A Study of the Meaning of "Spirit" in the Bible [Spirit]

We human beings are constantly in the process of creating new words and expressions to communicate with one another. This has always been true of the human race. We have words and phrases for all kinds of things: varieties of birds and animals and plants, shades of color, shapes, sizes, distances, ways of travel, parts of the body, names of cities and countries and rivers and mountains and mountain ranges, and the list goes on and on.

One thing about words and phrases that is very confusing is that the same word or phrase may have one meaning in one context or in one time period or in one culture--but may have a different meaning in another context or in another time period or in another culture. Furthermore, all languages are changing constantly, so that a word which meant one thing 100 years ago may have an entirely different meaning now. The Oxford Dictionary of the English Language is a wonderful source for tracing the changing meanings of words and expressions.

An interesting example of this for Bible students is the word "prevent." This word comes from the Latin verb praevenire, "come/go before." Thus, quite correctly, the King James Version of 1611 translated 1 Thess. 4:15: "we who are alive . . . will by no means 'prevent' those who have fallen asleep," which all readers of the early part of the seventeenth century easily understood to mean: "we who are still alive [when Christ returns] . . . will by no means 'go [to be with Christ in heaven] before' our fellow-Christians who have already died, [but first God will raise from the dead those who have already died, and they together with us will go up to join Christ in his eternal glory]." But in 2006, 1 Thess. 4:15 means: "we who are alive . . . will by no means 'keep' those who have died 'from' ?" At this point, we are stumped! Keep them from doing what? The meaning of the word "prevent" has changed in the last 400 years. So more recent English translations correctly translate this word "precede," that is, "go before": "we who are alive . . . will by no means 'precede' or 'go before' those who have died to meet Christ when he returns.

One word which troubles students of the Bible is the word "spirit." The Hebrew word for "spirit" is "ruach," and the Greek word is "pneuma." In the next several blogs, we will be taking a trip through the Bible in an attempt to learn the various meanings of the words "ruach" and "pneuma." At the very beginning, one thing is very clear: THESE TWO WORDS HAVE DIFFERENT MEANINGS IN DIFFERENT CONTEXTS. So we do our best to stay with the context in each case.

One final introductory observation is important: the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts with which we work do not distinguish between words which begin with capital letters and words which begin with small letters. So, it is ALWAYS the translator's decision which determines whether we translate "Spirit" or "spirit." The problem here will soon become evident when we compare different English translations of the Bible.

John Willis