Is God more concerned with bodies or souls? It’s an imperfect indicator, but a count of the use of terms in Scripture is revealing, perhaps even startling.
The word “soul” is used in the NASB just under 300x (a few dozen more than the number of times that the NASB uses “body,” which of course is used for “bodies” other than the individual human body. The word “soul” is used about as much as the word “foot/feet,” about half the number of times that the word “eye(s)” is used, and a third of the times that the word “hand(s)” is used (which is well over 1000). ”Mind” is used a bit about 140x, but a number of those are English idioms; in the Hebrew Old Testament, “mind” sometimes translates a body part (sometimes “face,” as in Exodus 10:10). ”Heart” is the “soul-word” used most frequently (680 times), but of course the heart is a body part.
Should we be spending as much time discussing the “foot-hand” relation as we do the “soul-body” relation?
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Notes on Anosmia
One morning several years ago, as my wife, Wendy, and I were having breakfast together, I had…
Empire of Unreality
Shiva Naipaul (1945–1985) was the author of three novels and two books of mordant dispatches from places…
The Dreadful Christ of Pär Lagerkvist
It’s dangerous to meet a god,” says the disgraced Pythia in Pär Lagerkvist’s The Sibyl. Her observation…
