What the Latin speaking missionaries called anima had the same meaning as the Greek psuche, and it seemed a good translation of the Anglo-Saxon concept of sáwol. It was the groundbreaking work of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) Peri Psuche, “About the Soul” that greatly influenced Hellenistic as well as later Roman thought about the nature of the soul. Contemporary Greek philosophers made no distinction between ‘mind’ and ‘soul’, using them interchangeably but it was Aristotle who proposed that the psuche was the primary reason for the existence and functioning of the body. He also believed that it was the ultimate link with the divine and that it could exist independently of the body. The mind (Gk. nous) was a function of the psuche.

Roman religion had some common origins with that of the Etruscans who were the dominant power in central Italy until Rome conquered them in the 3^rd century BC. Both were heavily influenced by Greek culture and Rome consciously adapted its religion to resemble that of the Greeks. This resulted in the shared belief of Hades as the destination of departed souls where they would be judged and assigned to different regions depending on whether they had been righteous, evil or indifferent; respectively the Elysian Fields, Tartarus and the Plain of Asphodel. Curiously and suspiciously, the NAB bible in 2Peter 2:4 correctly translates the accepted Greek text dealing with angels that sinned “condemned them to the chains of Tartarus.” The mention in the Greek text of a place out of pagan mythology is so foreign to biblical usage, one must suspect a forgery or gross mistranslation; the Aramaic text reads ‘chains of darkness’ which most English versions follow. Euripides and other Greek writers called Tartarus ‘abussa chasmata’, the bottomless chasm. Abussos, [abyss] by itself appears seven times in the book of Revelation and is translated as ‘bottomless pit’. This is the place where some devil spirits are still confined - but not mankind. Abussos is also called the deep; where the devil spirits called Legion petitioned Jesus Christ not to send them. For those evil Greeks and Romans whose souls were consigned to Tartarus there was hope. After sufficient torture by the Furies the debt for their misdeeds was deemed to have been paid and they were released to the Plain of Asphodel.

When the English bible uses the word hell in the Old Testament (hereafter called OT) it is the translation of the Hebrew word Sheol. Finding a verse using Sheol in the OT that is quoted in the NT, allows a comparison be made; and through a totally inaccurate understanding there seems to be an equivalency.

Psalm 16:10 For thou wilt not leave my soul (nephesh) in hell (Sheol); neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.

Acts 2:27 Because thou wilt not leave my soul (psuche) in hell (Hades), neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.

The Hebrew word nephesh is mistakenly thought to be the same as the Greek psuche. The differences will be shown shortly. There may have been some popular philosophical thought that led to the justification for this equivalency but not for Sheol/Hades. Not only is the biblical description of Sheol far from the Anglo-Saxon concept of Hel, even Hades with its elaborate geography and hierarchy does not come close in comparison. In a massive and disastrous error of translation, Sheol and Hades are made to be the same place. As we have seen above, the Greco-Roman Hades is swarming with activity as is the Anglo-Saxon Hel. Turning our attention to the Hebrew Sheol we discover that of the 65 occurrences of the word in KJV, 31 are translated ‘hell’, 31 are ‘grave’ and 3 are ‘pit.’ The first example shows the burial of a heathen in the same fashion that the Anglo-Saxons used a millennium later; preparing the deceased for the afterlife.

Ezekiel 32:27 And they shall not lie with the mighty that are fallen of the uncircumcised, which are gone down to hell (Sheol) with their weapons of war: and they have laid their swords under their heads, but their iniquities shall be upon their bones, though they were the terror of the mighty in the land of the living.

And then there was this account of the fate of certain Israelites who rebelled against God in the wilderness. The Earth opened beneath their feet while they were still alive. Were they then alive in hell until the earth closed upon them?

Num 16:33 They, and all that appertained to them, went down alive into the pit (Sheol), and the earth closed upon them: and they perished from among the congregation.

The following occurrences are all translated ‘grave’ in KJV and describe not a place of afterlife but of death. It is dark, Job 17:13; there is no praise of God nor remembrance of Him, Psalm 6:5; no one speaks, Psalm 31:17; there is no work, reasoning, knowledge or wisdom there, Ecc 9:10; but there are maggots and worms:

Isaiah 14:11 Down to Sheol your pomp is brought, the sound of your harps. Maggots are the couch beneath you, worms your blanket." NAB

This does not appear to be a desirable place to spend the afterlife for either Greek or Roman or Anglo-Saxon. This is why these cultures, through their own genius, invented or inherited an afterlife that suited them. For Israel there was no afterlife for the nephesh, as we have so far seen it, and there is very little in the Old Testament concerning any life after death and what there is, is the result of a resurrection. This follows the account of the dry bones:

Ezekiel 37:12 Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves (qeber burial plot, all 4 occurrences.), and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel.

¹³And ye shall know that I am the LORD, when I have opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up out of your graves,

¹⁴ And shall put my spirit [ruach] in you, and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land: then shall ye know that I the LORD have spoken it, and performed it, saith the LORD.

It is the spirit of God that gives life, not soul.

Daniel 12:2 And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.

The euphemism using sleep for death is common throughout the bible. It expresses the thought that in sleep there is no consciousness of time passing neither is there any awareness of any mental functions.

Ecclesiastes 9:5 For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing,

There are very few additional verses in the OT concerning the resurrection of the dead and absolutely nothing concerning the afterlife of the soul. The compatibility of the Anglo-Saxon concept of soul with both Greek and Roman thought has perpetuated a flawed doctrine, even to the present. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary offers this definition of soul:

1: the immaterial essence, animating principle or actuating cause of an individual life 2a: the spiritual principle embodied in human beings, all rational and spiritual beings, or the universe 3: a person’s total self, etc.

This definition accurately reflects how English speakers use the word soul but it is no guarantee that this usage is correct. Seeing that it is a spiritual concept we must allow the bible to define the word nephesh. In the verses that follow I have purposely left the Hebrew nephesh untranslated so as not to prejudice your definition.

Genesis 1:20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath nephesh, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.

Genesis 1:21 And God created great whales, and every living nephesh that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

Genesis 1:24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living nephesh after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.

Genesis 1:30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is nephesh [Heb. nephesh chay a living nephesh] I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. [KJV failed to translate the word nephesh from the Hebrew text in this verse resulting in ‘there is life’.]

From these four verses the only things we may ascribe to nephesh is that it has the ability to move and reproduce, and anything that is a living nephesh can eat. This next verse is the most critical verse on this subject and I repeat it here for emphasis.

Genesis 2:7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living nephesh.

Note well – Adam was not given a living nephesh – he became one! The word ‘became’ is the Hebrew verb hayah which is no mere copula but always an emphatic word. What can we add to our knowledge of the meaning of nephesh? We now know that Adam was one. In Genesis 1verses 21, 24 and 30 we see ‘living nephesh’ as though it needed to be qualified to differentiate it from another kind of nephesh, perhaps a non-living nephesh.

Ezekiel 18:4 Behold, all nepheshes are mine; as the nephesh of the father, so also the nephesh of the son is mine: the nephesh that sinneth, it shall die.

God gave instruction concerning Nazarites, those who dedicated themselves to God with a vow. One of their prohibitions was to refrain from touching a corpse.

Numbers 6:6 All the days that he (the Nazarite) separateth himself unto the LORD he shall come at no dead nephesh. ⁷ He shall not make himself unclean for his father, or for his mother, for his brother, or for his sister, when they die: because the consecration of his God is upon his head.

Therefore anything from a crawling thing to a great whale can be a nephesh whether alive or dead.

Leviticus 17:11 For the nephesh of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your nepheshes: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the nephesh.

In this verse the first use of nephesh is translated ‘life’ by KJV but not the other two. The translators correctly understood that the use of nephesh here was the figure of speech metonymy where the whole is put for a part. The being of the flesh, its existence, depends on the blood (and equally on its breath.) A living being requires a body, blood and breath. If a soldier bleeds to death on the battlefield and his blood runs into the earth, is his nephesh then in the soil? As we have just seen in Numbers 6:6 a dead soldier would still be a nephesh, although a dead one. Does a blood transfusion necessitate the transfer of a part of the nephesh of the donor to the donee? There are some who believe so. It must be remembered that it was through the ‘breath of life’ and the presence of the spirit of God that man became a living nephesh and not because God filled Adam’s veins with blood.

Deuteronomy 12:23 Only be sure that thou eat not the blood: for the blood is the nephesh; and thou mayest not eat the nephesh with the flesh.

There is a contradiction: Leviticus states that the nephesh is in the blood and Deuteronomy states it is the blood. God doesn’t make contradictions – scribes do. It becomes totally unexplainable if nephesh is translated as soul. Again, KJV translated nephesh as ‘life’ because of the same figure of speech, metonymy. The blood is absolutely not the ‘life’ because a dead nephesh, a dead person, can still have his blood in him. A living soul, a nephesh chay must have a body, blood and breath. When Adam became a living nephesh did God suddenly fill his veins with blood? Even harder to explain would be how one could eat a nephesh if it meant life or soul. Going from the inexplicable to the ridiculous – if a nephesh is eaten, what is its fate? What are the consequences for the eater other than the consequences of disobedience? Christians are not bound by this commandment and suffer no spiritual or physical consequences. It is obvious that there is a strong dissimilitude between the pagan concept of soul and the biblical. A thorough examination of scripture concerning nephesh is required.

The pre-Hellenistic concept of psuche as a life force with all the attributes of a living being was necessary for the Greek belief in an afterlife in which some part of man continued after death. Their religion consigned the psuche to Hades where they could spend eternity as a functioning entity, with thoughts and feelings. They knew that the body did not survive therefore they put all their hope in the psuche.

In Greek mythology a man named Aeneas visits his dead father in Hades, in the Elysian Fields, the place where those who had led a good life while living, dwelt in the afterlife. When he is ready to return to the world of the living, Anchises, his father, shows him the souls of those who are about to be reincarnated. They must first take ‘a draught of long oblivion’ from the River of Forgetfulness so that they have no memory of what in former lives or the afterlife they had experienced and suffered. In Greek the name of the river is Lethe. It takes its name from a very old Greek verb that is translated: to forget, to escape notice, to remain concealed. It is the word letho. There is a device used in Greek grammar that is called a privative that allows a word to be turned into its antonym. This is done by adding an alpha, our a, to the word. It exists in English also in such words as amoral, asymmetrical, etc. The resulting antonym for the noun form is aleethee, which is translated: unconcealed, manifest, being in reality what it appears to be. It is the root of aletheia, the Greek for truth. So, for one to return to the living one must forget the truth and thereby not be able to give testimony of the afterlife. How convenient! Does this place bear any resemblance to Sheol?

It was at the start of the Hellenistic period that Jews that still could read Hebrew translated the OT into Koiné Greek. As the Greek concept of psuche narrowed after Aristotle, making it more mental by attempting to disassociate it from the functions of life, the decision that made psuche the equivalent of nephesh proved to be a bad one. Conversely, a Greek who could read the Hebrew OT would be well aware that psuche was not the same as nephesh but rather very much like lebab, heart, which we shall examine shortly.

From comparatively humble Homeric beginnings, the word ‘psuche’ undergoes quite remarkable semantic expansion in sixth and fifth century usage. By the end of the fifth century — the time of Socrates' death — psuche is standardly thought and spoken of, for instance, as the distinguishing mark of living things, as something that is the subject of emotional states and that is responsible for planning and practical thinking, and also as the bearer of such virtues as courage and justice. Coming to philosophical theory, we first trace a development towards comprehensive articulation of a very broad conception of psuche, according to which the psuche is not only responsible for mental or psychological functions like thought, perception and desire, and is the bearer of moral qualities, but in some way or other accounts for all the vital functions that any living organism performs. This broad conception, which is clearly in close contact with ordinary Greek usage by that time, finds its fullest articulation in Aristotle's theory. The theories of the Hellenistic period, by contrast, are interested more narrowly in the psuche as something that is responsible specifically for mental or psychological functions. They either de-emphasize or sever the ordinary-language connection between psuche and life in all its functions and aspects.

Ancient Theories of Soul (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The Hellenistic Jews wanted a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures and set about, with utmost care, we are told, to perform this task in Ptolemaic Egypt about the year 285 B.C. The result was the Septuagint, hereafter referred to as LXX because, as legend has it, 70 Hebrew scholars, six from every tribe, (I know – that would be seventy-two, also disregarding the fact that ten of those tribes no longer existed) working independently of one another, came up with the exact same translation. Really? Not being versed in Greek religion or philosophy they equated nephesh with psuche and through their blundering and naiveté that error has stood to this day.

From the time that the first books of the OT were written to the time of the 12^th chapter of Judges was about 340 years. During that time the twelve tribes settled in different areas, had different foreign neighbors and may or may not have had Canaanite peoples living among them. After so many years they developed different dialects and accents to such an extent that it was impossible for some to mimic the speech of another tribe even if their life depended on it. Judges 12 recounts the confrontation of the Ephraimites and the Gileadites and the test of identity by the ability to pronounce shibboleth. If they mispronounced the word they were killed. Another 150 years passed before the hope of a unified nation began to be realized when Saul was anointed its first king. It was achieved when David conquered Jerusalem.

The highly centralized regime demanded a unified language. The administration needed a written and spoken language which could be understood without hindrance in all parts of the kingdom, and which every civil servant was able to learn quickly, and which on the other hand was sufficiently rich and adaptable to express efficiently the mass of new concepts connected with the involved administration, the corvée, the Temple cult, and the rapidly growing foreign trade described in I Kings 10. It seems probable that this language was at first created in the capital through contacts between men from different tribes, especially at court, and that owing to its prestige as language of the capital and the court; it spread, carried by the officials sent out from Jerusalem. Once this new common language began to be used in official documents, it became a matter of course also to be employed by authors of the royal chronicles, and no doubt the Books of Kings, which were in part based on extracts from such chronicles, also reflect their language. This language form, due to the unification of the nation under David and Solomon (ca. 998-926 B.C.E.) is the Classic Hebrew of the First Temple period.

Classical Hebrew was used for 400 years, until the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E. It would be impossible that during this long time the spoken language should not have changed, even in the city of Jerusalem. But the written language remained the same in grammar and all the essentials of vocabulary, only the style changed. This means that classical Hebrew was a literary language, acquired through education, which mainly served the social elite, even if it was understood by the people. A contributory factor to the conservatism of the language was the custom of that time, that letters and books were not actually written down by their authors, but writing was done by professional scribes who had learnt the language of writing together with the script. These scribes had a professional interest in maintaining the language standards as rigidly as possible, for the bigger the gap between the spoken and written language, the greater the standing of those that could handle the latter correctly.

When Nebuchadnezar destroyed Jerusalem, he transferred to Babylon the priests, scribes and craftsmen, and left in Judaea only “vintners and ploughmen” (II Kings 25:12), i.e. villagers. There was thus no one left in Judaea to continue to foster the Classic literary language. The Exile lasted 70 years, which means that people born in the foreign country might already have had grandchildren. During this period, the exiles learnt to speak the language of their surroundings. The spoken language in Babylonia at that time was Aramaic . . .

Chaim Rabin, Professor of Hebrew Language

The Hebrew University, Jerusalem

The language of the Israelites that returned home in the year 516 B.C. was irrevocably Aramaic. Add to that another 231 years of speaking that language as their native tongue to get to the year 285 B.C. when the LXX was translated. Alexander the Great had conquered Egypt only 46 years earlier and subsequently Greek became the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean area displacing Aramaic to some extent. The need arose among the Israelite population in Egypt for a translation into Greek of their scriptures, seeing that few of them could read the Hebrew text. Seventy ‘scholars’ set about to translate a text written twelve centuries previous, which was modified and codified 500 years later into Classical Hebrew, and which none of their ancestors had spoken as a native tongue for 300 years. In addition, they abandoned seeking Aramaic/Egyptian bilingualism for the Aramaic/Greek. They were masters neither of Hebrew nor Greek.

In examining the version itself, it bears manifest proof that it was not executed by Jews of Palestine, but by those of Egypt: -there are words and expressions which plainly denote its Alexandrian origin. It may also be doubted whether in the year 285 B.C. there were Jews in Palestine who had sufficient intercourse with Greeks to have executed a translation into that language; for it must be borne in mind how recently they had become the subjects of Greek monarchs, and how differently they were situated from the Alexandrians as to the influx of Greek settlers.

Introduction to the Septuagint Version of the Old Testament (Zondervan)

In addition to the difficulties involved with translating one non-native language into a second non-native language, was the cultural differences that the religion of the Israelites adopted through syncretism. The Canaanite religion was greatly influenced by its imperial neighbor, Egypt, but to a greater extent by Babylon, because of the similarities in language.

The Canaanites were agriculturists whose fate depended on the fertility of the soil and abundant rainfall. It is not surprising that their chief deities were Baal, the god of weather and Athart (Astarte) a fertility goddess. Their religion was characterized by ritual prostitution, both male and female, child sacrifice and licentious worship as the normal expressions of religious devotion. Their unrestrained lifestyle was their attempt to realize the greatest pleasure in this life, in stark contrast with what awaited them at death when their npš (the Canaanite equivalent of nephesh) entered the afterlife in the land of Mot, the god of death. It is described as damp and dismal and lacking sufficient nourishment, which prompted living relatives to make food and drink offerings. They were buried with grave goods so that they would not bother the living. Dead relatives were venerated and sometimes asked for help. None of this was native to the Israelite culture although their forefathers had seen similar practices in Egypt.

When the Israelites came into the land of Canaan they were told by God to totally destroy the people who occupied the land or drive them out but they did neither and allowed a remnant to dwell among them. The strong ethic and faith of the Israelites weakened under the influence of the sexual attraction of the Canaanite religion. Even the Philistines, who were not native to this area, succumbed to the lure of the Canaanite religion. In direct disobedience of God’s instruction, the Israelites intermarried with the Canaanites.

Judges 3:6 And they took their daughters to be their wives, and gave their daughters to their sons, and served their gods.

Israel began to absorb some of the concepts and practices of their tributary neighbors even to the point of naming their children after the names of their gods. Gideon, for example, was also called Jerub-baal and King Saul named one of his sons Esh-baal. This same Saul consulted with a Canaanite woman at Endor to bring up from Sheol the nephesh of the dead prophet Samuel; a practice which Saul himself outlawed on pain of death. It was not because God did not want the living to talk to the dead but rather that the living would be talking to devil spirits because the dead were dead. After centuries of Israel disregarding God’s instructions concerning ‘strange women’, King Solomon set up altars for his foreign wives and worshipped there and served their strange gods. Things only got worse after that to the point that God showed Ezekiel what was going on in the temple. The full account begins in chapter eight; the more you read the worse it gets.

Ezekiel 8:17 Then he said unto me, Hast thou seen this, O son of man? Is it a light thing to the house of Judah that they commit the abominations which they commit here? for they have filled the land with violence, and have returned to provoke me to anger: and, lo, they put the branch (a phallic symbol) to my (sic) nose.

The priesthood had become altogether corrupt in doctrine and in practice. It is not surprising then that wrong doctrine and wrong practice became acceptable; that the Israelite culture slowly adopted pagan beliefs and customs.

Here then are some of the attributes of nephesh that are absent from psuche.

Ezekiel 4:14 Then said I, Ah Lord GOD! behold, my nephesh hath not been polluted: for from my youth up even till now have I not eaten of that which dieth of itself, or is torn in pieces; neither came there abominable flesh into my mouth.

Food can pollute a nephesh.

1 Kings 17:22 And the LORD heard the voice of Elijah; and the nephesh of the child came into him again, and he revived.

This cannot be flesh or blood but only breath.

Joshua 20:3 That the slayer that killeth any nephesh unawares and unwittingly may flee thither: and they shall be your refuge from the avenger of blood.

A nephesh can be killed.

Jeremiah 52:29 In the eighteenth year of Nebuchadrezzar he carried away captive from Jerusalem eight hundred thirty and two nepheshes:

Clearly this indicates people.

Proverbs 6:30 Men do not despise a thief, if he steal to satisfy his nephesh when he is hungry;

A nephesh gets hungry.

It is difficult to arrive at a precise definition of nephesh but obviously it pertains to the whole body, the blood and the breath of a person; what in humans we could call being, whether human or animal. These are the elements of life; absent any one of them there is no life. These are the elements of physical life which can be observed by the senses, far from the Anglo-Saxon concept of sáwol and the Greek concept of psuche. There are many verses that plainly use the figures of speech synecdoche and metonymy where the word ‘soul’ is put for the person or where it could be replaced with a personal pronoun.

Psalm 49:15 But God will redeem my soul [me] from the power of the grave [Sheol]: for he shall receive me. Selah.

And this poetic verse where ‘I’ and ‘nephesh’ are synonymous.

Isaiah 61:10 I will greatly rejoice in the LORD,

my nephesh [I] shall be joyful in my God;

Or this bit of poetry using parallelism:

Psalm 63:1b . . . my nephesh thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee

And then there are verses that claim that God has a nephesh, which are not true to fact and fall into the same category of figures as above.

Proverbs 6:16 These six things doth the LORD hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him, [Heb. his soul – nephesh.] KJV was aware that God did not have a mortal soul and saw the figure of speech, correctly supplying ‘him’ for ‘his soul.’

The overwhelming evidence is that when the soul is said to be doing anything, (dying, hungering, rejoicing, sorrowing, etc) if it is not factual it is a figure of speech and it indicates an earthly being and not a spiritual entity.

Deuteronomy 6:5 And thou shalt love the lord thy God with all thine heart (lebab), and with all thy soul (nephesh), and with all thy might (me’od).

If it is God’s intent to instruct the reader to love Him with the whole being, it must be that whatever is not physical, (that which is represented by nephesh) must be represented by heart and might. Numerous examples of the emotions being expressed are to be found throughout the scriptures and there is no question that the heart is the source of them, therefore we will not examine those here but there is more going on in the heart than only feelings.

Proverbs 3:3 Let not mercy and truth forsake thee: bind them about thy neck; write them upon the table of thine lebab:

Ecclesiastes 5:2 Be not rash with thy mouth, and let not thine lebab be hasty to utter any thing before God: for God is in heaven, and thou upon earth: therefore let thy words be few.

Zechariah 7:10 And oppress not the widow, nor the fatherless, the stranger, nor the poor; and let none of you imagine (think) evil against his brother in your lebab.

Isaiah 6:10 Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their lebab, and convert, and be healed.

Genesis 20:6 And God said unto him in a dream, Yea, I know that thou didst this in the integrity of thy lebab; for I also withheld thee from sinning against me: therefore suffered I thee not to touch her.

1 Samuel 27:1 And David said in his lebab, I shall now perish one day by the hand of Saul:

2 Samuel 7:27 For thou, O LORD of hosts, God of Israel, hast revealed to thy servant, saying, I will build thee an house: therefore hath thy servant found in his lebab to pray this prayer unto thee.

1 Kings 10:24 And all the earth sought to Solomon, to hear his wisdom, which God had put in his lebab.

Esther 7:5 Then the king Ahasuerus answered and said unto Esther the queen, Who is he, and where is he, that durst presume in his lebab to do so?

Psalm 31:12 I am forgotten as a dead man out of lebab: I am like a broken vessel.

Deuteronomy 30:1 And it shall come to pass, when all these things are come upon thee, the blessing and the curse, which I have set before thee, and thou shalt call them to lebab among all the nations, whither the LORD thy God hath driven thee,

The KJV uses the word ‘mind’ in these last two verses as the translation of lebab. The word ‘mind’ appears 92 times in the OT of the KJV but not once is it said to be a function of the organ in our heads. Isaiah 26:3 seems to disagree but the Hebrew word used for ‘mind,’ yester, means purpose or frame.

Isaiah 26:3 Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind (purpose) is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee.

And the source of that purpose:

Daniel 1:8 But Daniel purposed in his lebab that he would not defile himself with the portion of the king's meat,

It appears, then, that the Hebrew concept of ‘heart’ includes every function that we attribute to the mind/brain. The separation between heart and mind in the English idiom does not exist in Hebrew. It is we ourselves, through the evolution of the English language and our culture, which have chosen to think with our minds and feel with our hearts. The commandment in Deuteronomy 6:5 compels the love for God with all one’s physical being through the nephesh, and all one’s mental and emotional faculties through the lebab.

This raises the question of redundancy in Matthew where a Pharisee asked a question of Jesus Christ concerning the great commandment. He quoted Deuteronomy 6:5 and although the underlying text in KJV is Greek (and well worth noting that it was not the LXX) it is inconceivable that the dialogue was not in Aramaic. An anecdotal quote from a Pharisee was that it would be better to feed one’s child meat from swine before allowing them to learn Greek. If anyone knew how to correctly translate Hebrew to Aramaic it was Jesus and yet the subsequent rendering to Greek was not from the Hebrew of Deuteronomy nor from the Greek of the LXX. It also does not match the Aramaic of the Peshitta text. Almost all Syriac scholars agree that the Peshitta gospels are translations of the Greek originals. A minority viewpoint is that the Peshitta represent the original New Testament and the Greek is a translation of it.

Matthew 22:37 Jesus said to him: Love the Lord your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might, and with all your mind. Lamsa Bible (Peshitta)

Matthew 22:37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. KJV

The discrepancy brings up another important point – if we accept the Greek text underlying this verse in the KJV as the original, why does the same verse, as it appears in Mark 12:30 and Luke 10:27 add the word might/strength (Gk. ischus) as it appears in the Aramaic text of the Peshitta? It is important to note that the original Hebrew in Deuteronomy read ‘heart, soul, might’, lebab, nephesh, me’od, which none of the translations in the gospels reflect. Matthew changes might to mind while Mark and Luke retain might (as strength) but also add mind. Another change may be noted here – the LXX translated me’od to the Greek dunamis, inherent power or capability, while ischus deals more with physical strength and abilities. This may possibly be explained by the evolution of language. Even if the spelling did not change in 1200 years (from Moses to the LXX) the meaning of the word most certainly will have changed. Consider Psalm 23:1 – I shall not want – today that would mean that we should not ask anything of God. The word ‘want’ had the meaning of ‘lack’ 400 years ago. Likewise me’od had the meaning of ‘vehemence’ when it was used in Deuteronomy 6:5 but of the 288 usages of that word only one other time did it mean that. Every other usage was an adverb and was translated as greatly, exceeding, very, sore and others. This is what George Lamsa, the Aramaic scholar and translator of the Peshitta bible to English says about that text and the LXX.

The Septuagint is based on early Hebrew manuscripts and not on the later ones known as the Massoretic, which were made in the 6^th to the 9^th centuries. In other words, there are many similarities between the Septuagint and the Peshitta text but the former contains inevitable mistranslations which were due to difficulties in transmitting Hebrew or Aramaic thought and mannerisms of speech into a totally alien tongue like Greek. But as it has been said, such was not the case between Biblical Aramaic and Biblical Hebrew which are of the same origin. Josephus used Aramaic and Hebrew words indiscriminately. Thus the term “translating” from Hebrew into Aramaic or vice versa is incorrect. It would be like one stating as having translated the United States Constitution from the Pennsylvania language into the English language or from lower German to higher German. Even before the first captivity, 721 B.C., Jewish kings, scribes, and learned men understood Aramaic, 2 Kings 18:26

The Israelites never wrote their sacred literature in any language but Aramaic and Hebrew, which are sister languages. The Septuagint was made in the 3^rd century, B.C. for the Alexandrian Jews. This version was never officially read by the Jews in Palestine who spoke Aramaic and read Hebrew. Instead the Jewish authorities condemned the work and declared a period of mourning because of the defects in the version. Evidently Jesus and his disciples used a text which came from an older Hebrew original. This is apparent because Jesus’ quotations from the Old Testament agree with the Peshitta text but do not agree with the Greek text. Jesus and his disciples not only could not converse in Greek but they never heard it spoken.

Everything was written at the time it was revealed. This is also true of the Gospels. They were written a few years after the resurrection and some of the portions were written by Matthew while Jesus was preaching. They were not handed down orally and then written after the Pauline Epistles, as some western scholars say; they were written many years before the Epistles.

Introduction to the Holy Bible from the Ancient Eastern Text, George M. Lamsa

One of the greatest mistranslations was due to the Canaanite influence concerning the afterlife. Their ‘Land of Mot’ was a damp and dismal place and could be equated with the cold dark damp of the grave. It matters not that there is not one line of scripture to support the idea of the nephesh living on after death in any place, the idea was adopted by the Israelites then, just as it was by some Christians later. When the LXX translators had to find a word to represent Sheol they chose Hades. As Christianity spread among the Greek speaking population of the eastern Mediterranean, the LXX was the only source of the Old Testament that was available to them until the Pharisees produced their own version in the 2^nd century AD but by then the LXX was well entrenched among the gentile Christians. The newer version was read mostly by Jewish converts. The Greek psuche had become the life force that nephesh never was and the grave (Sheol,) where the dust that once was the body returned to the dust of the earth, was replaced by Hades where the psuche continued to exist after death.

When Jerome was commissioned in 382 AD, to produce a newer version of the OT in Latin, he rejected the older Latin version as a starting point because it was based on the LXX and he also rejected the LXX itself and instead returned to the best Hebrew texts that were then available. These were not the texts that Jesus Christ quoted. The Vulgate, as it was later called, became the standard text for Western Christianity for centuries. It is very similar to the Massoretic text to which George Lamsa referred above.

The use of the word ‘hell’ by KJV was a disservice to the English speaking world for it brought centuries of tradition and myth along with it at the expense of truth. If those translators had shaken off this false concept and did as Lamsa had done by using ‘grave’ as the only English word for the translation of Sheol or by leaving it in the Hebrew as they did with other Hebrew and Aramaic words, we would not have today a whole industry that survives by preying on misinformed and uninformed clients who want to communicate with the dead. Or have millions of Christians who ask dead relatives for counsel or stand at gravesites and talk to them or offer prayers and money so that their souls might be consigned to a better place.

The truth that we must see from this biblical evidence is that the nephesh is the physical being which became alive when the spirit of God breathed into it the breath of life and which remains alive as long as blood flows through its veins and it has breath. The heart is the source of everything we think or feel. When we die and return to dust, we are in the grave, not a place of torment or punishment. Nothing of us remains – no body, no soul, no heart, no memory, and no thought – except in God’s book of life.

Some collateral subjects that should be covered.

Was the original language of the Gospels Aramaic?

If George Lamsa is correct about the early date of the Gospels it would make sense for them to have been written in Aramaic. Seeing that the mystery of the make-up of the church was not revealed until 30 years after the resurrection, it would have been logical to believe that the only people who would read them would be Aramaic speaking Jews. There is some internal evidence to support this view in Matthew and Mark where some words that Jesus used are still in Aramaic. The opposing viewpoint is that the writers of those Gospels did not know how to translate those words to Greek and so left them in the Aramaic language that Jesus spoke. This is a weak argument because they managed to translate everything else he said. Were they so unfamiliar with Aramaic that they did not know that ‘Abba’ meant father and ‘talitha’ meant young lady? Furthermore, if unbeknownst to bible scholars, Matthew, Mark and John understood Greek and the inspired word of God was given to them in that language, why would God put Hades for grave? However, if the Gospels were originally in Aramaic, then that would have been the inspired word of God and not the Greek translations. Where the word ‘psuche’ appears in Greek, it would have been nephesh in Aramaic, the same as in Hebrew and the later translation to psuche would have been ‘private interpretation.’ The Gospel of John, likewise, would have been written in Aramaic for the same reason as stated above. If Luke, as was supposed, spoke Greek, he could have written his Gospel in Greek and also the Book of Acts. The mystery of the make-up of the church was revealed in the Epistle to the Ephesians which was written from Rome while Paul was a prisoner. This imprisonment is recorded in the last chapter of Acts and it seems unlikely that Luke would have re-written the whole book in Greek because it was now known that the Gentiles were to be joint heirs with Christ. It is likely that he too wrote in Aramaic. Until there is manuscript evidence to support this view, the Greek Gospels must be considered to be the inspired word of God.

When hell did not refer to Sheol.