Gen. 1:2

I promised a piece on my work with Genesis, and so here is a summary of the issue and my conclusion. Keep in mind that this is a single page summary of an issue that I barely covered in ten.

Genesis 1:1-2 “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters”. (ESV)

There are many who think that the noun ruah is the first mention of the Holy Spirit in scripture. Indeed, the vast majority of biblical translations reflect this, interpreting ruah as “Spirit”. Recently however, there is a growing trend in biblical interpretation to translate ruah instead as “wind,” perhaps reflecting a hermeneutic that is more aware of the culture and context of the Genesis narrative.

While this issue is certainly not a hill that needs to be battled over, it should be clearly understood and carefully thought through because of its importance to the development of the Holy Spirit in scripture. Theologically speaking, the interpretation of ruah will not change our basic views of Pneumatology in that it will not bring into question the nature or existence of the third person of the trinity. It will however reveal the tendencies of our hermeneutic and our ideas of progressive revelation.

The interpretive problem is straightforward enough; ruah is taken to mean “spirit,” “breath,” and “wind” throughout the scriptures. The difficulty lies in deciding which meaning is meant in the original narrative after examining the literary, historical, and cultural context, and evaluating the semantic structure of the passage.

I submit that the author never intended ruah to be translated as an absolute “either/or” but instead purposefully utilized a word that would encompass a “both/and.” In the Hebrew mind, the idea of a “divine wind” carried with it implications of “the spirit of God,” though not necessarily referring to the Holy Spirit. Here it should be acknowledged that the use of the word ruah does not imply both specific meanings simultaneously, but instead is used as a broad term encompassing the whole range of meaning from wind to spirit. This is a common literary construction in Hebrew as can be seen by the use of the word neser to represent both the eagle and the vulture (or in English as can be pointed out that “panther” may refer to any number of large feline carnivores such as the black leopard, puma, cougar, or jaguar), and one that allows the author to use ruah intentionally as an ambiguous term, knowing that the Israelite mind would see, understand, and even assume a close relationship of the ideas.