Soul of Fire: A Theory of Biblical Man

By Ethan Dor-Shav

Our common fate as water, earth, wind, and fire.

In other instances, “spirit” proves to be a transferable, quantifiable commodity, as in the case of Moses: “The Lord… took of the ruah that was upon him, and gave it unto the seventy elders,”⁹¹ or in the case of Elisha pleading of Elijah “Let a double portion of your ruah be upon me.”⁹² These examples indicate a wider conception of one’s ruah as passing on, in part, to people one has closely interacted with. A father and mother, in particular, give children not only of their body’s genes (as biological parents), but also of their spirit (as relational parents). This in turn explains the circling nature of the biblical Wind.

Similarly, we find in the story of Saul that an addition of ruah transforms one’s persona (when changed into charismatic king-material), “the ruah of the Lord will come upon you… and you shall be turned into another man,”⁹³ as does its subsequent removal: “But the ruah of the Lord departed from Saul.”⁹⁴ In ancient Israelite thought an individual is possessed by ruah, not vice versa. Like a social mantle, we assume the air of our ruah during life—rich or poor, husband or wife, meek or brave—but it does not incarnate our inner self.

VI

The final biblical soul-term is neshama—the uniquely human soul. The 25 appearances of neshama in the Bible refer only to people, and the semantic opposite of neshama—shmama—denotes the absence of people.⁹⁵ Why is neshama uniquely human? Because it is our share in Heaven.

Contrary to a common misconception, neshama has no connection to “breath,” and indeed, the Bible contains not a single occurrence of the root nasham in connection to breath. It refers, rather, to a soul of fire, as Proverbs declares, “Man’s neshama is a candle-flame of the Lord.”⁹⁶ The same fire is found in Isaiah: “For the inferno was ordained of old.... The neshama of the Lord, like a river of brimstone, burns inside it.”⁹⁷ Ibn Ezra ridicules those who suggest that the biblical root means “to breathe” and maintains instead that neshama comes from the word shamayim (heaven), which we already established as a fire realm.⁹⁸ Ibn Ezra is in line with the earlier Midrash that explains a double letter in Genesis 2:7, “And the Lord God formed (vayyitzer) man.” The Midrash, asks: “Why two yuds? For there were two creations in one; man was made half of the earth, and half of the heavens.”⁹⁹

In addition to the cosmic fire of neshama’s heavenly origin, “light” is used innumerable times to signify wisdom and truth—as functions of our innate divine capacity.¹⁰⁰ Indeed, in ancient Israelite metaphysics, the fire of supreme divination and the light of Godly knowledge both infuse the fire-nature of heaven. This is, on the deepest level, the “fire” of God’s word: out of the midst of fire God speaks to Moses in the bush, and out of the midst of fire God delivers his commandments at Sinai. According to the Talmud: “The testament God gave Moses is rooted in white fire, engraved from black fire; it is fire, mingled with fire, hewn with fire, given with fire; as it says, ‘From his right—a fire-law to his people.’”¹⁰¹ Likewise, “Behold, I will turn my words in your mouth into fire.”¹⁰² God’s everlasting “word,” from which he created the world, is thus embossed in the brilliant fire-realm—a world untouched by time—as the Psalmist reports: “The heavens tell the magnitude of God... and their words reach to the end of the world,”¹⁰³ and elsewhere, “For ever, O Lord, your word is fixed in Heaven”;¹⁰⁴ fire fixed in fire.

The human neshama is a spark of this fiery heaven embedded in man, and the nature of this component is our own ability to create with words, as the sole possessors of language in the animal kingdom. Indeed, when Onkelus rendered the verse describing the creation of man into Aramaic, he translated nishmat hayim as “a speaking-soul”; not prone to embellishing, he meant this as a literal translation. The common reading of this verse—“God breathed into man’s nostrils a breath of life”—is misleading, since neither breath nor nostrils are involved. Rather, God kindled in man a living, speaking soul.¹⁰⁵

Fittingly, neshama often appears in the context of speech. In the book of Job: “To whom have you articulated words; and whose speaking-soul (neshama) came from you?”;¹⁰⁶ “All the while my speaking-soul (neshama) is in me…. My lips shall not speak wickedness”;¹⁰⁷ “The speaking-soul (neshama) of the Almighty gives them understanding.”¹⁰⁸ In Daniel: “How can my lord’s servant talk with my lord? As for me, straightway there remained no strength in me, nor a speaking-soul (neshama) left in me anymore.”¹⁰⁹ Other verses use the term for God’s power to create with words¹¹⁰ as well as his rebuke,¹¹¹ while the last verse of Psalms calls for all neshama to chant God’s praise.¹¹² With this understanding, we may appreciate Saadia Gaon’s description of man’s eternal essence:

As for the quality of its substance, it is comparable in purity to that of the heavenly spheres. Like the latter, it attains luminosity as a result of the light, which it receives from God, except that its substance becomes, in consequence thereof, even finer than that of the spheres. That is how it came to be endowed with the power of speech.¹¹³

At the deepest level, the core of the word neshama is, I suggest, the root word shem (name), signifying the ability to name (i.e. to categorize) that defines man’s capacity for abstract thought, and Adam’s first act after he was ensouled. In fact, in Arabic, s-m-w serves as the root of the word “heaven” (samaa) and also means “to name.”¹¹⁴ The heavenly speaking-soul is therefore the source of our creative ability, moral responsibility, and control over the world. If ruah captures the “self” that we are allotted by God, then neshama is the identity that we give to ourselves, by utilizing our capacity for thought. As we go through our ephemeral life, this neshama becomes enlightened by our learning of God. It is the nature of fire to illuminate, but just as importantly it is the cosmic nature of fire to rise. Therefore, when we die, our own neshama—the soul of fire—rises up to heaven.

VII

Ultimately man is the crown of creation because only man incorporates each of the four elements in his being. In the Bible, therefore, every human being mirrors God’s cosmos at large. Being a microcosm, “the destruction of any person’s life is tantamount to destroying a whole world and the preservation of a single life is tantamount to preserving a whole world.”¹¹⁵ To come full circle, linking the cosmic dominions and the constitution of man, I will conclude my analysis of the four-element construct with another passage of Ecclesiastes, from the section in which Kohelet concluded his essay. There he forges a direct parallel to the four cosmic elements with which he opened his book, though now focusing on the four corresponding components of man. At the moment of his death, says Kohelet, “Man goes to his eternal home.”¹¹⁶ Kohelet describes this passing as follows:

The silver cord snaps, and the gold-globe is released.

And the pitcher breaks at the fountain, and the wheel is released

from the bor;

And the dust [‘afar] returns to the earth as it was,

And the wind returns to God who had granted it.¹¹⁷

The flesh, the body, is of Earth, to which it returns in burial. The nefesh, being of Water, is released when the water-pitcher, its earthen vessel, is broken, running down the bor to the watery abyss of the underworld. The Wind-spirit is ruah. It has always been of God, and it returns to the collective awareness within God’s treasury. Finally, the neshama of Fire, here called “gulat hazahav” (the “gold-globe”). In antiquity gold stood for fire, its shine signifying the sun.¹¹⁸ Kohelet thus mirrors the sun-globe from his first chapter, and anticipates the prophet Zechariah’s metaphor, where the same term represented God’s highest divine flames that watch over the world with seven eyes. This neshama becomes free of its worldly link, as the silver cord snaps, letting our fiery core rise up to the eternal, divine light.

This is the true, transcendent view of the afterlife in heaven in the Hebrew Bible—an existence within the light of pure, radiant truth, olam ha’emet. As Isaiah says, “the Lord will be unto you an everlasting light.”¹¹⁹ And as Malachi reiterates, “A benedictive sun shall rise for you who fear my name.”¹²⁰ And as Daniel teaches in the only biblical verse about the world to come: “And those who are wise shall shine like the radiance of the firmament; and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.”¹²¹ What are stars if not distant suns; golden globes of fire.

What does it mean to become a star? Ultimately, neshama designates man’s personal potential, his language faculty. Its root word, however, the concept of a name (shem), expresses the realization of potential, and the accomplishment achieved through that capacity. In other words, the neshama is the means by which we create our own name.¹²² This name—the distilled, essential idea of who we are—designates an eternal reality within the fire sphere of heaven.

How can we be sure that, for the Bible, stars are a manifestation of names? Just two verses prior to talking of the eternal stars, Daniel says: “At that time your people shall be delivered, every one whose name shall be found written in the book.”¹²³ Furthermore, this is the lesson of Psalms: “He counts the number of the stars. He calls them all by their names.”¹²⁴ God needs no book in order to remember. Rather, the fiery book of heaven stands for an ideal state of existence. Indeed, this is the same book that, according to Israelite tradition, served as the blueprint for creation. The “revised” book, therefore, where the righteous are themselves inscribed in white fire, engraved from black fire, will serve as the basis for what Isaiah calls “the new heavens and the new earth” in days to come.¹²⁵ This is the apparatus of reincarnation, tehiyat hametim, for, indeed, man will not stand again, “not until the heavens stir and waken from their sleep.”¹²⁶

Far from the superficial meanings of “reputation,” or “prominence,” the name a person achieves is not of this world, nor limited to it. All of the following verses, and many others, misread as shallow allegories, conveyed, all along, the Hebrew Bible’s afterlife for the neshama. Of the righteous it is written: “Unto them will I give in my house and within my walls a hold and a name better than of sons and of daughters: I will give them an everlasting name, which shall not be cut off.”¹²⁷ Of the evil, the reverse: “The memory of the just is blessed: but the name of the wicked shall perish”;¹²⁸ “you shall destroy their name from under heaven.”¹²⁹