Ecclesiastes 12:7

The solemn declaration 'then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it' provides Ecclesiastes' most explicit statement on the anthropological constitution of the human being — dust from earth (Genesis 2:7), spirit from God — and their respective destinations at death. The verse does not resolve the question of post-mortem individual consciousness (Ecclesiastes is deliberately ambiguous on this) but establishes that the human being is a composite whose components return to their origins. The phrase 'spirit shall return unto God' (Hebrew ruach tashuv el-ha'Elohim) was read by later Judaism and Christianity as the basis for belief in the immortality of the soul, though Ecclesiastes' original intention may be more about death as the dissolution of the life-force back to its source. James 2:26 ('the body without the spirit is dead') applies the same dust-spirit anthropology to the faith-works relationship.