Note 120 — Chapter IV · Traces of Greek Influence in the Old Testament and in the Apocrypha

Unless nĕphĕsh is used in the sense of nĕshāmāh in 1 Samuel xxv. 29, where Abigail says to David: “... Yet the soul (nĕphĕsh) of my lord shall be bound in the bundle (or bag) of life with the Lord thy God; and the souls of thine enemies, them shall He sling out, as from the hollow of a sling”; but it is probably a quite different set of ideas which comes into question here. At the same time the idea of God’s solicitude for the souls of His beloved which He takes care of in the “bundle of life,” and which are thus separable from the body even during life, might easily, with the advance of thought on the subject, suggest the pre-existence of the soul.