The Talmud states it plainly: the son of David will not come until all the souls of the body, guf, are finished, all souls destined to be placed in bodies. The Kabbalistic architecture around it: souls bud on the Tree of Souls in Paradise, fall into the Guf, Gabriel reaches in and takes the first soul his hand touches, the angel Lailah guards it through the womb. The tradition splits on whether the treasury is finite, and the finite reading supplies the mechanism of the end: the Guf empties, a soulless birth heralds the last days. Kabbalah ties the idiom to Adam Kadmon, every soul a fragment of the primordial body.
The myth does unusual work: it makes every birth cosmically load-bearing, even a newborn brings the Messiah closer by being born, and it frames death as wardrobe change, the soul returning its earthly garment for the heavenly one. The dark corollary, the soulless infant at the end, is the oldest written version of the modern NPC anxiety: people walking around without souls because the inventory ran out. The iceberg's bank of souls is the Guf after two thousand years of telephone.
The claim: the Guf encodes a management insight, value requires finitude, so heaven keeps a limited edition, and the Messiah's delay is explained not by God's absence but by the inventory's patience; eschatology becomes a countdown powered by reproduction. Verdict: the finite-reading texts support it, and the structural rhyme with every limited-supply theology since, 144,000 sealed, the lamed-vav tzadikim, is real. A finite heaven is a schedule. An infinite one is a rumor.
If souls are finite inventory, is every birth an advance on the apocalypse?