Genesis 1.2 has “a wind from God sweeping over the face of the waters,” while in 2.7 the “Lord God [….] breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” Does the ruaḥ in the first verse have anything to do with the nishmat ḥayyim (breath of life) in the second? Are divine wind and breath related? Can one build an ontology or a theology on these reeds? Of course!

The root for neshamah is the verb nasham which means to pant, puff, breathe. Neshamah means 1) movement of air 2) breath, breathing of life as in nishmat ḥayyim, breathing of god, 3) living being. When used as metaphor, it seems narrower or more practically focused on human life, characterized of course by its breathing, as much as by movement or the flow of blood.

The broader metaphor is that of breeze and wind, ruaḥ. The root verb for ruaḥ (a noun that is usually feminine but not always) is almost certainly the notion of spaciousnes, extension, spread, relief, relaxation. Ruaḥ means 1) breeze and wind (even storm) 2) breath and spirit (our word spirit is embedded in respiration) 3) also closely related to meaning 2 above, are further meanings of sense, mind, frame of mind.

The terms are not interchangeable. The second one is the more frequent one in the Hebrew Bible, by far (387 times acc. to my Koehler-Baumgartner, recent edition).

The way to allow the ontological or theological hares to show themselves is to refrain from rushing after them and instead start examining patiently the materiality of wind and breath. Poetry—perhaps in all languages—sees wind and breathing as two intimately connected dimensions. The root of these two mixed metaphors is to be sought in the characteristics of the phenomena:

• the invisibility of wind (of breeze, or even of breath except in the winter), our (usual) ignorance as to its origins (four corners of the world), and so its unpredictability, suppleness, softness, carrying of needed rain-bearing clouds, but also its destructive power (storms), and most of all its universal quality of being ceaselessly all around us (trees’ foliage almost never at rest and birds using air portents). I find it uplifting to examine this kind of metaphor with Bachelard in Air and dreams: an essay on the imagination of movement. In brief: wind is incarnate movement of air at every moment of life around us. Everything in nature moves—plants, animals, etc.—but stops occasionally, goes to sleep, or proceeds so slowly we don’t perceive or feel it. Air never or rarely goes still.
• the extraordinary nature of animal and human breathing, so natural to us that we almost never stop to consider it except at critical moments (birth, death, and illness) or in thoughtful exercises, religious or not. Six or seven minutes (I may be wrong on the length of time) without breathing, that is, without this movement of invisible air, without this participation in the movement outside I mentioned above, and one would become immobile. We think of food, drink, sleep—which we can do without for appreciable amounts of time—but air? It can be communicated to others, it is scented, its rhythm and pressure can communicate feelings, and its articulation and compression provide the basic material of spoken languages.

The materialities of wind and breath explain their ubiquity and power in poetry. That said, it becomes difficult to extract an essence from them, or try to add to them by metaphorizing them as divine: what do they surreptitiously carry or bear that is not already fully in themselves? Yet, let their depths be turned into divine attributes as in the Hebrew Bible and become the topic of ontological inquiries. Let the regret that metaphors build in us bring us back to the depth and width of things.