Glory, Soul and Heart

Deuteronomy 6:4-5 is the Shema, named from its first word, שְׁמַע (shema, hear), the qal imperative, second person masculine singular, of שָׁמַע (shama, to hear, listen, obey). Module 4 read the confession of verse 4 and the infinitive absolute. This lesson reads verse 5, which in the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC) begins וְאָהַבְתָּ אֵת יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ (ve'ahavta et YHWH elohekha, and you shall love the LORD your God). וְאָהַבְתָּ (ve'ahavta) is the qal perfect, second person masculine singular, of אָהַב (ahav, to love), with the conjunction; following the imperative of verse 4 it carries the force of a command. Love here is commanded. That alone tells you that Deuteronomy's love is not first a feeling one waits for, but loyalty one gives, the word used in ancient treaties for a subject's faithfulness to his king.

Then come three phrases, each beginning בְּכָל (bekhol, with all): בְּכָל־לְבָבְךָ (bekhol-levavkha, with all your heart), וּבְכָל־נַפְשְׁךָ (uvkhol-nafshekha, and with all your soul) and וּבְכָל־מְאֹדֶךָ (uvkhol-me'odekha, and with all your strength). The first two words are the subject of most of this lesson. The third is worth a moment now. מְאֹד (me'od) is one of the commonest words in Hebrew, but almost always as the adverb very. Used as a noun, as here, it is rare; the tagged WLC treats it as a noun in only three verses. One of them is 2 Kings 23:25, where King Josiah is said to have turned to the LORD with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his strength, echoing this verse word for word. The noun means something like muchness: everything you have, all your might, the whole force of a life.

Jewish teachers read the three words with great seriousness. The Mishnah, the collection of rabbinic teaching completed around AD 200, explains with all your soul as even if he takes your soul, and with all your strength as with all your wealth, and the Babylonian Talmud tells that Rabbi Akiva, being put to death by the Romans, recited the Shema and said that all his life he had waited to fulfil with all your soul. Whatever one makes of the details, the rabbis saw that nephesh here means life itself, and that the verse asks for love to the point of death.

Jesus quotes this verse as the greatest commandment, and the Gospels give it in Greek with four terms instead of three: in Mark 12:30, heart, soul, mind and strength. Most commentators take the addition not as a correction of Moses but as a way of making sure Greek readers did not miss what the Hebrew heart included, as the next section shows. The systematic theology lesson What a Human Being Is makes the same point: the number of nouns in a list like this does not tell you how many parts a person has.

The Hebrew for heart has two forms, לֵב (lev) and לְבָב (levav), which mean the same thing. Counted together in the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible, the free tagged WLC on GitHub (openscriptures/morphhb), they occur about 850 times, which makes heart the commonest word in the Old Testament for the inner life. Deuteronomy prefers the longer form; most other books prefer the shorter.

English readers tend to hear heart as the seat of feeling, as opposed to the head, the seat of thought. Hebrew does not divide a person that way. The heart in the Old Testament is where a person thinks, plans, understands, remembers and decides, as well as where he feels. The fool says in his heart, There is no God (Psalm 14:1), בְּלִבּוֹ (belibbo, in his heart); he is not feeling it, he is thinking it. A man's heart plans his course (Proverbs 16:9). Solomon asks for an understanding heart to judge God's people, and the Hebrew is לֵב שֹׁמֵעַ (lev shomea, a hearing heart, 1 Kings 3:9), a mind that listens. Hosea calls Ephraim a silly, senseless dove (Hosea 7:11), and the word behind senseless is אֵין לֵב (ein lev, without heart): Ephraim has no sense, not no feelings.

The heart feels too. Aaron will be glad in his heart when he sees Moses (Exodus 4:14), and God himself was grieved in His heart over humankind in Genesis 6:6. But the deepest feelings are often placed lower in the body. Jeremiah's anguish over the coming invasion is מֵעַי מֵעַי (me'ai me'ai, my inner parts, my inner parts, Jeremiah 4:19), which the BSB renders My anguish, my anguish! The kidneys, כְּלָיוֹת (kelayot), are where God tests a person's deepest motives, and the BSB, not wanting readers to think of organs, renders them mind in Jeremiah 17:10 and conscience in Psalm 16:7. Hebrew placed thought in the heart and feeling in the bowels and the kidneys; English places thought in the head and feeling in the heart. Translators have to move the furniture, and you will now see them doing it.

This changes how you preach. When a preacher says that God wants not just your head but your heart, he is using English anatomy, and he may be teaching the opposite of Deuteronomy, for whom the heart is the head, the will and the affections all at once. When Deuteronomy 30:6 promises that God will circumcise your hearts so that you will love Him, and Ezekiel 36:26 promises a new heart and a new spirit, they promise a new mind and will, not only new feelings. And when Jeremiah 17:9 says that the heart is deceitful above all things, it is not only our emotions that are crooked but our reasoning.

נֶפֶשׁ (nephesh) occurs 757 times in the tagged WLC, and the King James Version renders it soul in more than four hundred of them. That English word has carried, for many centuries of Christian preaching, the meaning of an inner, immaterial part of a person that survives death. The question is how much of that meaning is in the Hebrew. The systematic theology lesson What a Human Being Is introduced the word; this section walks through its range with the tools, so that you can test it yourself.

At its most physical nephesh is the throat or neck, the passage through which a person breathes, eats and drinks. Sheol enlarges its throat in Isaiah 5:14, נַפְשָׁהּ (nafshah, its nephesh). The waters are up to my neck in Psalm 69:1, and the Hebrew is עַד־נָפֶשׁ (ad-nafesh, up to the nephesh); Jonah 2:5 has the same phrase, which the BSB renders to take my life. From the throat it is a short step to appetite and desire: in Deuteronomy 12:20, when you crave meat, the Hebrew says your nephesh desires to eat it. And from breath and appetite it is a short step to life itself. A life for a life in Exodus 21:23 is נֶפֶשׁ תַּחַת נָפֶשׁ (nephesh tachat nafesh), and the spies swear to Rahab, Our lives for your lives (Joshua 2:14).

Then nephesh is the living creature, the whole animal or person that breathes. In Genesis 1:20 the waters teem with living creatures, נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה (nephesh chayyah). In Genesis 2:7, after God breathes the breath of life into the man's nostrils, the man became a living being, לְנֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה (lenephesh chayyah), the same phrase used of the fish and birds. Notice the grammar: the man does not receive a nephesh; he becomes one. From there nephesh is simply a person: seventy nephesh went down to Egypt (Genesis 46:27), which the BSB renders seventy in all, and when anyone brings a grain offering in Leviticus 2:1 the Hebrew is when a nephesh brings. It is the self: Bless the LORD, O my soul (Psalm 103:1) calls on the whole self, all that is within me, to bless him. And, most surprising of all, it can be a dead person. A Nazirite must not go near a dead body, נֶפֶשׁ מֵת (nephesh met, a dead nephesh), in Numbers 6:6.

There are also texts where the nephesh seems to go and come. As Rachel died, Genesis 35:18 says, בְּצֵאת נַפְשָׁהּ (betset nafshah, at the going out of her nephesh), which the BSB renders with her last breath. Elijah prays over the widow's son, Let this boy's life return to him, and the child's nephesh returned and he lived (1 Kings 17:21-22). The psalmist says God will not abandon my soul to Sheol (Psalm 16:10), a verse Peter applies to the resurrection of Jesus in Acts 2:27. These are the verses over which the debate in the next section is fought, and notice that the BSB's renderings, last breath and life, are themselves interpretations. Other translations render soul in the same places. Your tools let you see the Hebrew word under both.

Christians have long held that a human being has a body and a soul, and that at death the soul continues while the body waits for the resurrection. Many Christians, and many scholars, now argue that this picture owes more to Greek philosophy than to the Old Testament, and that the Bible's hope is resurrection rather than the survival of a soul. The systematic theology lesson What a Human Being Is sets out the full range of positions with their philosophical defenders. Here the question is narrower: what does the Hebrew vocabulary contribute, and what does it not? Begin with what is not in dispute. Nearly every scholar now agrees that nephesh in most of its uses does not mean an immaterial part, that the Old Testament speaks of a person as a living unity, and that the Christian hope is the resurrection of the body. The disagreement is about what happens between death and resurrection, and whether a person is the kind of being who can exist, for a time, without a body.

The first position holds that the Old Testament sees a human being as one living whole, with no part that naturally survives death, and that this is the right starting point for Christian thought. H. Wheeler Robinson put it in the often-repeated formula that the Hebrew thought of a person as an animated body rather than an incarnated soul. Hans Walter Wolff's Anthropology of the Old Testament (1973 in German, 1974 in English) made the case from the words, beginning with nephesh as needy, breathing life. Oscar Cullmann's lecture Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? argued that the New Testament hope is resurrection and that the Greek idea of an immortal soul had muffled it. Joel B. Green's Body, Soul, and Human Life (2008) argues for a Christian physicalism, in which a person is a bodily being whom God sustains and raises. Some traditions go further and teach that the dead are unconscious until the resurrection, among them the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The texts this view leans on are Genesis 2:7, where the man becomes a nephesh; Numbers 6:6, where a corpse is a nephesh; Psalm 6:5 and Ecclesiastes 9:5, where the dead do not praise God or know anything; and the whole weight that the New Testament places on the raising of the body.

The second position holds that a human being is a unity but not a simple one: body and soul belong together and are torn apart by death, yet the person continues, in a lesser and unnatural state, until the resurrection. This has been the teaching of most of the church's history, East and West, in Augustine, Aquinas and Calvin, and of the major Protestant confessions; the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646) says that the souls of the dead neither die nor sleep. John W. Cooper's Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting (1989) made the biblical case afresh and called it holistic dualism. Its defenders grant that nephesh usually means life or person, but argue that the Old Testament already assumes that the dead continue: Rachel's nephesh goes out (Genesis 35:18); the child's comes back (1 Kings 17:21-22); the patriarchs are gathered to their people even before they are buried (Genesis 25:8); the dead in Sheol are a shadowy company who rise to greet a fallen king (Isaiah 14:9-10); Samuel speaks after his death (1 Samuel 28:15). And they argue that the New Testament makes it plain: Jesus distinguishes body and soul in Matthew 10:28, promises the thief today you will be with Me in Paradise (Luke 23:43), and Paul would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:8).

Each view has work to do. The first must give an account of Matthew 10:28, Luke 23:43, 2 Corinthians 5:8 and Philippians 1:23, and explain what the gathering to one's people and the company of Sheol mean, if the dead are not in any sense there. The second must give an account of the many Old Testament texts in which death is the end of praise and knowledge, and avoid speaking as though the body were a husk to be discarded, when the Bible's hope is its resurrection. James Barr, who did more than anyone to discredit sweeping contrasts between Hebrew and Greek thought, also warned, late in his career, that the contrast between a Hebrew unity and a Greek soul had been overdrawn on this very question. Physicalists such as Green reply that their case does not rest on that contrast at all, but on the New Testament's own weight on resurrection and on what is now known of the human person. What a word study can settle is that nephesh is not a technical term for an immaterial soul, and that you must not preach Psalm 103:1 or Deuteronomy 6:5 as though it were. What it cannot settle is the doctrine. That depends on passages, especially New Testament passages, not on one Hebrew word.

כָּבוֹד (kavod, glory, honour) occurs 200 times. It comes from the root כבד (kavad, to be heavy), and the family is easy to see in the tools. The adjective כָּבֵד (kaved) means heavy: Eli died because he was old and heavy (1 Samuel 4:18). It can mean numerous or great: Solomon asks who can govern הַכָּבֵד (hakkaved, this great people) in 1 Kings 3:9. It can mean hard to move: Moses is heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue in Exodus 4:10, slow of speech. And the piel verb כִּבֵּד (kibbed) means to give weight to someone, to honour him: כַּבֵּד אֶת־אָבִיךָ וְאֶת־אִמֶּךָ (kabbed et-avikha ve'et-immekha, honour your father and your mother, Exodus 20:12). Some tools parse that first word as a piel imperative and the tagged WLC as a piel infinitive absolute used as a command; in this verb the two are spelled alike, and the sense is the same.

So kavod is the weight a person carries: his wealth, his importance, his honour. Laban's sons complain that Jacob has built all this wealth, הַכָּבֹד (hakkavod), at their father's expense (Genesis 31:1). Joseph tells his brothers to report all my splendor, כְּבוֹדִי (kevodi), in Egypt (Genesis 45:13). And when the word is used of God it is the weight of his presence made visible: the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle (Exodus 40:34); all the earth is full of His glory (Isaiah 6:3); the heavens declare the glory of God (Psalm 19:1); and in Ezekiel's vision the glory of the LORD moved away from the threshold of the temple (Ezekiel 10:18), leaving it to its fate. Moses' request in Exodus 33:18, Please show me Your glory, kevodekha, is answered in the creed of the second lesson of this module.

The opening chapters of 1 Samuel play on the whole family. God tells Eli, I will honor those who honor Me (1 Samuel 2:30), using the piel twice. Eli has honoured his sons above God. Then Eli, old and heavy, falls and dies at the news that the ark is taken (4:18), and his daughter-in-law names her son אִי־כָבוֹד (i-khavod, Ichabod), saying, The glory has departed from Israel (4:21). Readers have long noticed the chain: the man who would not give God weight dies of his own weight, and the glory leaves. The small word אִי (i) at the front of the name is uncertain: it may mean no, so no glory, or it may be a question, where is the glory? Lexicons and commentaries give both.

Two cautions. First, the root fallacy again. Kavod and heavy are one family, and in 1 Samuel the narrator plays on it, but that does not mean every use of glory carries a picture of weight. When the heavens declare the glory of God, the psalmist is thinking of radiance and majesty, and a sermon that makes the point about heaviness is preaching the root, not the psalm. Second, check the Hebrew behind every English glory. In 1 Samuel 15:29, the Glory of Israel does not lie, the Hebrew is not kavod but נֵצַח (netsach), a word whose basic sense is endurance or permanence; some translations have the Strength of Israel or the Eternal One of Israel. An English concordance search for glory would put that verse beside Isaiah 6:3. The interlinear will not.

Open your passage in Blue Letter Bible or STEP Bible and search it, and the chapter around it, for the words of this lesson: lev and levav (heart), nephesh (soul, life, person), and kavod (glory, honour) with its family. Add any other body word you find, such as panim (face), yad (hand), af (nose, anger) or me'ayim (inner parts); the next lesson will need them. Write each one on a new page headed Body words, with its reference and the BSB's English.

For each occurrence, write which part of the word's range the context chooses, using the ranges in this lesson. For heart, is it thinking, deciding, remembering or feeling? For nephesh, is it throat, appetite, life, creature, person, self or corpse? For kavod, is it wealth, honour, or the visible presence of God? Then compare the BSB with one other translation you can read, on your phone or in print, and write down any place where they choose different English for the same Hebrew word.

Finally, write two sentences you could say to your congregation about one of these words. The first should say what the word means in your passage. The second should say plainly one thing the word does not mean, so that you correct a misunderstanding without overclaiming, for example that heart in your passage includes the mind, or that soul in your passage means the whole living person. Keep the page with your passage notes.