How can one best understand the expression "ruah elohim" in Gn 1:2? Some translations, moved by a trinitarian doctrine, go with "the Spirit of God" (capital S). Others go with "the spirit of God" (lower case S). Others translate "the wind of God".
I'd like to know what the semantic range of the expression was and of the word translated as spirit/wind. Priestly authors half a millenium before the founding of the church were probably in no way trinitarians. So I'm curious about the background of the expression and how it can be best understood.
Jesus' second most common epithet in the Old Testament is the Light (ลr, feminine).
The Holy Spirit is gender-neutral (Pneuma, neuter) in the New Testament, and Jesus โ while male-presenting โ is most often epithetized using feminine nouns โ the Way (Hodos, f), the Truth (Alฤtheia, f), the Life (Dzลฤ, f), etc. Furthermore, while Jesus' physical body is apparently male, His mystical Body, the Church โ IE the Bride โ is feminine-represented, whenever talked about in both Testaments.
Only the Father is exclusively referred to using male pronouns throughout the entire Christian canon.
As Jesus would have spoken Aramaic, which uses most of the same gender assignments as Hebrew, He would have used the Old Testament conventions for gendering the Persons of God when speaking of them.
Finally, Genesis 1:27 (โIn the Beginning God created Man in His Image; in the Image of God He created them: male and female He created themโ) strongly implies that (1) God is pangender, both male and female; and that (2) gender is a spiritual, not merely a physical, attribute, as it comes from the Image of God (the Breath of Life, not the dust of the earth, Genesis 2:7).
Early Shabbat = 19:00 Minha when sheqi'a is 20:00
