The Breath Of Life

". . . the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being."
--Genesis 2:7


The moment that the breath of life enters Adam, found in the second chapter of Genesis, is the first appearance of or reference to human consciousness in the entire Bible.  Though the text does not elaborate further, the Biblical origin of human consciousness is communicated in a way that emphasizes a significant truth.  The truth in question is that minds are metaphysically and fundamentally distinct from bodies.

If one reads Genesis 2, one finds that the Bible describes God as creating a body for the first human from the earth and then subsequently imbuing the man with the "breath of life."  Since the man's nostrils already existed prior to this indwelling, meaning his body had already been formed, the breath of life is not itself a part of the man's body.  It is something beyond it.  The Bible explicitly teaches mind-body dualism from the first book onward (see also Matthew 10:28 and James 2:26).

That the Bible teaches that the human mind and body are distinct means by necessity that it denies any sort of idealism which holds that matter is merely an illusion.  Of course, there are things that exist besides just matter and consciousness--logic, space, and time.  These things cannot be illusions, and anyone who tries to reduce the whole of reality to just mind and matter has a very poor understanding of both, since they cannot encompass everything.  But in distinguishing human consciousness from the human body, the Bible opposes several forms of idealism that have sprung up in the history of philosophy.  Humans do actually possess bodies, though these bodies function as vehicles for the minds that inhabit them.

Genuine exegesis reveals that the Bible agrees with what logic can prove about consciousness independent of Scripture: consciousness is not a physical thing, but is what animates the bodies of sentient beings.  The distinction between consciousness and matter, regardless of whether or not human consciousness exists without a body for a time in an afterlife, is the beginning of Biblical phenomenology.  Any part of Biblical phenomenology that comes after, like the issue of soul sleep, stands upon this foundation.