Genesis 2:7
Genesis 2:77Then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being.
is the foundational text for the Watchtower's physicalist anthropology. The Hebrew phrase nephesh chayyah is rendered as the definitional claim: Adam became a living soul, not that he received one. On the JW reading, the soul is not a part of a person — it is the whole living person, and when the person dies the "soul" ceases to exist. ("the soul that sins, it shall die") and are then deployed to build out the mortalist framework.
The identification of the whole person with nephesh is not wrong at — Adam did become a living being. The theological error is treating that one verse as the full biblical anthropology when progressive revelation later clarifies it. Jesus says in that humans "can kill the body but cannot kill the soul" — a distinction that is meaningless if the soul is the body. The same soul-body differentiation runs through (martyred souls crying out under the altar), (Paul's desire to "depart and be with Christ"), and (the thief with Jesus "today in Paradise"). describes the original creaturely wholeness; the rest of Scripture fills in what happens at death.
The 1984 NWT rendered nephesh chayyah as "a living soul," matching the KJV; the 2013 revision changed this to "a living person" (footnote: "Or, 'soul.' Hebrew, nephesh"). The revision serves the Watchtower's physicalist doctrine: "living soul" leaves open the distinction Jesus makes at ; "living person" closes it, collapsing nephesh into the whole human being by translation choice. Standard English translations render either "living soul" (KJV) or "living creature/being" (ESV/NASB) — the 2013 move to "living person" is distinctively Watchtower.