The Old Testament Witness

The Hebrew Scriptures speak constantly of the ruach of God — breath, wind, spirit — hovering over the waters, seizing judges, resting on kings, speaking through prophets, and promised for the last days upon all flesh. This file sets out that witness, states plainly what it does and does not disclose, reports the reading that takes ruach YHWH to mean simply God’s own power at work, and gives the Church’s answer: that the Spirit was present and active throughout, and that his personal disclosure waited on the Son.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Word

The Hebrew rûaḥ (רוּחַ) means breath, wind, and spirit, and the Old Testament uses it in all three senses without a firm boundary between them. The wind that dries the flood (Genesis 8:1) and the breath in a man’s nostrils (Genesis 6:17) and the Spirit of God that comes upon Saul (1 Samuel 10:10) are all ruach. The Septuagint renders it almost uniformly as πνεῦμα, which carries the same range in Greek, and the New Testament writes in that vocabulary.

This is the first thing to say, and it is a caution rather than a concession. The word is not a technical term for a divine person, and no Old Testament passage can be made to yield one by lexicography. What the Old Testament gives is a pattern of activity — creative, life-giving, prophetic, sanctifying, eschatological — that the Church, after Pentecost, recognized as the work of the one whom she names the Holy Spirit.

Creation and Life

The Spirit appears in the second verse of Scripture: “and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2; LXX καὶ πνεῦμα θεοῦ ἐπεφέρετο ἐπάνω τοῦ ὕδατος). St. Basil takes the verb to mean a brooding warmth, “as a bird broods over her eggs, imparting vital force to what is being hatched,” and finds in it the Spirit’s proper work: not the making of matter but the quickening of it (Basil, Hexaemeron 2.6; trans. NPNF II/8).

Two other texts anchor the same theme. “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth” (Psalm 32:6 LXX / 33:6 MT) — read by the Fathers as a Trinitarian text, the Word and the Breath together with the Speaker. And Psalm 103:29–30 LXX (104:29–30 MT): “Thou takest away their breath, they die and return to their dust. Thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are created, and thou renewest the face of the earth.” This last verse is sung at Pentecost and at every Vespers, and it states the Old Testament’s most characteristic claim about the Spirit: he is the reason anything lives.

Job says it in the first person: “The Spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty hath given me life” (Job 33:4). Genesis 2:7 has God breathe into the face of the man “the breath of life,” a text the Fathers connect directly with Christ’s breathing on the apostles in John 20:22 — the same gesture, now restoring what the first breath gave (see Pentecost and the Apostolic Preaching).

The Spirit and Men

Outside the creation texts, the Spirit in the Old Testament comes upon particular people for particular purposes.

He comes upon craftsmen: Bezalel is filled “with the Spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship” for the building of the tabernacle (Exodus 31:3) — the first person in Scripture said to be filled with the Spirit, and he is an artisan.

He comes upon leaders: the seventy elders on whom the Lord takes of the Spirit that was upon Moses, so that they prophesy (Numbers 11:25); Joshua, “a man in whom is the Spirit” (Numbers 27:18); the judges — Othniel, Gideon, Jephthah, Samson — upon whom “the Spirit of the Lord came” for a specific deliverance and then departed (Judges 3:10; 6:34; 11:29; 14:6). He comes upon kings at their anointing: “the Spirit of the Lord came upon David from that day forward,” and departed from Saul (1 Samuel 16:13–14).

He comes upon prophets, and this is the usage the Creed picks up. Ezekiel is repeatedly taken up and set down by the Spirit (Ezekiel 2:2; 3:12; 8:3); Micah says “I am full of power by the Spirit of the Lord” (Micah 3:8); the Chronicler has the Spirit clothe itself with Amasai and with Zechariah (1 Chronicles 12:18; 2 Chronicles 24:20). What the Church confesses in the words “who spoke through the prophets” is drawn from this material, and the treatment of what inspiration means belongs to Inspiration and the Spirit in Tradition.

Two features of this Old Testament pattern matter for what follows. The gift is occasional — it comes and goes, and Saul’s case shows it can be withdrawn; David prays “take not thy Holy Spirit from me” (Psalm 50:13 LXX / 51:11 MT), one of only three places in the Hebrew Bible where the phrase “Holy Spirit” occurs, the other two being Isaiah 63:10 and 63:11. And the gift is selective — it falls on judges, kings, prophets, and craftsmen, not on the people as a whole. Both features are precisely what the prophets say will change.

The Promise

The Old Testament’s most important word about the Spirit is a promise about the future.

Joel: “And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy… and also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my Spirit” (Joel 2:28–29 MT / 3:1–2 LXX). Every restriction is lifted at once: not the elders but all flesh; not the free but the slaves; not the men but the daughters too. St. Peter quotes this text as the interpretation of Pentecost, and it is the hinge on which the whole biblical pneumatology turns (Acts 2:16–21).

Ezekiel: “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you… and I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes” (Ezekiel 36:26–27). And the vision of the valley of dry bones, where the Spirit is the agent of resurrection: “Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live” (Ezekiel 37:9). The chapter is read at the Vesperal Liturgy of Holy Saturday, which places it exactly where the Church thinks it belongs — at the threshold of the resurrection.

Isaiah: the Spirit rests upon the shoot from the stem of Jesse (Isaiah 11:1–2); the Servant is the one upon whom God has put his Spirit (Isaiah 42:1); and the passage Christ reads in the synagogue at Nazareth and applies to himself, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor” (Isaiah 61:1; Luke 4:18). Isaiah 63:10–11 is the one Old Testament passage that comes closest to speaking of the Spirit as one who can be personally offended: “they rebelled, and vexed his Holy Spirit.”

What the Witness Does Not Say

Here the honest statement has to be made, and the Church has always made it.

The Old Testament nowhere presents the Spirit of God as a distinct person alongside God. A reader working only from the Hebrew Scriptures would most naturally take ruach YHWH to mean God himself in his active, life-giving, irresistible power — the divine equivalent of a man’s breath, which is his and not another. This is how the Jewish exegetical tradition reads the material, and it is how most modern critical scholarship reads it. The reading is not perverse and cannot be answered by piling up proof-texts; the texts do not say what a proof would need them to say.

[Disputed: whether the Old Testament *ruach YHWH* passages presuppose or intimate a distinct divine agent. (a) The dominant reading in modern biblical scholarship, and the reading of the Jewish exegetical tradition, is that *ruach* denotes God's own power, breath, or extended presence and not a hypostasis — see, e.g., the survey in Levison, *The Spirit in First-Century Judaism*, Leiden: Brill, 1997, and the treatment in Firth and Wegner, eds., *Presence, Power and Promise: The Role of the Spirit of God in the Old Testament*, Downers Grove: IVP, 2011. (b) The patristic reading, from Athanasius and Basil onward, is retrospective and typological: the texts are read from Pentecost backward, and are held to describe the activity of one whose personal identity the same Scriptures do not yet disclose. The two readings are not in competition about the philology; they differ about whether a later disclosure may be used to name an earlier agent. This collection takes the second, and states the first accurately because the Church's own account requires that the Old Testament not yet say plainly what the New says.]

The Church’s answer to the gap is not that the Old Testament secretly teaches the Trinity. It is St. Gregory the Theologian’s account of the order of disclosure: the Old Testament proclaimed the Father openly and the Son more obscurely, the New manifested the Son and suggested the deity of the Spirit, and the Spirit now “dwells among us and supplies us with a clearer demonstration of himself” (Gregory the Theologian, Oration 31.26; trans. NPNF II/7). That passage is delicate and is regularly used for purposes it will not bear; it is examined at length, with the necessary cautions, in the Trinity collection (see Basil’s Reserve and Gregory’s Boldness).

What follows for reading the Old Testament is a rule rather than a technique. The Church reads these texts christologically and pneumatologically because Christ told her to read them so (Luke 24:27, 44–45), and she does not pretend that a reader without that key would find the same thing there. The Spirit who inspired the prophets is the one who now opens their books (see Christ the Key to the Scriptures).

The Hinge

The Old Testament’s promises are held in a single line of narrative at the opening of the Gospels, and the Spirit is in every scene of it.

The Spirit overshadows the Virgin, and the promised one is conceived: “The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee” (Luke 1:35) — the verb ἐπισκιάζω recalling the cloud over the tabernacle (Exodus 40:35). John the Forerunner is “filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother’s womb” (Luke 1:15); Elizabeth, Zacharias, and Symeon each prophesy in the Spirit (Luke 1:41, 67; 2:25–27). The last prophets of the old covenant are the first witnesses of the new, and the Spirit is what makes them both.

Then the Jordan: the Spirit descends and remains on Jesus (John 1:32–33) — the remaining is the point, and John the Baptist is given it as the sign. What came and went upon the judges now abides. And the Forerunner draws the conclusion the whole Old Testament has been building toward: “the same is he which baptizeth with the Holy Spirit” (John 1:33).

References

Basil the Great. Hexaemeron 2.6; On the Holy Spirit 16.38. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8.
Gregory the Theologian. Oration 31 (Fifth Theological Oration), 26. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 7.
Athanasius of Alexandria. Letters to Serapion I. Trans. DelCogliano, Radde-Gallwitz, and Ayres, Works on the Spirit, Popular Patristics 43. Yonkers, NY: SVS Press, 2011.
Firth, David G., and Paul D. Wegner, eds. Presence, Power and Promise: The Role of the Spirit of God in the Old Testament. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2011.
Levison, John R. The Spirit in First-Century Judaism. Leiden: Brill, 1997.
Scripture (LXX numbering noted where it differs): Genesis 1:2; 2:7; Exodus 31:3; Numbers 11:25; 27:18; Judges 3:10; 6:34; 11:29; 14:6; 1 Samuel 10:10; 16:13–14; Job 33:4; Psalms 32:6; 50:13; 103:29–30 LXX; Isaiah 11:1–2; 42:1; 61:1; 63:10–11; Ezekiel 2:2; 36:26–27; 37:9; Joel 3:1–2 LXX; Micah 3:8; Luke 1:15, 35, 41, 67; 2:25–27; 4:18; 24:27, 44–45; John 1:32–33.