“And Jehovah Elohim formed man (of) the dust of the earth and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” (Gen.2:7)
I have already dealt with the “dust of the earth” in my earlier exaggerated exegesis entry of the Book of Genesis. That second Adam was a golem, 
a mystical creature of the Hebrew kabbalistic stories. The most famous bestseller of the early years of the last century was Austrian Gustav Meyrink’s novel The Golem, which is a story about a rabbi who formed a humanoid creature from clay and then animated it with a kabbalistic spell. In one sense it was a spooky spirit of the Prague ghetto, in another it was a kabbalistic Frankenstein. The plot of that occult story can be read here. A reliable and interesting background to the legendary “shapeless mass” (or perhaps mess) which is the Hebrew meaning of the word, can found on this website. Curiously enough, the author of that page says that according to a Talmudic legend “… Adam is called “golem,” meaning “body without a soul” (Sanhedrin 38b) for the first 12 hours of his existence”. I am intrigued by the choice of nostrils by Jehovah Elohim to inject “the breath of life” into his golem. Wouldn’t mouth-to-mouth be a more effective resuscitation? The word “aph” (nose) basically means “a place for breathing” but also “face” and frequently “anger, wrath”, probably because heavy breathing is a sign of roused emotions. Another rather unusual meaning is “two persons” and that would fit to the image of an androgynous Adam. Jehovah Elohim must have breathed twice to revive both Adam and as yet unrevealed Eve. I could muse in this context on the meaning of two channels of breathing in the yoga teaching (ida and pingala) which may have some relevance to the resuscitation of golems. But as there are already far too many of those confused lumps of clay walking the planet and ruining my savings, I’d rather leave the subject and take care of my own “living soul” plus a few gold coins.
