נְשָׁמָה

The derivation

The audited BDB extract records nĕšāmâ with an unusually spare entry — simply "n.f. breath," with no sense-numbered breakdown of the kind BDB gives its more frequent neighbors nepeš and rûaḥ (BDB s.v. נְשָׁמָה, Strong's H5397). The brevity of the entry is itself informative: this is BDB's plainest, least-elaborated breath-word, reserved for a small number of theologically weighted occurrences rather than spread across the wide, everyday sense-range of rûaḥ or nepeš. No separate root note is recorded in the audited extract beyond the bare gloss.

The word's founding and most consequential occurrence is the same verse that gives nepeš its founding use. Genesis 2:7 states that the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground, "וַיִּפַּ֥ח בְּאַפָּ֖יו נִשְׁמַ֣ת חַיִּ֑ים" — and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, nišmat ḥayyîm — and the man became a living nepeš. In this single verse, Hebrew deploys two distinct breath-words for two distinct moments: nĕšāmâ for the act of God's breathing itself, the divine inbreath that only this rarer word carries in the creation account, and nepeš for the resulting state of the man once animated. The same word recurs even in the flood narrative for every land creature "in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life," nišmat rûaḥ ḥayyîm (Gen. 7:22) — a verse that stacks nĕšāmâ and rûaḥ together, the two rarest and most frequent breath-words of the Hebrew Bible occurring side by side.

Root

• No root note beyond the bare gloss "breath" is recorded in the audited BDB extract (BDB s.v. נְשָׁמָה, H5397) — an honest gap in this particular source rather than an invented derivation.
• No HALOT cross-check is available: the single HALOT volume in the audited library covers only the letters zayin through ṭet, not נ — an honest gap, not an omission. BDB is the verified authority for this lemma so far as it goes.

In the corpus

24 occurrences, all within the single indexed work Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), 0.78 per 10,000 words — by a wide margin the rarest of the soul-words gathered in this pilot, Greek or Latin or Hebrew. The corpus tooling does not yet break the Tanakh into constituent books for frequency profiling, so no book-level distribution table is available — an honest limitation of the current indexing. Individual attestations recovered by concordance include both Genesis occurrences already named (2:7, the breath of life; 7:22, the flood), 2 Samuel 22:16 (a theophany in which the nĕšāmâ of God's own breath lays bare the channels of the sea), Isaiah 2:22 and 42:5, and Daniel 10:17 — a small, concentrated set of high-register passages rather than the wide, everyday distribution nepeš and rûaḥ show across the corpus.

The word's world

Nĕšāmâ is the rarest and, in a real sense, the most sacred of the Hebrew Bible's breath-words: reserved overwhelmingly for the specific moment God's own breath enters a creature, whether the first man in Eden or the animals boarding the ark, and for a handful of prophetic and poetic passages where the weight of divine action is at stake. Its scarcity is the argument: where rûaḥ names ordinary wind as readily as the Spirit of God, and nepeš names the ordinary fact of any breathing creature, nĕšāmâ is called on only when the text wants to mark the breath as coming directly from God — the inbreath that makes dust a living being, not the life that results from it. Genesis 2:7's careful sequence — nĕšāmâ for the divine act, nepeš for the resulting state — is exactly the kind of distinction a single Greek or Latin breath-word (πνεῦμα, spīritus) would later have to absorb into one term, collapsing a two-word Hebrew sequence into one.

Authorities: Brown, Driver & Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906) s.v. נְשָׁמָה (Strong's H5397) — from the audited BDB (1906) layer, public domain. Entry is unusually brief in the audited extract (bare gloss, no sense breakdown) — stated honestly rather than padded. HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner) cross-check unavailable: the single volume in the audited library covers letters zayin–ṭet only, not נ — an honest gap, not an omission. Corpus figures and citations from the live Logoi corpus record — receipt soul-word-journey-v0. Cross-reference: nepeš, rûaḥ, pneuma, spīritus.