kes him a free creative personality, self-conscious and god-like.
For this reason the creation of man forms a special act in the account in
Genesis. Both the plant and animal worlds rose at God's bidding from the
soil of mother earth, and the soul of the animal is limited in origin and
goal by the earthly sphere. The creation of man inaugurates a new world.
God is described as forming the body of man from the dust of the earth and
then breathing His spirit into the lifeless frame, endowing it with both
life and personality. The whole man, both body and soul, has thus the
potentiality of a higher and nobler life.

3. Accordingly Scripture does not have a thorough-going dualism, of a
carnal nature which is sinful and a spiritual nature which is pure. We are
not told that man is composed of an impure earthly body and a pure
heavenly soul, but instead that the whole of man is permeated by the
spirit of God. Both body and soul are endowed with the power of continuous
self-improvement. In order to see the great superiority of the Jewish view
over the heathen one, we need only study the old Babylonian legend
preserved by Berosus. In this the deity made man by mixing earth with some
of its own life-blood, thus endowing the human soul with higher powers. In
the Bible the difference between man and beast does not lie in the blood,
although the blood is still thought to be the life. The distinction of man
is in the spirit, _ruah_, which emanates from God and penetrates both body
and soul, lifting the whole man into a higher realm and making him a free
moral personality.

Still the Bible makes no clear distinction between the three terms,
_nefesh_, _neshamah_, and _ruah_.(644) Philo first distinguished between
three different substances of the soul, but his theory was the Platonic
one, for which he simply used the three Biblical names.(645) The Jewish
philosophers of the Middle Ages, beginning with Saadia, took the same
attitude, even though they realized more or less that the division of the
soul into three substances has no Scriptural warrant.(646) In rabbinical
literature this division is scarcely known, and there is little mention of
either the animal soul, _nefesh_, or the vital spark, _ruah_. Instead the
word _neshamah_ is used for the human _psyche_ as the higher spiritual
substance, and the contrast to it is not the Biblical _basar_, flesh, but
the Aramaic _guph_, body.(647) This bears a trace of Persian dualism, with
its s