'and thy spirit (lit. thy breath, nishm'thāk) will return to stand in judgment before the Lord who gave it thee.' It ought to be mentioned, however, that some critics (accepting the clause as genuine) see in that return to God nothing more than the absorption of the human spirit into the divine (whether in a naïve popular or in a developed philosophical sense).[1] This will seem plausible at first to many readers. As a Lutheran writer says, 'Si spes, quam nos fovemus lætissimam, Ecclesiastæ adfulsisset, non obiter ipse tetigisset et verbis ambiguis notasset rem maximi momenti' (Winzer, ap. Hengstenberg). But if the Hebrew rūakh means, as I think it does, the personal, conscious, spiritual side of man in iii. 21,[2] I fail to see why it should not bear that meaning here.
