Personal Blogs

What Is Life?

Two thoughts have been dancing in and out of my mind, rather like those shifting lights in the northern sky. At first they seemed separate, but gradually they began to illuminate one another. The first came from something the chemist James Tour said while discussing one of the most elementary yet mysterious boundaries in nature. Consider a single cell that has just died. Its molecular machinery and structures do not simply vanish at the moment of death, yet something fundamental has changed. Tour asks the wonderfully simple question, ‘When a single cell just dies, what is it we just lost?’ (Tour, 2024). It is a question that has stayed with me: what was living is no longer alive.

Science has revealed much about the death of a cell and the processes of decay that follow. Yet these discoveries leave room for a broader question about the nature and meaning of life: what is life?

That question takes my mind back thousands of years to the language of Genesis. We are told that God forms Adam from the dust of the ground, the adamah, and then breathes into him the breath of life. The human being then becomes what the Hebrew text calls a nefesh chayyah, a living being (Genesis 2:7). There is something profoundly simple about the picture. The material from which Adam is formed belongs to the earth, but when God gives the breath of life, that formed matter becomes a living human being.

There is also something beautiful about the biblical language of breath. Genesis 2 uses the Hebrew word neshamah for the breath of life, while another important Hebrew word, ruach, can mean wind, breath or spirit. They are not the same word and should not simply be treated as interchangeable, but together they belong to a biblical vocabulary in which breath and life are intimately connected. Anyone who has stood beside someone taking their final breaths understands why this imagery has such enduring power. Breath accompanies us through life, and its departure is a powerful sign of death.

I do not think that what takes place with a cell in a laboratory is directly equivalent to the first man receiving the breath of life. To equate them would confuse two different kinds of explanation. Science can investigate the mechanisms by which living things function and the processes by which they die—the how. Genesis addresses a theological question about the ultimate source and meaning of life—the why. The two questions are different, but placing them beside one another can be illuminating.

There is something deeply arresting about the comparison. A scientist can observe the processes through which a cell dies and identify the signs that life has ended. Genesis invites us to consider the opposite: the entryway to life.

Neither perspective diminishes my wonder. Together, they deepen it.

Standing imaginatively between the laboratory and that ancient Hebrew text, I find myself returning to the same deceptively simple question: what is life? Science continues to give us increasingly remarkable descriptions of how living systems work, and we should treasure those discoveries. Genesis asks us to look beyond mechanism to source and meaning, and answers in the language of breath, earth and gift. Humanity is formed from the dust of the ground, God breathes the breath of life, and the creature becomes a living being.

References

Tour, J. (2024) ‘The shocking truth about life’s origins’, interview with E. Huffman, Maybe God Podcast, 26 December. Available at: Maybe God website (Accessed: 21 September 2026).

Berean Bible Translation Committee (2023) Berean Standard Bible. Available at: Berean Bible (Accessed: 21 September 2026).

Why Hebrew: On Cancer and Memory

With winter coming in, and cancer having done rather more to my memory than I would have liked, I decided to do something completely different with my brain.

I had read those unfamiliar mental exercises—even something as simple as writing your name backwards—can be good for the brain. So I decided to go the whole hog and learn Biblical Hebrew.

Why Hebrew? I was hoping you would ask.

For a start, it is certainly different. You read from right to left, the alphabet is unfamiliar, and at first a page of Hebrew looks as though it might require archaeological equipment. More importantly, though, I love the Bible. The Old Testament was written predominantly in Hebrew, and I wanted to get a little closer to the language behind the English translations I have read for years.

One of the delights of Biblical Hebrew is the way it can make you see and feel an idea rather than simply define it.

The Hebrew word שָׂפָה (safah) literally means “lip,” but it can also mean an edge, border or shore. So, the expression שְׂפַת הַיָּם (sefat hayyam) is literally “the lip of the sea”, where English would naturally say “the seashore” or “the edge of the sea.”

You can see the image: the land forms a lip around the water. It’s wonderfully physical.

For example, Genesis 22:17 describes Abraham’s descendants as being as numerous as “the sand which is upon the seashore.” The Hebrew is literally the sand that is “upon the lip of the sea.”

Biblical Hebrew can be wonderfully concrete. Where English speaks of the ‘seashore’, Hebrew can speak of the lip of the sea. The ordinary word for a human lip, safah, can also describe an edge or boundary. Suddenly the coastline becomes almost bodily: the place where land and water meet is the sea’s lip.”

There’s another intriguing twist: the same Hebrew word safah can also mean “language” or “speech”—presumably through the association with the lips that produce speech. That is why Genesis 11:1, just before the Tower of Babel story, can say that the whole earth had “one safah”—one language, but quite literally, “one lip.”

Take the famous opening of Psalm 23:

יְהוָה רֹעִי לֹא אֶחְסָר

YHWH ro‘i, lo ’eḥsar.

“The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not lack.”

There is no separate Hebrew word for “is” in that first phrase. The two realities are simply placed together: The LORD—my shepherd. It has a wonderful, almost carved-in-stone directness.

Hebrew is rich in concrete imagery. The word ruaḥ (רוּחַ), for example, can mean wind, breath or spirit. These meanings inhabit the same imaginative world: something invisible that cannot be grasped, yet whose presence is known by what it does. It moves, breathes and gives life.

Then there is shalom (שָׁלוֹם). We translate it as “peace,” but it can suggest something fuller: well-being, completeness, wholeness, things being as they ought to be. So when the ancient priestly blessing asks God to give someone shalom, it means rather more than wishing them a quiet life. It is a blessing of flourishing and wholeness.

Another beautiful word is ḥesed (חֶסֶד), variously translated as “steadfast love,” “mercy,” “lovingkindness” or “faithful love.” No single English word quite carries its range. It speaks of a committed, loyal goodness: love that does something.

This is where learning even a little Hebrew becomes fascinating. You don't suddenly discover that English Bibles have been getting everything wrong. Quite the opposite. You begin to appreciate what translators have been trying to carry across—and how difficult their task is.

Hebrew is a real language, not a secret biblical code, and context always determines what a word means. Yet some of its richness inevitably gets thinned out in translation. The face can signify presence and favour; the heart can think and choose; walking can describe how a person lives; breath can speak of spirit; and peace can mean the restoration of wholeness.

Perhaps that is what I am beginning to enjoy most. I am not discovering a different Bible hidden behind the English one. I am beginning to glimpse something of the texture of the original.

Sometimes you can see exactly what the translators managed to carry across. And occasionally you spot something beautiful that fell out of the boat on the journey.

So this winter, while the weather closes in, I shall be sitting with my unfamiliar alphabet, trying to persuade my brain to remember which way the words go.

Cancer has taken a few liberties with my memory. Hebrew, I have decided, can have a go at putting it through its paces.

And if nothing else, I have finally found a language in which starting at the right-hand side of the page is not a mistake.