On God and LLMs

The second chapter of Genesis poetically describes the beginning of the human story. “The Lord formed Adam from the dust of the earth,” it reads. “He blew into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being.” There are different ways to translate the Hebrew term rendered here as “living being.” Onkelos, a Roman nobleman turned Torah scholar, interpreted it to mean “speaking spirit” (in Aramaic: ruach memalela). As Rabbi Shai Held elaborates in the second volume of ​The Heart of the Torah​, Onkelos’s translation implies that “speech is constitutive of what it means to be a human – a core part of our humanity is our ability to communicate with words.” Onkelos is not the only scholar to explore this concept. As Held also explains: “According to [the medieval commentator] Rashi, speech is thus not only central to who we are as human beings, it is also key to our uniqueness. Alone among God’s creations, Jewish tradition affirms, human beings are capable of speech.” The…