οτι ηγνοησεν τον πλασαντα αυτον και τον εμπνευσαντα αυτω ψυχην ενεργουσαν και εμφυσαντα πνευμα ζωτικον
because he did not know the one who molded him and infused him with an active soul and breathed into him a life-giving spirit
And at the end (15:19):
εκπεφευγεν δε και τον του θεου επαινον και την ευλογιαν αυτου
but they have escaped the approval as well as the blessing of God
The Short Version of David:
Man can only mold lifeless things, God is the one that can infuse life into lifeless things.
Even clearer would be Ecclesiastes 12:7, or Job 1:21: “καὶ τὸ πνεῦμα ἐπιστρέψῃ πρὸς τὸν θεόν, ὃς ἔδωκεν αὐτό”, or “αὐτὸς γυμνὸς ἐξῆλθον ἐκ κοιλίας μητρός μου, γυμνὸς καὶ ἀπελεύσομαι ἐκεῖ· ὁ κύριος ἔδωκεν, ὁ κύριος ἀφείλατο.” But God’s ultimate agency does not preclude other agencies.
Look how Luke describes it all in 16:22: ἀπενεχθῆναι αὐτὸν ὑπὸ τῶν ἀγγέλων εἰς τὸν κόλπον Ἀβραάμ. There Luke is (rather poetically) describing angels taking the man’s soul (unless he means that they take him bodily?). Yes, Lazarus has been “taken back by/to God” in an ultimate sense, but in the proximate sense, Luke sees him taken by angels up to heaven with Abraham. Luke’s conception, maybe, is of a God sitting atop and directing the universe through agents. This is not unique to Luke, but is a bit of a contrast with the more personal, agentive God often seen in Jewish and Christian literature. A lot of the angel stories in the Bible come from Luke and Acts.
As an aside, the Wisdom 15:8 language of “μετ᾿ ὀλίγον πορεύεται ἐξ ᾖς ἐλήμφθη,” as well as being from Gen 3:19, of course, “… ἕως τοῦ ἀποστρέψαι σε εἰς τὴν γῆν, ἐξ ἧς ἐλήμφθης,” perhaps bears a slight similarity to Seikilos’ “πρὸς ὀλίγον.”
I hope I’m not breaking any rules by reopening a thread that has been dormant for six months. I just noticed that Joachim Jeremias gives his own answer to your specific question, citing chapter and verse, on p. 9 of his book New Testament Theology (link below).
In the later pre-Christian period, Jeremias says, “to ensure that the second commandment was followed as scrupulously as possible and to exclude any misuse of the divine name, there arose the custom of speaking of God’s actions and feelings in periphrases. Jesus … followed the custom of the time and spoke of the action of God by means of circumlocutions.”
He then gives a numbered list of eighteen different forms that these periphrases or circumlocutions are found to take in the synoptic gospels, when Jesus’ words are quoted in direct speech. The fourth of the eighteen reads:
4. The third person plural: only in the Lucan special material: Luke 6:38; 12:20, 48c (twice); 16:9; 23:31.
In a footnote he adds that this is “the usual periphrasis in Rabbinic literature.”
With reference to Luke’s gospel in particular, Jeremias has noted a few pages earlier:
The sayings of Jesus handed down by the synoptic gospels are clad in the garb of a koine Greek with a number of Semitic characteristics. Although in a Hellenistic setting this Semitic colouring must have been felt to be unattractive and in need of improvement, by and large the tradition has been very restrained in giving the sayings a more pronounced Greek style. This reserve, which stems from reverence towards the Kyrios, comes out particularly strongly in the case of Luke, in whose writing the more Semitic-type logia stand out strikingly from the smooth Greek of the framework in which they are set.
But I would agree with an overall point that it’s likely that the rabbinic tradition and Luke draw from the same well of popular Jewish superstition and myth-language to tell their stories, especially the Lukan-origin ones.