The Hebrew Bible already uses nefesh, ruach and neshamah for breath, life-force and soul without a fixed hierarchy among them, most famously in Genesis 2:7, where God breathes nishmat chayim, "the breath of life," into Adam, who thereby becomes nefesh chayah, "a living soul." The Zohar, the foundational work of Kabbalah traditionally attributed to Moses de Leon, and the theoretical framework built on it by later Kabbalists systematized these three terms into an ascending structure: nefesh, the lowest level, animal life-force present in every creature and associated with the blood and bodily appetite; ruach, the middle level, distinctively human, seated in the breath and associated with emotion and moral character; and neshamah, the highest level, the specifically divine, intellectual spark present only in human beings.
Later Kabbalah, especially the Lurianic system associated with Isaac Luria, extended this to five levels with chayah (life) and yechidah (unity, or singularity) above neshamah, together forming the acronym NaRaNChaY, though nefesh, ruach and neshamah remain the three most commonly discussed in everyday religious use. Kabbalistic sources describe the higher levels as latent rather than automatically fully present, developed over a lifetime, or over multiple lifetimes in traditions that accept reincarnation, gilgul, through Torah study, prayer, ethical conduct and mystical practice.