Uncreated

then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it.  Ecclesiastes 12:7  NASB

Spirit will return – Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher-mathematician, invented the doctrine of the eternal existence of the soul (in Greek psyche).  The ancient world did believe in life after death (e.g., Egyptian burial evidence), but that did not include an eternal existence of the psyche.  You didn’t exist before you were born.  What existed was the Spirit, that numinous divine something that gave life to your body.  But once you were animated, according to Pythagoras, you never ceased to exist.  You might change the mode of your existence (for example, from physical to spiritual), but whatever made you “you” continued forever.  We inherited this idea via Plato and the early Church fathers.  Today virtually all Christian doctrinal systems include the idea that the essential “you” continues after death, either in eternal reward or eternal punishment.

But it seems that the Tanakh and the ancient thinking of the Hebrews doesn’t have the same belief.  According to Qohelet, when you die the body disintegrates and returns to what it was made from (the earth) and your animating force, the “whatever” that gives you life, returns to God who gave it to you in the first place.  There’s nothing left over to continue your existence.  You’ve reached the end of being.  This is why Hebrew thought includes the idea of a general resurrection, when God brings back to life all who have been uncreated.  You will come back, but not as a visitor from the heavenly sphere.  You’ll come back because somehow God will once again create you as you.  But between death and this new creation, you just simply don’t exist.  Fortunately, God remembers you and He can recreate you as He sees you.  That will be a glorious day, indeed.

The Hebrew verb used here is šûb (shuv).  In this sentence it is a Qal form.  You might recognize this verb as the one used to speak about repentance, that is, (re)turning to God.  It’s used more that 1000 times in the Tanakh.  However, in the Qal stem alone, there are at least ten different nuances of this verb.

In the Qal stem it has been suggested that there are ten different meanings for šûb with subdivisions within each, plus a few uses difficult to pinpoint (Holladay, p. 59ff.). Of these two or three merit special observance. To begin with, the basic meaning of šûb “to (re)turn” implying physical motion or movement appears over 270 times. ^[1]

This is the sense of the verb here, implying a movement of the physical body and the animating force.  Both go somewhere, and where they go no man can actually determine.  You can no more discover the location of the elements of your physical after it has been in the grave for a hundred years than you can point to the location of the spirit that gave you life.  God knows—you and I don’t.  And because God knows, at some point He will bring it all back, not just in a resurrection but in a total recreation, a complete “start over” for you and me.  Some days I just can’t wait.

Topical Index:  spirit, animation, return, šûb, shuv, creation, resurrection, Ecclesiastes 12:7

^[1] Hamilton, V. P. (1999). 2340 שׁוּב. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 909). Chicago: Moody Press.