Ran across a spiritual term I’ve never heard before. It’s called “guff”. It’s a term that comes from the Talmud, which is a Jewish commentary on the Old Testament, and in particular the first five books called the Pentateuch. According to Jewish tradition, the Talmud started as oral teachings from the time of Moses. It was completed sometime between the 4th and 2nd century B.C.
The Talmud essentially says that the Messiah won’t come until there aren’t any more souls left in the guff, a type of heavenly storehouse. There, the souls wait to be attached to a physical body when that body is born.
Of course, this is unbiblical. The Old Testament doesn’t teach this, nor does the New Testament. The idea of the guff goes against the Bible’s own definition of the soul.
Genesis 2:7 says that “God formed man out of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (KJV). The soul, in other words, is a combination, or the result, of the body and God’s animating breath of life (a breath that’s passed down from Adam through every generation).
The soul is not a separate entity. The soul is everything that a person is, according to the Bible. I’ve written more on the topic of the soul in my article The Soul Explained. Click here to read it.