רוּחַ

The derivation

BDB gives rûaḥ a single unified entry spanning breath, wind, and spirit, and orders its senses to show the concrete-to-abstract path directly: first "breath of mouth or nostrils" (33 occurrences), then "wind" (117 occurrences, the single largest sense-category), then "spirit, as that which breathes quickly in animation or agitation" — temper, disposition (76 occurrences) — then the spirit of a living, breathing being, the spirit as seat of emotion, and, rarely, as the seat of mental acts or of the will (BDB s.v. רוּחַ, Strong's H7307). The ninth and final sense BDB records is the one with the largest textual weight in the corpus: rûaḥ as "spirit of God," attested 94 times — nearly a quarter of all occurrences of the word. No separate root note beyond the noun's own semantic range is recorded in the audited BDB extract; the lexicon treats wind, breath, and spirit as one continuous sense rather than three separate derivations, which is itself the etymological claim: the same word names moving air whether it moves through a person's chest, across a landscape, or — at the furthest reach of the sense — as the animating presence of God.

The word's most consequential appearance sits at the very opening of the Hebrew Bible. Genesis 1:2 states that the earth was formless and void, darkness on the face of the deep, "וְר֣וּחַ אֱלֹהִ֔ים מְרַחֶ֖פֶת עַל־פְּנֵ֥י הַמָּֽיִם" — and the rûaḥ of God was hovering over the face of the waters (Gen. 1:2). Every later theological development of the word — Ezekiel's rûaḥ that revives the dry bones, the Psalms' rûaḥ that God can send or withdraw, and the word's eventual translation into Greek πνεῦμα (see pneuma) and Latin spiritus (see spīritus) — traces back to this single founding image: the moving breath of God present at creation itself, before the first spoken word.

Root

• BDB records no separate consonantal root distinct from the noun's own attested range of senses (breath → wind → spirit → Spirit of God) — the lexicon treats these as one continuous semantic field rather than derivations from an unattested verbal root (BDB s.v. רוּחַ, H7307).
• No HALOT cross-check is available: the single HALOT volume in the audited library covers only the letters zayin through ṭet, not ר — an honest gap, not an omission. BDB is the verified authority for this lemma.

In the corpus

378 occurrences, all within the single indexed work Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), 12.32 per 10,000 words. 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 the founding creation passage (Gen. 1:2) and a cluster around Elijah at Horeb — 1 Kings 18:12, 18:45, and the theophany of 19:11, where the text names rûaḥ three times in close succession as the great wind that precedes, but is explicitly not identical with, the Lord's presence.

The word's world

Rûaḥ moves in a single continuous arc from the most physical sense — the breath that leaves the mouth, the wind that crosses a field — to the most theological: the Spirit of God, present at creation and active throughout the prophetic and poetic books. The 1 Kings 19 theophany states the distinction the word itself makes possible: a great and strong rûaḥ tears the mountains, but "the LORD was not in the rûaḥ" — the same word can name the wind that is merely wind and the wind that carries the presence of God, and only context tells the reader which is meant. This is precisely the semantic terrain Greek πνεῦμα would later be asked to hold when the Septuagint translators rendered rûaḥ ʾĕlōhîm into Greek, and Latin spiritus after them (see spīritus) — a single word, in three languages, carrying breath, wind, and Spirit as one uninterrupted sense rather than three separate ideas.

Authorities: Brown, Driver & Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906) s.v. רוּחַ (Strong's H7307) — from the audited BDB (1906) layer, public domain. HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner) cross-check unavailable: the single volume in the audited library covers letters zayin–ṭet only, not ר — an honest gap, not an omission. Corpus figures and citations from the live Logoi corpus record — receipt soul-word-journey-v0. Cross-reference: pneuma, spīritus.