Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
Genesis 2:7a
Breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. A different word from the one in chapter one.
Genesis 2:7, in every translation this tool compares.
English has breath, wind, air and gasp, and you would not use them interchangeably. Other languages divide the same territory along different lines, and the lines never match.
Because the word for what God breathes in is not the ordinary word for breath or spirit, and the difference is worth knowing before you build anything on this verse about the human soul.
All versions read breath. The distinction from the other Hebrew word is invisible in every English Bible.
נְשָׁמָה neshamah · H5397
Neshamah, not ruach. Ruach covers wind, breath and spirit and is the word at Genesis 1:2. Neshamah is narrower, the breath of a living creature, and is used of God and of humans and occasionally of animals. The verse is not saying God put His Spirit in Adam; it uses a different noun for that.
English has one word, breath, standing in for both, so the vocabulary change between chapter one and chapter two cannot be seen.
When two Hebrew words are both rendered by one English word, the change from one to the other is a signal you will never see. Look for it wherever a doctrine is being built on a single verse.
No dispute. This is worth flagging because the ruach and neshamah distinction is routinely collapsed in popular teaching about the human constitution.
- neshamah of God: 2 Samuel 22:16; Job 4:9
- neshamah of humans: Genesis 7:22; 1 Kings 17:17
- ruach at Genesis 1:2; 6:17; Ezekiel 37
