Staff deleted my post. Here we go again.
Since you are presenting yourself as an expert on the interpretation of the OT you should know, but seem not to, know there are more than 200 figures of speech used in the Bible.
Relevance?
If you can, and I can almost guarantee you can't, provide some kind of credible, verifiable, historical etc. evidence to back up your, as yet, unsupported accusations against the Jews and/or Plato. I won't hold my breath.
Unsupported? Really? Across 633 posts I have shown:
(1) There is no biblical/contextual/exegetical evidence for the concept of "magical immaterial spirit". And that evidence is required, because it's an extraordinary claim. In other words there is a huge burden of proof on immaterialists. No evidence is needed for materialism, because it's an ordinary claim, matter is all we know for sure.
(2) There is hard evidence for physical wind/breath, for example 100 undisputed OT places where ruach translates to wind/breath.
(3) The disputed passages should be interpreted in light of the 100 clear passages. Thus the presumption should be wind/breath for all remaining passages unless the context clearly screams "magical immaterial spirit." Which never happens. In fact the opposite is true. In several passages, there is clear contextual evidence for divine Wind/Breath.
(4) Given this evidentiary deficiency, one can only surmise that "magical immaterial spirit" originated not from an examination of contextual evidence but from Platonic philosophy. Professional theologians define "spirit", especially the Holy Spirit, as DDS (Doctrine of Divine Simplicity), which is a clear extrapolation of Plato's philosophy. I have a degree in philosophy, and it is well known that Plato is the first writer in history to explicitly articulate immaterialism. As noted in the Catholic Encyclopedia, the church fathers considered Plato and his followers to have doctrinal authority equal to Scripture and thus looked to Greek philosophy for a technical definition of God. This purely philosophical definition, known as DDS, is beset with approximately 13 points of incoherence. It is pure gibberish.
If "ruach" does not mean spirit, from your "expert" knowledge, which Hebrew word should be translated "spirit?"
In Greek philosophy, the Greek term pneuma took on a meaning of "magical immaterial spirit" in accordance with DDS. There is no BIBLICAL evidence to believe the same of the biblical writers, neither of ruach nor of pneuma.
How many times is "ruach" said to be acting, doing, speaking, leading etc? Does breath or the wind do that?
Yes it does, if the material Breath/Wind in question is the divine Third Person of the Trinity. Example found at
John 3:8.
"The [divine] Wind [Pneuma] blows wherever it
pleases. You hear its sound but know not from whence it came or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the [divine] Wind [Pneuma]" (
John 3:8).
Do you see that word "pleases"? This proves that ordinary wind isn't mentioned in this passage - not even metaphorically. Ordinary wind doesn't blow wherever it pleases to go, it has no say in its final destination, - it rather END UPS wherever the forces of nature happen to drive it. This is the divine Wind/Breath blowing wherever it wants to go, just as it pushed apart the waters of the Red Sea as a blowing Wind/Breath from God's nostrils (Ex 15:8-10).
One more comment on John 3:8. God was well aware of Plato's philosophy when the Gospel of John was written. Thus He was well aware that translators would have to decide, in that verse, between reading it as either:
(A) The Holy Spirit/Ghost
(B) The Holy Wind/Breath
If God WANTED us to read it as Spirit/Ghost, the LAST thing He would do, assuming He is a wise instructor, is make any mention - even metaphorically - of physical wind/breath in that context. Yet that's precisely what He did, and He does this time and again, in multiple passages, two of my favorites being:
"He
breathed on them and said, 'Receive the Holy [
Breath]'" (John 20:22).
"They heard the sound of a mighty rushing
wind...They were all filled with the Holy [
Wind]" (Acts 2).
