Doctrine of Man in the Old Testament

Doctrine of Man in the Old Testament
Throughout the OT the relationship of man to nature is everywhere stressed. As man shares with nature share with man in the actualities of his living. Thus, while nature was made to serve man, so man on his part is required to tend nature (Gen. 2:15). Nature is therefore not a sort of neutral entity in relation to man's life. For between the two, nature and man, there exists a mysterious bond so that when man sinned the natural order was itself deeply afflicted (Gen. 3:17 - 18; cf. Rom. 8:19 - 23). Since, however, nature suffered as a result of man's sin, so does it rejoice with him in his redemption (Ps. 96:10 - 13; Isa. 35, etc.), for in man's redemption it too will share (Isa. 11:6 - 9).

But however deeply related man is to the natural order, he is presented nonetheless as something different and distinctive. Having first called the earth into existence with its various requisites for human life, God then declared for the making of man. The impression that the Genesis account gives is that man was the special focus of God's creative purpose. It is not so much that man was the crown of God's creative acts, or the climax of the process, for although last in the ascending scale, he is first in the divine intention. All the previous acts of God are presented more in the nature of a continuous series by the recurring use of the conjunction "and" (Gen. 1:3, 6, 9, 14, 20, 24). "Then God said, 'Let us make man.'" "Then", when? When the cosmic order was finished, when the earth was ready to sustain man. Thus, while man stands before God in a relationship of created dependence, he has also the status of a unique and special personhood in relation to God.


Man's constituents
The three most significant words in the OT to describe man in relation to God and nature are "soul" (nepes, 754 times), "spirit" (ruah, 378 times), and "flesh" (basar, 266 times). The term "flesh" has sometimes a physical and sometimes a figuratively ethical sense. In its latter use it has its context in contrast with God to emphasize man's nature as contingent and dependent (Isa. 31:3; 40:6; Pss. 61:5; 78:39; Job 10:4). Both nepes and ruah denote in general the life principle of the human person, the former stressing more particularly his individuality, or life, and the latter focusing on the idea of a supernatural power above or within the individual.
Of the eighty parts of the body mentioned in the OT the terms for "heart" (leb), "liver" (kabed), "kidney" (kelayot), and "bowels" (me'im) are the most frequent. To each of these some emotional impulse or feeling is attributed either factually or metaphorically. The term "heart" has the widest reference. It is brought into relation with man's total phychical nature as the seal or instrument of his emotional, volitional, and intellectual manifestations. In the latter context it acquires a force we should call "mind" (Deut. 15:9; Judg. 5:15 - 16) or "intellect" (Job 8:10; 12:3; 34:10), and is frequently employed by metonymy to denote one's thought or wish with the idea of purpose or resolve. For one's thought or wish is what is "in the heart," or, as would be said today, "in the mind."

These several words do not, however, characterize man as a compound of separate and distinct elements. Hebrew psychology does not divide up man's nature into mutually exclusive parts. Behind these usages of words the thought conveyed by the Genesis account, that man's nature is twofold, remains. Yet even there man is not presented as a loose union of two disparate entities. There is no sense of a metaphysical dichotomy, while even that of an ethical dualism of soul and body is quite foreign to Hebrew thought. By God's inbreathing the man he formed from the dust became a living soul, a unified being in the interrelation of the terrestrial and the transcendental