do that you end up saying the body is insignificant and irrelevant.
The Gnostics and the Docetists pushed that so far
that they said that anything material was inherently evil and that which was
spiritual or immaterial was inherently good. That led them to denying the
physical incarnation of Christ in a body because that would mean God would be
tainted by that which is inherently sinful. We have to maintain each in its
proper perspective, and that the physical body is important.
In this first phrase, “the LORD God formed man
of the dust of the ground,” the dust of the ground indicates the basic
chemicals of the soil, that man is made from this soil, and this is used in
many passages in the Old Testament described as clay. This concept of clay or
earthenware vessels is also carried over into the New Testament. Some of these
passages are Job 4:19, “How much less in them that dwell in houses of clay,
whose foundation is in the dust.” Job 10:9, “Remember, I beseech thee, that
thou hast made me as the clay; and wilt thou bring me into dust again?” Isaiah
45:9, “Woe unto him that striveth with his Maker! Let
the potsherd strive with the potsherds of the earth. Shall the clay say to him
that fashioneth it, What makest thou? or thy work, He hath
no hands?” This is in complete contrast to what evolution teaches. If someone
does introduces God at some point it is the idea that God uses evolution, and
the accommodationists try to develop some sort of
metaphor for meaning here that from the dust of the ground is really just a
figure of speech for saying that man started off in the primordial ooze and
then gradually developed his way up until there was a full human being. But
that has several problems. First of all, dust is used again in this immediate
context at the end of chapter three, verse 19, where we are told that Adam was
dust and to dust he would return. So whatever the process of coming up from the
dust is, it is the same process in reverse. The implication within the text, if
we are going to be consistent, is that the text means that God uses the
physical components of the soil to mould and shape the human body. The literal
meaning is made even more clear when we get down into
the later section where we have the creation of the woman, and there she is
taken literally from the side of the man. This is not something that is just
thrown in there, because what that does technically in a theological sense is
show that the human race is organically connected to the one original human
created. God creates the man; He doesn’t create the male and the female
separately. He creates the male and from the man He creates the woman, so that
every person in the human race is organically connected to Adam. This is why
Jesus Christ can then come and die as a substitute for the entire
race—because He is organically related in His humanity to every other
member of the human race. If you have two distinct origins for the male and the
female then you would not have that kind of organic unity in the human race.
This is one reason that there is no salvation, no savior, for the angels,
because each angel was an individual creation. You don’t have father and mother
angels producing baby angels.
“ … and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life …” This is a very important word
that is used throughout the Old Testament to describe the nature and
characteristic of life. Today we come up with all kinds of definitions. How do
we know someone is alive? When someone goes into a coma, when someone has
debilitating disease and they reach that final stage, how do we measure when
life is no longer there? The description that is used in the Bible for life and
the presence of life is the word neshemah, which is
translated “the breath of life” or “the spark of life.” First, what God does is
create the biological home, the physical, material home for the soul, the
immaterial part of man. When God forms man from the dust of the ground He is
building that earthly tent, that earthenware home, for the immaterial part of
man. The question to be asked: Between the time that God forms the physical
body and the time that God breathes into the body, which is when He would
impart the soul, the immaterial part of man to that human body, if someone was
to walk up in between that process and decapitate the body, is that murder?
What we have at this point is the formation of the body, which is biological
life, and then God breathes into the body soul life, and it isn’t until the two
are united that you have full human life. Some questions we are going to have
to answer: a) Does God continue the same pattern? b) When and how does God
impart the soul? c) How has this been understood by theologians throughout the
ages? d) How can we know when the immaterial soul is really present? That is
the root question. e) What is the importance of the fetus in developing
physical life in the womb? The Bible never minimizes the importance of the
body.
So God breathes the breath of life
into the biological life, the clay, and then man becomes a living being.
Biological life plus soul life then equals full human life. What we see here in
terms of an observation is that breathing seems to be a biblical definition of
the presence of life. Genesis 7:22, “All in whose nostrils was the breath of
life [neshamah], of all that was in the dry land,
died.” Deuteronomy 20:16, “But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth
give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth [neshamah].” Joshua
10:40, “So Joshua smote all the country of the hills, and of the south, and of
the vale, and of the springs, and all their kings: he left none remaining, but
utterly destroyed all that breathed [neshamah], as the LORD God of Israel
commanded.” These are just some representative passages of the definition of
life. One who breathes is alive and one who doesn’t breath is dead.
The second thing that we see is that
breath or neshamah is the basis for life; it is God
breathing a spark of His own life into the biological life of man. Isaiah 2:22,
“Cease ye from man, whose breath [neshamah] is in his
nostrils: for wherein is he to be esteemed?” Once again, man is defined in
terms of neshamah. Isaiah 42:5, “Thus saith God the LORD, he that
created the heavens, and stretched them out; he that spread forth the earth,
and that which cometh out of it; he that giveth
breath [neshamah] unto the people upon it, and spirit to
them that walk therein.” Notice that breath and spirit, in the last part of
this verse, is called synonymous parallelism. Breath and spirit are synonymous.
The Hebrew word for spirit is ruach, which often stands for the
immaterial part of man. It is a generic term; it doesn’t refer to the human
spirit in most places. In some places it refers to the Holy Spirit, as it does
in Genesis 1:2. It is a word that refers to wind or breath and in many cases it
has a generic use for the immaterial part of man. Here we have a statement that
it is the LORD God who gives, and this is a qal stem verb, which means that God
actively gives—it indicates that He is directly responsible for giving
breath to the people, and that is life. Isaiah 57:16, “For I will not contend
for ever, neither will I be always wroth: for the spirit [ruach]
should fail before me, and the souls [breath: neshamah]
which I have made.”
From these passages we make certain crucial observations.
1)
It is clear
that God created the biological life from the chemicals of the soil.
2)
He is the one
who imparted soul life to biological life.
3)
Full human life
is not present until biological life and soul life are united.
4)
Conclusion: The
sign of full human life is the presence of breath, neshamah.
What we see is that at the original
creation God immediately and directly created both the human body and the human
soul. It is immediate and God directly creates both biological life and soul
life. But after that He gives a command to Adam and Isha
that they are to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. So God delegates
the responsibility for generating biological life through the natural process
of procreation. However, as we have seen in Isaiah 42:5, God is directly
providing soul life through neshamah. The question
is: how do we know this? How do we know that God is still directly giving
physical life? One line of argument is that biological life is material and
therefore it is dependent on a physical or material process of generation. That only makes sense. But the soul or spiritual life is
immaterial and cannot be transmitted physically. Therefore soul life or spirit
life is dependent upon God, both for its creation and for transmission.
Ecclesiastes 12:7, “Then shall the dust
return to the earth as it was: and the spirit [ruach]
shall return unto God who gave it.” The dust returns to the earth. The physical
body is generated physically through procreation and the spirit is produced
immaterially because God gives it, and so it returns to God who gave it. God is
the one who gives to each individual soul life. Question: Does God continue
this same pattern of life? By this is meant, does God
have one process for generating the material part of man and another process
for generating and transmitting the immaterial part of man? To understand this
we have to understand that there has been a division in church history. There
are two views. The first is called Traducianism. This
is from the Latin traducerio, which means to transfer. This view
teaches that both the material body and the immaterial soul are transmitted
through physical procreation. This view was first articulated
in the early church by Tertullian. Tertullian is famous for one other
thing, and that is, that he is the one who coined the term trinitos
from which we get our word Trinity. He was a very profound thinker but, like
many of the early church fathers, he had some gaping holes in his theology. One
of the gaping holes was that he was a Montanist,
those who were followers of a man named Montanus who
claimed that he was the incarnation of the Holy Spirit. In other words, the Montanists were the early church form of modern Charismatics. They weren’t necessarily speaking in tongues
but they were certainly emotional and ecstatic and they had some problems. But
Tertullian had another problem and this is more germane to understanding his
position of Traducianism. That is, Tertullian held
the position that the soul was material. He holds to a material transmission of
the soul, but the reason he can do that is because the soul itself is physical
and material. He doesn’t believe in an immaterial soul. So the foundation of Traducianism goes back to a man who did not believe the
soul was immaterial but was material. There have been many others down through
church history that have held to this position. Martin Luther, W.G. T. Schedde. Schedde has an
interesting comment in his Dogmatic Theology that was published in the middle
19th century, and that is that he recognizes that up to his point
the position that he holds, Traducianism, is the
minority position in church history. L. S. Chafer very carefully goes through
the arguments for both Traducianism and creationism
in his Systematic Theology and he comes to the conclusion that the evidence can
go either way, but he falls out slightly on the side of Traducianism.
He really had a difficult time of coming to a conclusion and he lacked any real
certainty or dogmatism on the point.
The second view is creationism. This
is the position that the body is generated through physical generation but the soul is directly created by God in each individual.
Historically, this position has always been that the soul is simultaneously
created and imparted by God at the first breath. Advocates of creationism:
Among Roman Catholics, Jerome who was the translator of the Vulgate [Common]
held to this position. It was the position that was dominant before Tertullian
developed Traducianism. Furthermore, Thomas Aquinas
also held to creationism at birth. He has a statement in which he says it is
heresy to think that a soul can be transmitted through the semen. John Calvin
rejected Traducianism, as did Charles Hodge. So there
have been many different theologians on different sides of this issue.
When does God impart the soul? Some
believe that God creates the soul and imparts it at conception. Another group
says that it is not at conception because, they say, you could have an ovum
fertilized by the sperm and there is development until the cell splits, in the
case of identical twins; but does the soul split? So this second view is that
it is sometime during gestation. Then at the other end there are those who
believe that the soul is simultaneously created and imparted at birth.
Birth. The word “birth” can function
as a noun or a verb. The noun for birth does not exist in Hebrew. What you find
in the Hebrew is a circumlocution or an idiom to express the concept of birth,
and that is the word mibeten. Birth as a noun is usually used
with a preposition. There is no noun for birth in Hebrew, thus when you have to
express the prepositional phrase “from birth,” you use the phrase mibeten.
The mi is
a shortened form of a Hebrew preposition, min, which means from. Beten
is the noun for womb. Mibeten means “from the womb.” Sometimes
there is the phrase bebeten, and the be is the Hebrew preposition
“in”—“in the womb.” There is a crucial difference between in the womb and
from the womb, and this is based on the meaning on the meaning of the
preposition min
which has the idea—especially when it is used for words of action, or
coming or going—of what takes place outside of the womb. If you are
talking about what is going in the womb then you have the preposition be. If you
are going to talk about something that has happened since birth you use the
phrase mibeten. Some verses which use this phraseology: Job 1:21,
“And said, Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return
thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” He is
talking about death: I come with nothing; I go with nothing. He is talking
about coming from the mother’s womb, outside the womb, but notice the
parameters for life here are from the womb and to death. Job 3:11, “Why died I
not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost
when I came out of the belly?” He is saying, Why
didn’t I come forth and then die, because the soul is not present in the womb.
If the soul had been present in the womb he would ask why he didn’t just die in
the womb, but there wasn’t an “I” to die in the womb, there was just physical
life; he recognizes he had to be born before he was fully there.
Psalm 22:9, “But thou art he that
took me out of [from] the womb.” The prepositions EK [e)k] in the Greek and MIN in the Hebrew indicate separation. Psalm 58:3; Isaiah
44:2. The point is that every time you have a starting point
in the Scriptures the writers have to use this term in the Hebrew, mibeten. The
other word that is used for birth as a verb is yalad.
It is used 388 times in the Old Testament and it is used of giving birth.
Genesis 4:1, “And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare [yalad]
Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD.” Yalad
indicates the end of the process. The word “conceived” must be looked at the
same way. For conception there is a verb. To conceive is the verb harah
and it is used 52 times in the Old Testament. In the vast majority of those
there is the same construction as in Genesis 4:1. This is a standard phrase but
it doesn’t tell us anything about whether conception brings soul life, it is
just talking about physical life when the ovum is fertilized and conception
takes place. There is also a noun for conception and you have a verb to
conceive. So you have a verb to conceive and a perfectly good noun that is used
numerous times in the Old Testament for conception. Why is the noun important?
Because if you are going to set up parameters for life and you are going to say
life is from conception to death, you have a perfectly sound and used Hebrew
word for conception but it is never used in that kind of a context. It is only
used in the context of “she conceived and gave birth.” But as we are going to
see, when the Bible talks about the parameters of life it is always from the
womb (from birth) to death. They have a legitimate word for conception. If life
begins at conception, why don’t the inspired writers of Scripture ever use that
terminology. They never, ever do. Job 38:21, “Knowest thou it, because thou wast
then born? or because the number of thy days is
great?” No verse anywhere gives the parameters of life as conception to death.
In the New Testament we have as a
parallel to this we have the phrase, EK
KOILIA [e)k koilia]—KOILIA is the word for womb—“out from the womb.” There
is also the phrase EK GASTROS [e)k
gastroj], and also the
use of the phrase EN GASTROS [e)n gastroj]. EN GASTROS is
talking about the biological life that is in the womb. This phrase is only used
one time but it is clear that is is talking about what
is taking place inside the womb in the development of biological life.