For thousands of years, every morning and evening,
Jewish people have prayed these well-known words as a way of expressing their devotion to God.
They are called the "Shema."
"Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one,
and as for you, you shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart,
with all of your soul, and with all of your strength."
We are going to look at the word "soul".
The Hebrew word is "nephesh".
It occurs over 700 times in the Old Testament.
The common English translation of this word is "soul".
That is kind of unfortunate.
Here is why.
The English word "soul" comes with lots of baggage from ancient Greek philosophy.
It is the idea that the soul is a non-physical, immortal essence of a person
that is contained or trapped in their body to be released at death.
It is a "ghost in the machine" kind of idea.
This notion is totally foreign to the Bible.
It is not at all what nephesh means in biblical Hebrew.
The most basic meaning of nephesh is "throat",
like when the Israelites are wandering in the wilderness.
They are hungry and thirsty, and they say to God,
"We miss the cucumbers and melons we had in Egypt.
Now our nephesh has dried up."
Or when Joseph was hauled off into slavery in Egypt, his nephesh was put into iron shackles.
But nephesh doesn't only mean throat.
Since your whole life and body depend on what comes in and out of your throat,
Nephesh could also be used to refer to the whole person.
Like in Genesis, there were 33 nephesh in Jacob's family.
That is, 33 people.
In the Torah, a murderer is called a nephesh slayer.
The kidnapper is called a nephesh thief.
On the first pages of the Bible, both humans and animals are called a "living nephesh".
If the life breath has left a human or animal, the nephesh remains.
It is just called a dead nephesh. That is, a corpse.
In the Bible, people don't have a nephesh.
Rather, they are a nephesh, a living breathing physical being.
That might surprise you
because most people assume the Bible says the soul is what survives apart from the body after death.
And while the biblical authors do have a concept of people existing after death,
waiting for their resurrection, they rarely talk about it.
When they do, they don't use the word "nephesh".
So, even though nephesh is often translated as "soul",
the Hebrew word really refers to the whole human as a living physical organism
In fact, this is why biblical people can often use this word to refer to themselves
and it gets translated "me" or "I".
Like in Psalm 119, most translations read,
"Let me live that I may praise you."
In Hebrew, the poet literally says,
"Let my nephesh live that it may praise you."
By using nephesh, the poet emphasizes that their entire being--their life and their body--offer thanks to God.
In the Song of Songs, the young woman constantly refers to her lover as "the one my nephesh loves".
Of course, love isn't just an intellectual experience.
It is in the emotion that activates your whole body, your entire nephesh.
This helps us understand the brilliance of other biblical poets who could combine multiple meanings of nephesh in one place.
Like in Psalm 42 we read, "As the deer pants for the water, so my nephesh pants after you."
My nephesh thirsts for the living God.
So, on a physical level, your throat can be thirsty, like a deer's.
But then that physical thirst can become a metaphor
for how your whole physical being longs to know and be known by your Creator
Which brings us all the way back to the Shema.
To love God with all of your nephesh means to devote your whole physical existence to your Creator,
the one who granted us these amazing bodies in the first place.
It is about offering your entire being, with all of its capabilities and limitations,
in the effort to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself.
That is the Hebrew word for soul.