Genesis 2:7

7. Formed man Here occurs for the first time the word יצר , to form . The production of man is here viewed not so much as a creation, but rather as a formation. Comp . note on Genesis 1:1. It is viewed from the standpoint of the generation of the heavens and the land, and conceived as a process: dust… breath of life… living soul. Having passed from the narrative of creation to a narrative of generations, the sacred writer would have us think of man as not merely created by miracle, but also as brought forth into form and activity by a gradational process of creation. First, God “formed man of dust from the ground.” עפר , dust, is here grammatically the “accusative of the material,” and denotes the ground as the source of the primeval generation of man’s body. Hence mortal man is from the earth, (Psalms 10:18,) and we speak of “mother earth . ”

Breathed into his nostrils the breath of life So man is not only earthborn, but heavenborn . As to his body, he is from the dust; but as to his soul he is, as the Greek poet and Paul affirm, the offspring of God. Acts 17:28-29. God breathed out of himself into the body of the first man the breath of life, נשׁמת חיים , breath of lives . Some have held that the plural, lives, in this Hebrew expression, was designed to denote the twofold life of man animal and spiritual; or perhaps the various powers and operations of the human soul . But the frequent use of the same plural form in other connexions ( as tree of life, Genesis 2:9; ways of life, Proverbs 2:19) is against such an interpretation . In Genesis 7:22, we have the expression breath of the spirit of life applied to the whole living animal creation . And (the) man became a living soul This is the third stage, and the outcome of the creative process . Man thus became a self-conscious, living creature . The expression חיה נפשׁ , soul of life, or living soul, is used also in Genesis 1:20-21; Genesis 1:24; Genesis 1:30, of fishes, birds, and other animals. But the divine process by which man comes to be such a living creature is what we are to note. His soul-endowed nature is the result of an extraordinary divine inbreathing; an “inspiration from the Almighty.” Job 32:8; Job 33:4. Hence we incline, with Delitzsch, to regard the breath of life in this verse (and which occurs nowhere else in this section) as denoting the spirit as distinguished from the soul of man . Accordingly, while discarding the low mechanical anthropomorphic conception of God as a workman, fashioning a clod of earth with his hands, and then standing near it to breathe into it a breath from without, we nevertheless discern in this narrative a divine process in the creation of man . “It begins,” says Delitzsch, “with the constitution of the body, as the regeneration ( palin-genesia) of man shall one day end with the reconstitution of the body . God first formed the human body, introducing the formative powers of entire nature into the moist earth taken from the soil of Eden, and placing them in co-operation; whereon he then breathed into this form the creative spirit, which, because it originated after the manner of breathing, may just as well be called his spirit as man’s spirit, because it is his breath made into the spirit of man . This spirit, entering into the form of the body, did not remain hidden in itself, but revealed itself, by virtue of its likeness to God, as soul, which corresponds to the doxa (glory) of the Godhead, and by means of the soul subjected to itself the corporeity, by combining within the unity of its own intrinsic vitality the energies of the bodily material, as they reciprocally act on one another in accordance with the life of nature.… For the soul, as Tertullian says, is the body of the spirit, and the flesh is the body of the soul.” Biblical Psychology, p. 102.