The Wind (Spirit)
Blows Where It Chooses:
Reflection on the
Origin of Religion
Joe E. Barnhart
“The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the
sound of it, but you do not know where it comes or where it goes” (Jo=
hn
3:8).
Various theories have emerged =
to
account for the dawn of religion just as various definitions of
“religion” have appeared. Rather than offer a sweeping theory or
definition, I explore a central element of the early stages of religion. I =
take
a cue from the Greek noun pneuma, translated as wind,
air, breath, spirit, ghost, or spirit life. Similarly, the Hebrew=
noun ruach means spirit, breath, air, breeze,
or wind. (1) First, wind is
invisible, yet effectual and sometimes powerful. It can howl like a visible=
animal,
make the tall grass sway, fell a tree, or stir up clouds of dust. A major
ingredient of storms, wind often accompanies rain or delivers it. In short,
though invisible, wind can impact the sensory realm.
In the first chapter of Job, a
messenger comes to Job to inform him that the Sabaeans=
have swooped down to carry off his animals and slaughter his herdsmen. Anot=
her
messenger arrives to tell him of the troubles inflicted by three bands of <=
span
class=3DSpellE>Caldeans. A third messenger appears to report that a whirlwind has swept across the de=
sert
to demolish his eldest son’s house and killed all of Job’s
offspring. Ironically, near the end of the Book of Job, the god Yahweh answ=
ers
Job from a whirlwind to inform =
him
basically that he has little understanding of how things come into being an=
d to
imply that such an ignorant creature should not complain about his losses
(38:1).Yahweh’s argument comes close to saying Supreme might make rig=
ht.
Just before Yahweh’s spe=
ech,
Job’s visitor Elihu informs him that the =
breath
of the god El formed ice and spoke to the rainstorms, saying “Be
violent,” whereupon at his voice the rains poured down unchecked. In =
some
cases, El and the elements in Job are not clearly separated. “Just
listen to the thunder of his voice, the rumbling of his utterance”
(37:2). He roars and thunders “with majestic voice” (37:=
4).
When the Hebrew’s god co=
ntrols
the wind, it often seems to be his self-control. At other times, his powerf=
ul
breath is words turning into sky-fire, rain, and storm in a kind of self-pr=
ojection.
This may be compared to Thales’ theory of
primordial water assuming various forms. For Anaximand=
er,
the primordial source was Apeiron, the boundles=
s. Anaximenes of the sixth century
(2) Second, controlling the wi=
nd is
not conspicuously easy, although wind can sometimes be put to use. Anyone
thought to have influence on the wind, therefore, tends to enjoy influence
within the community. Shamans, including such mutants as prophets and pries=
ts,
have sometimes professed the ability to control at least indirectly the wind
and its accompanying elements (e.g., Elijah 1 Ki.
17:1, 13-24;
The crafty shaman Samuel appar=
ently
encouraged the Israelites to connect his prayers and sacrifices with the wi=
nd
and weather. When the Philistines approached to attack, the Israelites begg=
ed Samuel,
“Do not stop crying out to Yahweh our Elohim so
that he may rescue us from the hand of the Philistines” (1 Sam. 7:8).
Samuel in his priestly function solicited and elicited Yahweh’s thund=
er
against the Philistines, which was so loud as to throw them into a panic th=
at
led to their slaughter (7:10). “Throughout Samuel’s lifetime
Yahweh’s hand was against the Philistines” (
The text of 1 Samuel makes it =
clear
that Samuel wanted no king for the tribes of
(3) Third, for ancient and
preliterate peoples, deceased ancestors, ghosts, and other beings were like
wind—mostly invisible but powerful in varying ways. The idea of spiri=
t as
a manifestation or source of life came perhaps from the observed fact that =
with
human beings and animals, breath is essential to life. Ancient Hebrews seem=
ed
not to have a consistent notion of disembodied spirit. Does not breathing
presuppose a body?
(4) Fourth, in early Hebrew th=
ing, wind
is a kind of personality in the sense of liveliness and unpredictability. A=
fter
making apparently mud figurines, Yahweh breathed the breath of life into th=
eir
nostrils to make them living o lively beings (Gen. 2:7).This is close to the
notion of human freedom and will. As late as the Gospel of John, the author=
has
Jesus saying to Nicodemus, “The wind [or spirit—the same word <=
span
class=3DSpellE>pneuma] blows where it wills [or wishes, choos=
es],
and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where is comes from or wh=
ere
it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit [pneumatos].
(5) Fifth, when wind-spirit ta=
kes on
personality, a tendency develops to give it characteristics of publicly
observed, embodied beings. In some of the Hebrew tradition, Yahweh/Elohim seems to be embodied. In Genesis 3:8-10, Adam =
and
Eve hear the sound of Yahweh
If spirit/wind is to interact =
with
human individuals, then some public=
ly
identifiable embodiment seems required. Raw wind is difficult to re-cognize and identify as the sam=
e person(ality) over stretch=
es of
time. The dilemma of the J Writer’s Yahweh lies in his being both a b=
ody
and his being like the wind. He is a “man of war” and he is a
spirit. Early Hebrew metaphysics faced, not the Cartesian mind-body problem,
but the problem of the spatial limits of the body, on the one hand, and the
need for wind/spirit to have specific location, on the other hand. The tens=
ion
between the invisible divine wind/spirit and the embodied wind/spirit is fo=
und
throughout the early Hebrew religion. In Exodus, for example, despite the
statement that “Yahweh spoke face to face with Moses, as a man speaks
with a friend” (33:11), Yahweh says to him, “You cannot see my
face, for no one may see my face and live” (33:20). Moses succeeds in
gaining permission to see only Yahweh’s back. Yahweh then uses his hand to cover Moses, thus prev=
enting
him from seeing him until he passes, leaving only his back visible to Moses
(33:22-23).
In Homer, the gods make appear=
ances
as actors arriving on stage to deliver their lines and perform their deeds,
sometimes incognito. In Judges 13:2-24, an individual appears incognito to =
Manoah and his wife, but the story reads like a skit =
with
heavy humor, as the human couple and the reader try to determine whether the
visitor is a man, an angel, or something else. He says he will not be able =
to
eat food offered him. Manoah wants to know his =
name,
but he says his name cannot be known and then advises =
Manoah
to give Yahweh an offering, presumably food. Manoah
takes the advice and makes a sacrifice on a rock, whereupon Yahweh does a
wondrous thing. As the flames are rising up from the altar to the sky,
Yahweh’s angel rises up in the flames. Manoah
exclaims, “We will surely die, because we have seen Elohim.”
But his more pragmatic wife disagrees. “If Yahweh wanted to kill us, =
he
certainly wouldn’t have accepted the burnt offering and grain
offering.” The humorous confusion in this scene comes from the distur=
bing
ambivalence generated by the humanlike being who apparently is a messenger.
Although appearing human, he not entirely so, which is why Manoah’s
wife thinks this “man (ish) of Elohim” is
“very frightening, like an angel of Elohim”
who would not give his name.
In The God of Old: Inside the Lost World of the Bible, James L. Kugel argues that the early Hebrews thought that beca=
use of
his appearances, the deity was somewhat human, and yet not human. The deity
pops in unexpectedly and often leaves unexpectedly—now you see him, n=
ow
you don’t. He comes and goes like the wind. Sometimes he is like smok=
e—not
an illusion yet not something that can be clutched and held. Like sound and
smoke, deity rises to heaven. Or like a cloud in heaven, it can descend to
become the shekinah<=
/span>
of God. Though not found in the Bible, it is found in rabbinic literature t=
o mean
God’s dwelling or resting—in some instances a synonym for God. =
Some
writers imagined it to be a light, a visible glory hovering above the
Sometimes, the now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t becomes now-I-see-it, but-you-don’t. In Acts 7, Stephen, filled w=
ith
the Holy Spirit, looks up to heaven and sees God’s glory and Jesus
standing at God’s right hand. Stephen exclaims that he sees heaven op=
en
and the Son of Man standing at God’s right hand. Though a young man n=
amed
Saul (later called Paul) was present, he did not see what Stephen saw, or at
least never refers to it in any of his known letters, although later he hea=
rs a
voice identified as that of Jesus.
The point I wish to make now i=
s that
in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, deity often comes and goes like =
the
wind, sometimes materializing or at least seeming to. Whether or not the Je=
sus
whom the disciples touched had kidneys or a stomach remained perhaps unansw=
ered
in the minds of the New Testament authors. The Jesus of Luke 24 eats fish,
which would perhaps end up in the glorified stomach. Jesus of Luke 7 in hea=
ven
might not have needed a stomach. These are questions Luke does not raise,
although interestingly in Acts 10 he has food descending on a sheet presuma=
bly
coming from heaven. He does not represent this as a publicly observable sce=
ne.
In much of the Hebrew Bible, t=
he
deity lives mostly in heaven. Prayers and cries along with the smoke of
offerings rise up to him. But apparently he cannot view everything happenin=
g on
earth, which is why he sometimes descends to find out for himself what is
happening. Yahweh had heard about the iniquity of
The Hebrew Bible preserves an
ancient view of Yahweh as a man who walks in the garden, eats with human
beings, and is a fierce man of war. As literary critic Harold Bloom points =
out,
a booklet attributed to the Palestinian rabbi Joseph b=
en
Akiba, who died about 132 CE, speaks of “=
the
measure of the body,” which shockingly is Yahweh’s own. Yahweh =
is a
cosmic giant in height, length of limbs, facial features, and stride (198).=
While this view of God is a lo=
ng way
from God as spirit/wind, some characteristics of the wind remain in the sen=
se
of changeableness, unpredictability, and being both comforting like a cool
breeze and terrifying like a raging storm. Nevertheless, Yahweh in especial=
ly
the J Writer has little in common with the God of Aristotle, Thomas, Tillich, and the systematic theologians. Indeed, the =
Hebrew
Bible stands against every attempt to draw out of it a coherent biblical
theology.
The New Testament cannot provi=
de a
coherent, self-consistent view of the historical Jesus. He becomes as illus=
ive
as the wind. The mighty theological works by the church fathers are admirab=
le
works of art, but their attempts to present the three illusive persons of t=
he
Trinity as distinct personalities are unsuccessful. To keep some semblance =
with
monotheism, Christianity has had to sacrifice the Father’s personalit=
y to
the point that he has little kinship with the roaring, dynamic, wind-like
character called Yahweh. At the same time, as Stephen =
Prothero
shows, Jesus today has multiple personalities, especially in
Bibliography
Blo=
om,
Harold. Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine.
Kugel,
James L. The God of Old: Inside the Lost World of the Bible. =
Prothero,
Stephen. American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon. =
&=
nbsp;
The Year 2006 Proceedings of t=
he
ASSR-SW