The Spirit of God in the Old Testament

I will not be giving a full account of the presence of the Spirit of God throughout the Old Testament (or the New) – just enough to give a sense of how the Spirit seems to have been widely understood in a range of authors.  The short story: biblical authors seemed to understand that one way God manifested himself and provided his power to specially chosen people was to send his Spirit upon them.

In this understanding, the spirit is simply the divine force that God sends.  It is not seen as a separate “person” from God.  In an undefined sense (that probably the authors didn’t think about much), the spirit is both part of God (as your breath is part of you) and yet is separate from God (remember: spirit and breath and wind are all the same word in Hebrew).

As an analogy: when you blow out a candle it is your breath doing it, and that act, the tool used to achieve it (the breath itself), and that which is actually achieved are all intimately connected with you; it involves something you do with an element of you (your breath) which then takes on its own power and has its own effect.  So your breath is separate from you in a sense.  But it also can’t exist apart from you, and it expresses your will doing what you direct it to do, and only what you direct it to do.  But your breath is not the same as you.  The “breath” or “spirit” of God is kind of like that for the biblical authors.

In some passages of the Old Testament,   God sends his Spirit (or breath) upon people to enable them to do something unusual.  This happens several times in the narratives of the early kings of Israel.  And so, for example, in ** you do not have permission to see this link **, the Spirit of God comes upon Saul (before he becomes king) and he is “possessed” and begins to speak prophecies; presumably that means he delivered revelations from God because he had been “inspired” (= breathed into; or enspirited).

In ** you do not have permission to see this link **, the spirit of God comes upon David, so that now he is the favored one of God as the one who had been anointed to be King.  We’re told in the next verse that the spirit departed from Saul and was replaced by an “evil” spirit from God that tormented him.  One spirit/breath is good because it brings about good things, the other is bad because it causes a person problems.  But both spirits/breaths come from God.  Here “good spirit” and “evil spirit” are not presented as ontological categories (inherently good or evil) but rather functional ones.  How does God make things good or bad for a person?  By sending a power upon him that can lead to good or bad outcomes.

Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible the prophets speak of God’s spirit and the good it does through the person(s) upon whom it comes.  Thus the “servant of the LORD” in ** you do not have permission to see this link **, where God indicates, “I will put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations.”  Through this servant, then, God will give his covenant to others and the servant will be “a light to the nations, to open the eyes of the blind.”

So too in ** you do not have permission to see this link **).  For Luke, Jesus was the one endowed with the Spirit (as I’ll be discussing more fully in a future post).

The prophet Joel indicates that arrival of God’s spirit will be a mark of glorious times ahead.  After the nation of Israel goes through a horrible time of suffering, God will have pity on it and will bring good times: deliverance from its military enemies, abundant crops, plenty of livestock, abundance all around for all time. And in addition to the coming peace and material prosperity: “Then afterward I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions; even on the male and female slaves, in those days, I will pour my spirit” (** you do not have permission to see this link **).  God’s spirit here is his presence among his people in very happy times.

These are the verses that are quoted by the apostle Peter on the Day of Pentecost in the New Testament, when it was believed that a fulfillment of that prophecy had come, when God’s spirit had come upon the disciples of Jesus in order to enable them to preach the Good News far and wide (Acts 2).

In the Old Testament, then, the Spirit of God was not understood to be a different “person” or “being” or “divine entity” from God.  It was simply God’s breath that he blew upon the earth and upon certainly people, both so they could enjoy his presence among them, they could live under his favor, and they could do things that otherwise they would not be able to do.

The ancient Israelites who wrote these texts did not engage in deep philosophical or theological reflections (at least in the texts themselves) about how to understand the relationship between God and his spirit.  The spirit somehow was simply an element of God that he sent to help and influence people.  If you had asked them: well, in these texts is the spirit a different “person” from God?  And how could the spirit as a divine entity exist if there is only one God?  And … and how does it all work?  My guess is that if you asked any of these questions these authors would have just looked at you puzzled and wondered what you were talking about.  In modern categories, they would say you were chopping the logic.  For them, the spirit of God is simply God’s active presence on earth that he sends down on occasion; it’s not complicated.

But of course it does become complicated once you start asking metaphysical questions about how the spirit can seem to be fully independent of God, and be God, and yet not to be identical with God, even while it fully manifests God, and … how does that *work* exactly?  My point is, the ancient authors who produced these texts didn’t have these questions and so there is no way for us to know if the questions would even have made sense to them, let alone how they would have tried to answer them if they did understand them.

The later Christians did ask them though, and in part that’s what led to the doctrine of the Trinity, as we’ll see.