Is the Holy Spirit (ruach hakodesh) the wife of God, and is the Holy Spirit the only feminine being in Heaven?

By: | Post date: July 14, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Culture

Depends on your theology, but mostly, no.

The female personification of Wisdom in the Sapiential Books in and out of the Hebrew Scriptural canon (including Proverbs) is as close as Judaism got to a female aspect of divinity. It’s not very close.

Spirit in Hebrew is the feminine noun ruach, and if Hebrew had any role in the development of the Christian notion of the Trinity, you could have seen something like a feminine aspect of divinity in Christianity. But spirit is neuter in Greek (pneuma ) and masculine in Latin (spiritus), so that’s not the direction the Trinity went. The Orthodox/Catholic understanding of a female being in Heaven ended up being the Virgin Mary instead, as intercessor rather than Godhead.

So, standard flavours of Judaism and Christianity have not gone there. I see from the first link I googled (The Feminine Aspect of the Godhead) that there were Gnostic trends to associate the Holy Spirit with femininity, and that the Gospel of the Hebrews referred to the Holy Spirit as a mother. So some theologians have thought so, but most have not.

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