Do Animals and Humans have the same breath? A very good friend put this together and I hope it would bless someone. The hebrew words nephesh, ruach and the greek words Psuche and pneuma all have more than one meaning. The closest meaning maintained in the english texts is gotten from the context of the passages in which these words find themselves. so, they apply to humans and animals in a way that is same in a sense, yet different in their various contexts. Man is made in Gods image. Animals are not made in Gods image. There is something in man that makes him distinctly Gods image. That is why the story took time to detail how man was made. Geneses does not detail in the same way how the animals and fishes and birds were created. That in itself is significant fact. Proverbs 20:27 The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord.... It does not say the spirit of animals. The reason is because animals are not in the image of God. The nephesh and ruach, psuchee and pneuma can be applied to animals, but they do not convey enough weight and breadth of meaning that will enable us(or the translators themselves) to equate them to soul and spirit, as they have rightly uniquely applied them to humans. There is no divine contact/interaction between God and animal life, hence animals cannot be said to have spirits in the same way humans have. Animals do not have a Conscience Intuition, or Communion, Which are unmistakeable components of the human spirit. Also animals dont possess the distinct characteristics of the Will (choice, determination, and decision), Emotions (desires, pleasure and pain, love, hate, happiness) and Mind (memory, imagination, cognition). These three make up the human soul, and the animals do not even come close to a tiny fraction of exercising the above, hence they cannot be credited to have a soul So even though the same terms may be used for humans and animals in various biblical texts, their meanings are not interchangeable, and the contexts do reveal exactly that. So, the english words soul and spirit are more accurately applied to human life. THEREFORE, when we see a passage like the Ecclesiastes, we must not run away with a literal interpretation of ruach as applicable to humans as equally applicable to animals. That will be blind literalism, and the letters do kill. Ovo Okpubuluku
Posted on: Wed, 02 Apr 2014 23:29:05 +0000