Objection:
The Bible describes the death of Rachel by saying that “her soul was in departing.” Genesis 35:18. (See also 1 Kings 17:21, 22).
Answer:
The reference from First Kings deals with the account of a child that died and how the prophet Elijah prayed: “O LORD my God, I pray thee, let this child’s soul come into him again. And the LORD heard the voice of Elijah; and the soul of the child came into him again, and he revived.” (1 Kings 17:21-22).
Those accounts of the child and Rachel may be examined together. The explanation of one is the explanation of the other.
The claim is that the “soul” that departed was the natural person that soared away at death, leaving behind only the shell, the body; in other words, that really Rachel and the child departed. But such a view does not fit with the Bible’s description of the child’s death. Elijah did not pray that the child would return and re-enter his body but “let this child’s soul come into him again.” “And the soul of the child came into him again, and he revived.” The following sentence says, “Elijah took the child, and brought him down out of the chamber into the house, and delivered him unto his mother.” (1 Kings 17:23). The lifeless form is called “the child,” or “him,” and the revived boy being led by the prophet to his mother is described in precisely the same language. This complete failure of the Bible writer to use any difference in language in referring to the child before and after the resurrection miracle is typical of Bible writers throughout.
For example, take the Lord’s statement to Adam: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” (Genesis 3:19). We all agree that God is addressing Adam. The personal pronoun “thou” could have no other meaning. But the whole sentence reads thus: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” (Genesis 3:19).
What rule of language permits the pronoun “thou” to have its correct personal meaning in the first part of a sentence and a different impersonal value in the remainder? If the Lord, as we believe, really wished to inform Adam that he, not merely the so-called shell of a body, would return to the ground, could any plainer language have been used? Now if to support a belief, it is necessary to give personal and impersonal values to the same pronoun when addressed to a single person in a single sentence, there must be something wrong with that belief. If we who teach that man is mortal and lies in the grave till the resurrection are not permitted to use the ordinary rules of language and the most obvious meaning of words in presenting our view from the Bible, then, of course, we have no basis for discussion.
Perhaps believers in natural immortality think we are attempting to build too much of a case on the use of pronouns. But suppose the Lord had said to Adam, “In the sweat of thy face shall thou eat bread, until thou return unto me.” How triumphantly would they have reminded us that “thou” is a personal pronoun and Adam was to return to God at death! Then indeed, we may be pardoned for calling attention to the fact that the Lord said the opposite, namely, “thou return unto the ground.”
Turning again, now, to Elijah and the child: If “he” and “him” mean neither he nor him in one half of the story, then this much only is certain, that personality can depart from personal pronouns. If when the child died, he really departed, why should the prophet pray that his “soul come into him again?” If at death he never really died but departed, why should the record describe this miracle of resurrection by declaring that “he revived?” We despair of attempting to settle this question if personality elusively departs from personal pronouns at the ready convenience of the believers in natural immortality.
Now, what was this “soul” that departed and which, in the case of the child, came back again? The word “soul” here, and in the case of Rachel, is a translation of the Hebrew word nephesh. Gesenius, generally considered the greatest of Hebrew lexicographers, gives the following as the primary meaning of the word: 1. “Breath.” (See Job 41:2 1, where nephesh is translated as “breath.”).
We surely need not offer any apology for employing the primary definition given to a word by one of the most learned Hebrew scholars. And when we do this, the whole matter becomes simple. When Elijah prayed, “the soul [nephesh, breath] … came into him again.” Thus translated, the text finds a parallel in the account of the child’s death in an earlier verse: “his sickness was so sore, that there was no breath left in him.” (1 Kings 17:17). The fact that “breath” in verse 17 is from a different Hebrew word, does not affect the comparison, seeing that both Hebrew words may properly mean “breath.”
When we examine the account of this child’s soul (nephesh) in terms of the original Hebrew word, we make still another exciting discovery. This word nephesh is translated as “life” in the following passage from the creation story: “And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life [nephesh], I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.” (Genesis 1:30). In the margin of the Bible the translators give “a living soul” as a variant rendering for nephesh, “life.” If the nephesh within the child proves that he is an undying soul, then it proves the same for the beasts, the fowls, and even the creeping things.
Speaking personally, we would instead “seek” the immortality the Bible promises the righteous at the second coming of Jesus than rest in the belief that this choice possession is already ours simply because there is within us something (a nephesh) that is also found in the beast of the field.
