The Concept of Soul in Judaism

Prologue

Humans quite naturally see themselves as bifurcated beings, distinguishing between physical attributes – the body – and our expressive selves, represented most obviously in the power of cognition. The idea of this division is a natural outcome of our day-to-day experience of ourselves. Our minds and bodies often seem to operate, and so to exist, independently of each other. Our thoughts, imagination, dreams, longings, and other emotions frequently are experienced separately from our physical body and its activities. On the other side, our body and limbs often seem to engage in rote behaviors without any clear connection to conscious thought. And then there is the question of life itself. We imagine our bodies to be the containers for a life force that comprises more than mere chemical processes. Upon death, the body remains, and it is hard for us to imagine that the life force and cognition that once animated us do not somehow also continue to exist.

This sense of a bifurcation between the physical body and the life force leads in almost every culture and religion to a conception of what we call the soul. To state what perhaps should be obvious, this means that, when we speak of the soul, we are speaking of the reification of an intellectual construction of the self. This being the case, we must always be conscious of the ways in which any particular idea of the soul responds to the distinctive needs and perspectives of the individuals and communities that develop and use that particular conception.

In the following, I illustrate this point by tracking the development of the idea of the soul from the Hebrew Bible and into the rabbinic Judaism that, in the first centuries C.E., reimagined all prior Jewish thought and practice. My point is that, to understand the idea of the soul in Judaism, we must understand the perspectives and experiences of the rabbis who, in the first centuries, created that idea. I argue, this is to say, that the diverse and often conflicting conceptions of the soul that emerge over time in Judaism are explained by the social and political contexts, by the theological and communal needs of the people who in each age developed their own particular idea of the soul. In imagining the soul, the rabbis made choices. The question for us is how those choices responded to their distinctive needs within their particular historical reality. How did the rabbis’ conception of the soul fit within and advance their program for Judaism? To answer this question, we begin by assessing the concept of the soul in the Hebrew Bible, the baseline against which we can then consider what is new in the rabbis’ thinking.

In following this approach, I do not mean to ignore the diverse developments in thinking about the soul that occurred across a range of manifestations of Judaism before rabbinic times: in the intertestamental literatures, in the writings of the Dead Sea Sect, in authors such as Philo, and, contemporaneously with the emergence of rabbinism, in early Christianity. These developments, alongside ideas about the soul found in Hellenistic cultures that were familiar to the rabbis, likely had an impact on rabbinic thinking. But their existence does not explain the choices the rabbis made in their distinctive presentation of the soul. To date, the scholarly preference has been for comparative research on ideas about the soul in the range of early manifestations of Judaism. My focus is more limited: to evaluate how the rabbis’ idea of the soul advanced rabbinic thinking as they made sense of the changed and disrupted world within which they lived. For our purposes, we can profitably move from the Hebrew Bible directly to the rabbinic literature, even as we are conscious of the diverse Jewish and non-Jewish sources on which the rabbis might have drawn.1

1 The Soul in the Hebrew Bible

The Hebrew Bible offers an extremely narrow definition of and almost total lack of knowledge of the soul. This is striking because, within many ancient near-eastern cultures, the soul was known and was broadly associated with traits such as physical appearance, destiny, and power.2 In ancient Israel, by contrast, rather than being seen as an aspect of identity, what later translations render as soul primarily referred to respiration, narrowly signifying the life force. This is reflected in the root meanings of the several Hebrew words that often are translated as soul. Thus we find the words nefesh (“breath”), neshamah (“breathing”), and ruach (literally, “wind”). Having to do primarily with respiration, these terms encompass the Latin words for soul: anima, which is close to the Hebrew concept of ruach; and spiritus, which parallels the Hebrew terms nefesh and neshamah. At the same time, as we shall see, in Scripture, what these words represent hardly goes beyond the words’ most basic implication: people’s respiration, the fact that they are breathing, signifies that they are alive.

The Hebrew Bible connects this life-force to God’s own ruach, that is, the “spirit,” “wind,” or “breath” from God that Gen 1:2 describes as moving over the face of the waters at the time of God’s creation of the world. That same word, ruach, appears 33 times in Scripture, referring to the breath of a person’s mouth or nostrils. Notably though, while the breath that gives Adam, the first man, life explicitly comes from God, it is described using not this word – ruach – but the other terms that Scripture generally associates with respiration. Gen 2:7 states: “Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (nishmat hayyim); and man became a living being (nefesh hayyah).” So the ruach of God that animates creation is not in Scripture the same “breath,” and certainly not the same “soul,” that animates the first man.3

It bears noting that, alongside breath, Scripture connects the life-force to blood, which accounts for the prohibition against eating meat from which all blood has not been drained, as at Gen 9:4, among other similar verses. This association also accounts for the important function of the blood of sacrifices. In sacrifice, the animal’s blood has expiatory power, as Lev 17:11 makes explicit: “For the life-force (nefesh) of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it for you upon the altar to make atonement for yourself/your life-force (nefesh); for it is the blood that makes atonement, by reason of the life-force (nefesh).” The destruction of the animal’s life-force saves from destruction the parallel life-force of the human on behalf of whom the offering is made.

We see here the biblical understanding of living beings as split, comprised of a physical body that is earthly and a life force that at least arguably is divine in origin, having been breathed into the first human by God. Still, we need to be clear that this perception does not represent a biblical idea of what we might define as a soul. In Scripture, the same life-force exists in all living creatures, animals as much as people, and it neither pre-exists birth nor continues to exist after death. Beyond its presence in the body as an animating force, it has no independent existence or power. It is not what we would call a soul.

That this is the case is suggested most strongly by the fact that Scripture also uses the term nefesh simply to designate a person him- or herself. In this usage, the term may stand for the essential substance of the human being, the person’s emotions, passions, appetite and, on occasion, knowledge. The nefesh feels love and longs for another person (Gen 34:3);4 it experiences distress (Gen 42:21);5 and it is the seat of true knowledge, e.g., of God, as at Deut 11:18.6

But even in such usages, this term, though commonly translated soul, may be nothing more than the biblical author’s way of referring to the person him- or herself. This is clear, for instance, at Exod 1:5, which states, “All the offspring of Jacob were seventy nefashot,” that is, seventy people.7 Given this use of the term, it is perhaps not surprising to find that Ps 11:5 can even depict God as having a “nefesh:” “The Lord tests the righteous and the wicked, and his nefesh hates him that loves violence.” The nefesh, that is, is the sum and substance of the being, whether a person or even God. But it is not more than that. It thus should be clear that, despite the common biblical use of the term nefesh, Scripture does not present even a rudimentarily developed concept of the soul in any sense familiar to today’s common definition. All life, as the creation narrative makes clear, originates with God. But the Hebrew Scriptures offer no specific ideas pointing to the existence of individual, independent souls that preexist birth, that exist separate from respiration during life, or that outlive the death of the body.

Explaining why a literature – or the social and religious system that literature represents – lacks any particular...