The Literal Meaning of Genesis
smote him.® What, therefore, is the meaning of breath except the soul, which because of sin has been smitten and afflicted? What, then, is the sense of J have made every breath except "I have made every soul"?
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Even one who holds that God is the world soul would not logically maintain that the breath of God 1s part of His substance.
6. If, then, we were to say that God is, so to speak, the soul of this corporeal world, and that the world itself is to Him a kind of body of one living being,? we should not truly say that He made the soul of man by His breath, except in so far as we should speak of a material soul made from the surrounding air which, as part of His body, would be subject to Him. But what He would have given'!® by breathing we should have to suppose He did not give from Himself but from the air subject to Him as part of His body, just as the soul produces breath not from itself but from something similarly subject to it, namely, its body.
But since we say not only that the body of the world is subject to God, but that He is above every creature, corporeal and spiritual, we cannot believe that He made the soul by breathing it forth from Himself or from the corporeal elements of the world.
When breathing the soul into Adam, did God create it out of nothing or form it from some previously created spiritual being?
7. What, then, are we to say about the creation of the soul? Did God make it from that which was entirely nonexistent, that is, from nothing, or from something which He had already made in the spiritual order but which was not yet a soul? This 11 is a real problem. <