Excerpted From
A Boundless God
By Jack Levison
It is impossible to capture in English translation the drama of the original Hebrew, where the three distinct concepts of breath, wind, and spirit are expressed by a single word: rûaḥ. Ezekiel repeats this term to emphasize that the one and only rûaḥ of God inspires the resurrection of Israel. This restoration mirrors the creation of Adam (rûaḥ as breath), acts as a rush of vitality (rûaḥ as wind), and serves as a promise of fidelity in their homeland (rûaḥ as life-giving breath). The rhythmic repetition of rûaḥ is simultaneously personal, cosmic, and national; to subdivide this word is to lose the power of ambiguity by which Ezekiel piles up connotations to revive Israel’s deadened psyche.
The intimate connection between God’s breath and the wind reached a resplendent climax in the experience of Ezekiel during the ominous decade following the deportation of Judah’s leaders in 597 BCE and the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE. When hope was at its lowest ebb and Israel chanted the threnody, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely” (Ezek. 37:11), Ezekiel envisioned the highest intensification of rûaḥ as the source of national restoration. Communal crisis, rather than affluence, yielded literature of unsurpassed hope in the power of God’s rûaḥ to breathe new life into a defeated community, allowing the Holy Spirit to lead the way.
The multifaceted nature of rûaḥ in the Hebrew Scriptures shatters modern taxonomies, leaving readers to ask whether the term refers to wind, breath, or spirit. In particular, rûaḥ causes tidy dichotomies to splinter and neat categories to fragment. In Israelite antiquity, a wind from the sea carrying quail was considered just as divine as the power that prompted elders to prophesy, demonstrating that the Spirit of God permeates both the physical and the prophetic realms.
Rûaḥ rolling over the tongue of a disconsolate man on an ash heap may evoke as much—or more—wisdom than a surprise onslaught of spirit. In short, familiar distinctions between divine and human, comfortable boundaries between sacred and profane, accustomed borders between spiritual and material, evaporate in the presence of rûaḥ.
The distinction between the personal and political also vanishes.
The Hebrew Scriptures do not allow the Spirit to be sequestered within the secure confines of the individual or the relatively safe space of the church. When it comes to rûaḥ, private yields to public. The profane, rather than the sacred, is the sphere of the Spirit’s influence.
This is apparent right at the start, when the rûaḥ of God hovers over the cosmic abyss (Gen. 1:1–2); when, in the flood, drowning humans and animals alike possess the breath of the spirit of life (6:17; 7:15, 22); when, in the story of Joseph, an Egyptian pharaoh—a foreign ruler whose empire was unparalleled at the time—recognizes the rûaḥ of God in Joseph (41:38). The book of Genesis, which contains our first clues to the world of the spirit, positions the rûaḥ above the abyss, in the throats of both human and animal, and in Joseph, whose wisdom is recognized by an alien ruler. There is nothing in the book of Genesis to suggest that the Spirit is only spiritual, that its sphere of influence lies exclusively within the individual, or that discernment of matters related to the Spirit is ecclesial, belonging solely to a community of faith or a church of some sort. Not a pious but a profane, pagan ruler has the wherewithal to acknowledge the rûaḥ in Joseph.
The Spirit, in short, was not yet tame in the annals of Israelite literature. Absent the creeds, long before Christians annexed philosophy to grasp the nature of the Spirit, Israel told stories of a mysterious presence that prompted remarkable feats in the public sphere. The comfortable constraints of later generations were not yet in place; this is untamed wilderness. Not gardens but forests. Not fields but plains.
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Excerpted from A Boundless God by Jack Levison ©2020. Used by permission of Baker Publishing BakerPublishingGroup.com.