Nĕšāmâ names breath in the selected accounts of created life, creaturely dependence and praise. Genesis 2:7 describes God forming the man and giving the breath of life, after which the man becomes a living being.
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Full entry for נְשָׁמָה (H5397) · Open the biblical lexicon
Nĕšāmâ names breath in the selected accounts of created life, creaturely dependence and praise. Genesis 2:7 describes God forming the man and giving the breath of life, after which the man becomes a living being.
The BSB source-word alignment has 24 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include the breath (4), at the blast (2), breath (2), By the breath (2), that breathed (2).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at Genesis 2:7. Its strongest book concentrations include Job (7), Isaiah (4), Joshua (3), 1 Kings (2).
Nĕšāmâ names breath in the selected accounts of created life, creaturely dependence and praise. Genesis 2:7 describes God forming the man and giving the breath of life, after which the man becomes a living being. Genesis 7:22 uses breath-of-life language for those on dry land who die in the flood. The shared expression should not be made an exclusive label for a special spiritual capacity found only in the first man.
Isaiah 42:5 identifies the Creator as the giver of breath to the people on the earth, and Psalm 150:6 calls everything with breath to praise the Lord. These passages connect life with God's gift and praise without allowing a teacher to read an entire anthropology into one noun. Isaiah 2:22 also turns human breath into a reminder of mortal limits. The word can support thankful dependence while leaving the precise claims about soul, spirit and embodied life to the passages that actually address them.
The selected passages describe God-given life, mortality in the flood, the Creator's continuing gift and a summons to praise. Breath identifies creaturely dependence without functioning as an exhaustive definition of human spiritual constitution.
Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being.
The Lord forms the man from dust and gives living breath. The verse's sequence concerns God's life-giving act and the resulting living being, not a dictionary division of human parts.
Of all that was on dry land, everything that had the breath of life in its nostrils died.
Breath-of-life language appears amid the death of creatures on dry land. This wider narrative use limits claims that the expression exclusively names a spiritual faculty unique to Adam.
This is what God the Lord says—He who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and its offspring, who gives breath to the people on it and life to those who walk in it:
The Creator of heavens and earth gives breath to its people. The declaration grounds the following commissioned work in God's identity and initiative rather than human self-sufficiency.
Let everything that has breath praise the Lord! Hallelujah!
Everything with breath is summoned to praise after a sequence of musical praise invitations. The verse completes the psalm's worship rather than setting a technical breathing exercise.
BSB source-word alignment connects this entry to exact verse rows, English rendering, source form, transliteration, and parsing.
How English Renders ItA compact distribution from source-word alignment before the full evidence tables.
Hebrew word. Animating breath linking physical life, divine inspiration, and human intellect within single semantic field.
Animating breath linking physical life, divine inspiration, and human intellect within single semantic field.
a puff, i.e. wind, angry or vital breath, divine inspiration, intellect. or (concretely) an animal BDB: breath Usage: blast, (that) breath(-eth), inspiration, soul, spirit.
How this word appears across different grammatical cases and numbers.
Selected passage-level study witnesses for this word. This section is not the full occurrence list.
Showing 1 selected witness from 24 lexical occurrence verses.
נְשָׁמָה is built from this root:
The reminder that human breath is temporary undercuts misplaced confidence in mortal leaders and highlights dependence on God.Isaiah 2:10-22
Compound and idiomatic phrases that include this word. Follow a link to study the phrase and how its parts work together.
Genesis 2 presents life as a gift rather than an achievement of the creature formed from dust. Genesis 7 then uses breath language amid mortality, widening the teacher's view beyond a single creation verse. Together the passages make human dependence vivid while resisting an overconfident claim that the noun alone divides persons into a fixed set of spiritual components. The actual narrative tells us what God does and what happens to His creatures.
Isaiah 42 names the giver of breath as the Creator who calls and commissions, while Psalm 150 responds to received life with praise. Acts 17 similarly identifies God as the giver of life and breath to all, within Paul's address calling his hearers toward God. This comparison supports humble thankfulness. It does not equate God with the created breath or establish that every use of a breath word directly names the Holy Spirit. Those further questions require their own textual evidence.
Gen.2.7
Breath is the governing gloss for these selected uses, with living-breath expressions appearing in both creation and mortality contexts. English soul or spirit in other gloss lists cannot automatically replace the particular noun's function in each passage.
Acts 17:24-28 explicitly names God as the giver of life and breath to everyone and calls attention to human dependence on Him. This provides a canonical comparison to Genesis and Isaiah's life-giving Creator. It does not identify the Greek wording with every Hebrew sense or define breath as the Holy Spirit.