Nephesh: The Soul That Gets Thirsty

Soul, in English, is the part of you that is not your body. The Hebrew word your Old Testament translates as soul is the part of you that is: it pants, thirsts, eats, bleeds, and can be counted in a census. Animals have one. It is the word for a living creature seen from the inside.

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Lesson 4 of 12 · Hebrew

Nephesh is a living creature considered as a whole: its life, its breath, its appetite, its self. Its oldest sense is the throat, the place where breath and food go in, and from there it means the life that breathes and wants, and then simply the person — "my soul" is Hebrew for "I." It is not the immaterial half of a body-and-soul pair; the Old Testament has no such pair. Animals are called nephesh in the same breath as people, and a nephesh can be hungry, in danger, or dead. Read soul in your Old Testament as "the living self," and the verses stop sounding like philosophy and start sounding like people.

The first soul

The word enters the Bible at the making of the first human, and what it names there settles its sense.

Yahweh God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. — Genesis 2:7 · WEB

Read the comment on The garden, the man, and the two trees

The man became a living soul, in the WEB as in the King James; a living being, in most newer versions, which is the better rendering of the word and the reason for this lesson. Notice what the sentence does not say. It does not say the man received a soul. Dust and breath together became one, and the one is what the word names: not a part inside him, but the breathing creature entire.

נֶפֶשׁ nephesh H5315

from נָפַשׁ; properly, a breathing creature, i.e. animal of (abstractly) vitality; used very widely in a literal, accommodated or figurative sense (bodily or mental); any, appetite, beast, body, breath, creature, [idiom] dead(-ly), desire, [idiom] (dis-) contented, [idiom] fish, ghost, [phrase] greedy, he, heart(-y), (hath, [idiom] jeopardy of) life ([idiom] in jeopardy), lust, man, me, mind, mortally, one, own, person, pleasure, (her-, him-, my-, thy-) self, them (your) -selves, [phrase] slay, soul, [phrase] tablet, they, thing, ([idiom] she) will, [idiom] would have it.

The word’s first meaning is physical: the throat or neck, the passage of breath and food. From there it names appetite, the life that breathes, the living creature itself, and finally the self — so that "my nephesh" is simply "I" and "every nephesh" is "everyone." It is used of animals as freely as of people, and it can die. The Greek translators rendered it psyche, and the English translators rendered psyche as soul, and by that road a word for the whole living creature came to be read as the part of it that survives death.

It thirsts, it pants, it is counted

Set the word in the places where "soul" reads strangely and "living self" reads plainly.

“As the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants after you, God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?” Psalm 42:1–2 · WEB
As the deer pants for water, so my soul pants for God; my soul thirsts. The throat is the picture, and it is not a metaphor for the psalmist.
“God said, “Let the waters abound with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of the sky.”” Genesis 1:20 · WEB
The waters swarm with living creatures: the same word, of fish, before it is ever used of a human.
“and thirty-two thousand persons in all, of the women who had not known man by lying with him.” Numbers 31:35 · WEB
Thirty-two thousand persons: a census counts souls, because a soul is a person.
“For the life of the flesh is in the blood. I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that makes atonement by reason of the life.” Leviticus 17:11 · WEB
The life of the flesh is in the blood: the word is nephesh, and it is what is poured out when a creature dies.

Thirst, fish, a census and blood. None of those is a spirit. Each is a living creature, or its life, seen whole.

Bless the Lord, O my soul

The commonest use is the one that sounds most spiritual and is the least so: the psalmist addressing his own self.

Praise Yahweh, my soul! All that is within me, praise his holy name! — Psalm 103:1 · WEB

Read the comment on As Far as the East Is From the West

Bless Yahweh, my soul, and all that is within me. That is a man talking to himself, the whole of himself, and telling it to praise. When Deuteronomy asks for love with all your heart, all your soul and all your might, it is not listing three compartments of a person; it is saying with everything you are, three ways.

The soul that sins shall die

Here the word stands at the edge of the largest argument it touches, and the argument should be marked rather than run through.

Behold, all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine. The soul who sins, he shall die. — Ezekiel 18:4 · WEB

Read the comment on The Soul Who Sins Will Die

The soul who sins, he shall die. Ezekiel is arguing about responsibility — each person answers for their own wrong, not their father’s — and the word means the person. Readers have long divided over what the Bible teaches about the soul after death: whether it is by nature immortal, as much of the church has held since the early centuries, drawing on Greek thought and on texts in the New Testament; or whether life beyond death is a gift given at the resurrection, as other readers hold from texts like this one and from the Hebrew word itself. That question is decided from many passages, and this lesson does not decide it. What the lesson can say is what the word means where the Old Testament uses it: not a part that outlives the body, but the living creature, which can die, and which God can make live.

What the word asks

It asks to be read as a whole. Every command that names the soul is a command to the entire person, appetite and breath included, and every psalm that speaks to the soul is a person gathering the whole of themselves before God. There is no part of you the word leaves out.