Bible Geek Word Nerd - Dust

Dust in the Wind

September 16, 2022

Kerry Livgreen, founding member and lyricist for the classic rock band Kansas, channeled the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes when he wrote the seminal hit, “Dust in the Wind”. For Livgreen, it was a meditation on our mortality and how fleeting it all is. The Hebrew word that gives us the common refrain about vanity is HEVEL (הֶבֶל), which does not mean “vanity”, but rather “vapor” or “breath”.

 

This post is not about HEVEL. That will come later. This post is about Livgreen’s masterpiece and our inevitable dance with death. We buried a loved family cat today after she passed

from life. We lay her still body in the ground and said the standard funeral refrain, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust”, from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (worth having on your shelves for lots of reasons). Here is the prayer in its entirety:

 

“In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our brother; and we commit his body to the ground; earth to earth; ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Lord bless him and keep him, the Lord make his face to shine upon him and be gracious unto him and give him peace. Amen.”

 

The Hebrew word for “dust” is APHAR (עָפָר).

 

APHAR appears over 100 times in the Hebrew text, beginning with its very first use in Genesis 2:7: “Then the LORD God formed a man from the DUST of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” We will come back to this verse because there are profound implications related to the words used in the Text. But as this post is on only one of those words, we will confine ourselves to APHAR and dust.

Consider “dust” and contrast it with similar or related words like “clay” or “dirt” or “soil”. Unlike the related words, dust connotes dead, worthless, and lifeless. Dust is dry (in fact, APHAR can also mean “dry dirt”). 

 

Genesis tells us that G-d did not form mankind from clay. He did not form mankind from fertile soil or mud. Rather, He formed us from dry, dead, lifeless dust. Like ash, which is only formed after burning what was once living, dust connotes death.

 

The prophet Zephaniah, in describing G-d’s coming judgment on the earth, records, “‘I will bring such distress on all people that they will grope about like those who are blind, because they have sinned against the LORD. Their blood will be poured out like DUST and their entrails like dung.”

 

APHAR is also connected to the curse of our Fall. In Genesis 3:14, the serpent is condemned to eat dust: “So the LORD God said to the snake, ‘Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat DUST all the days of your life.” Genesis 3 continues the theme of dust being associated with the curse when G-d speaks to Adam: “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for DUST you are, and to DUST you will return.’”

 

The curse on the created world – all of creation – is death, and our destiny is APHAR. For all of human history, mankind’s greatest enemy, his staunchest foe, and his everpresent companion is death, because we are dead, waiting to be buried.

 

At least, we were dead until the Son of G-d conquered death for all time. And though we all will pass from this world to eternity through the doorway of death, those who know Jesus do not need to fear either death or the coming Judgment. As we are reminded in the Book of Common Prayer, there is a “sure and certain hope of the Resurrection unto eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ; at Whose coming in glorious majesty to judge the world, the sea shall give up her dead; and the corruptible bodies of those who sleep in Him shall be changed and made like unto His glorious body; according to the mighty working whereby He is able to subdue all things unto Himself”. All things. Even dust.