E-PH-R – ‘elementary aerial (astral) principle’

The word עפר here in question offers the two roots united עוף–אר, the first of which עוף contains the idea of all rapid, volatile, aerial movement; the second, as we have already seen, is applied to the elementary principle. (The Hebraic Tongue Restored, Fabré d’Olivet,, p. 74-75)

Although I have already spoken several times of this important word, I cannot refrain from referring to it again here, because it is to the wrong interpretation of the translators, that one must impute the accusation of materialism brought against Moses; an accusation from which it was impossible to clear him as long as one had only the version of the Hellenists, or that of their imitators. For, if man is drawn from the dust, and if he must return to the dust, as they make him say, where is the immortality? What becomes of his spiritual part? Moses says nothing of it, according to them. But if they had taken the trouble to examine the verb שיב they would have seen that it expressed not a material return, but a restitution to a place, to a primordial state, a resurrection, in the sense that we give today to this word; they would have seen that this place was, not the earth, properly speaking, ארץ ; but the similitude of man, his original, homogenous country, אדמה, and they would have seen finally, that this was neither the dust of the one, nor the mire of the other, to which he must return; but the spiritual element, principle of his being. (The Hebraic Tongue Restored, Fabré d’Olivet, p. 116-117)