The Spirit and Prophecy in the Hebrew Bible
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What does the Hebrew word “ruach” reveal about God’s breath and speech in creation?
This is Bible Project Podcast, and we're talking about the Spirit of God. The biblical authors have a word that can be translated wind or breath or mind and spirit. It's the Hebrew word ruach. In Greek, it's phnuma. It's the personal and visible divine presence of the creator God. It sustains all of life and it gives us wisdom so we can fulfill our callings as humans.
God's ruach animates people to represent God, to rule on God's behalf. I wouldn't be surprised then that one of the ways they're gonna rule would be to talk and represent God in speech.
As we talk about prophecy, we need to appreciate how the ancients understood and experienced prophets in Israel and around Israel's neighbors. The prophets were commonly experienced as maniacs, people out of their minds. They channeled the voice of the gods while losing their sense of self.
This conception of prophecy is like if a god is going to speak through a human, the human agency has to be canceled or overpowered by the divine agency speaking through them.
In the Hebrew Bible, we have stories of people acting this way. But alongside this portrait is a mode of prophecy that the biblical authors want to highlight. It doesn't require you to lose yourself. It's a way to speak on behalf of God as a true human and divine partner. A key example of this is the prophet Ezekiel.
He very much had this experience of something beyond himself influencing him. But all the depictions of him speaking, sometimes of him sitting down and writing, show him in full possession of his faculties. It's a heightening of Ezekiel's mind so that he has clarity. He can see things that no one else can see.
Today, Tim Mackey and I look at the biblical portrait of prophecy. Humans in partnership with the Spirit as they speak for God. Thanks for joining us. Here we go.
Hi Tim. Hello, John Collins. Hello. It's good to be here with ya. It is. We are exhaling Ruach as we speak these greetings to each other. This is true. And it's what we are talking about. That's pretty meta. God's Ruach in your nostrils.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Yeah. God in my nose. It's one crass way to think. But the biblical authors uh wanna mess with our categories and word things in ways that force you to think about the nature of God and of human life and all through this language about breath or wind or Yeah, you latched onto breath as kind of a centering aspect of it. Yeah.
Yeah. That is the most intimate part of Ruach.
Mm-hmm. That you breathe it in. Mm-hmm. Yeah. When I see it blowing the trees, you know, above me as I Walk round my neighborhood. I mean that yeah, it's not intimate. But it feels like, whoa, that's something powerful. It is moving that tree. I couldn't do that to that tree. Yeah. More powerful than me.
Mm.
But then it's also intimate.
Mm-hmm.
Coming in and out of my body and all my neighbors, keeping us alive.
Mm-hmm.
And then at some point
We begin to talk about as ours. It's my ruck.
Mm-hmm. Yes. But that my is always like in scare quote marks. 'Cause it's been loaned to me or it is made available to me to keep me alive, but it's not mine. I didn't generate it, and I have no control over how long it's available to me. So it's kind of mine and quote marks. Yeah. Ruach provides the biblical authors with a pretty rich palette of ideas in non visible. But more real than anything else actually. 'Cause everything else is temporary and material and breaking down and right. Mm-hmm. But man, whatever energy that originated and the sustaining all of creation. That's gotta be the most real thing there is 'cause it never changes. It's like the constant underneath all the the f flux and change. Yeah.
So it's invisible, it's ultimate reality. And what I wanted to do was walk us through the three most consistently connected ideas with Ruach throughout the Hebrew Bible specifically. And so the first one is life, and it's just right there on pages one and two. God's breath brings about living creatures. The second was wisdom. So we looked at the Joseph story. Creation of the tabernacle, Joshua, Daniel. We didn't even look at the spirit in the book of Proverbs, but we could have Lady Wisdom as a Ruach that she pours out on people.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What does the Hebrew word “ruach” reveal about God’s breath and speech in creation?
0:05–9:58
2
How did ancient cultures picture prophets as “madmen” or “possessed” individuals?
9:58–19:38
3
What is the biblical “gold‑standard” portrait of prophecy according to Ezekiel?
19:38–31:02
4
How does Ezekiel experience the Spirit without losing his mind?
31:02–40:25
5
Why does Micah’s prophetic profile complement Ezekiel’s?
40:25–47:47