Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of Man, Part 6.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

Today we want to turn to subpoint three on your outline, the nature of man. And we want to

begin by looking at the biblical data pertinent to man's nature. Let's start with the Old

Testament. The Old Testament includes a number of anthropological terms referring to man's nature.

For example, the word nefesh is the word for soul.

The word ruach is the Hebrew word for spirit, and the word Bashar is the word for flesh.

Now even though these are the primary meanings of these Hebrew words, nevertheless, these

anthropological terms in the Old Testament do not serve to draw hard and fast distinctions

between different aspects of man.

Indeed, sometimes the word nephish or soul is actually used to refer to dead corpses. For example,

look at Leviticus 21 and verse 11. Leviticus 2111. It gives instructions for the priest and says,

He shall not go in to any dead body and defile himself.

The word for body there is not Bashar, flesh, but Nefesh or or soul. Similarly, numbers 6, 6, numbers 6, and verse 6,

all the days that he separates himself to the Lord, he shall not go near a dead body.

And the word again is nefesh. So nephish, though the word for soul, can

actually be used to refer to the physical body. In English, this same usage has been adopted.

For example, we've all heard the nursery rhyme, Old King Cole

was a merry old soul. Now, nobody thought that Old King Cole was therefore a disembodied,

unexended, immaterial entity. So when we say that Old King Cole was a merry

old soul, we're not necessarily referring to that immaterial part of human being. Turn out of the New

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