Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
Deuteronomy 6:5
Love God with all your heart. In Hebrew that is an instruction about thinking, not feeling.
Deuteronomy 6:5, in every translation this tool compares.
I know it in my gut. You do not mean your stomach. Every language parks thinking and feeling in body parts, and no two languages park them in the same place. English put thinking in the head and feeling in the heart. Hebrew put thinking in the heart and did not ask your permission.
Because this is the Shema, the verse Jesus calls the greatest commandment, and the English word at its centre now means something the Hebrew never meant. Nothing else in the sentence has moved. Getting this one wrong turns a command about the direction of your mind into a demand for a feeling you cannot produce.
And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
Every English version reads heart, because there is no better word. The problem is not the translation. It is what English readers hear.
לֵבָב levav · H3824
Levav is the seat of thought, will and decision in Hebrew anthropology. When the Hebrew Bible wants the seat of emotion it more often reaches for the bowels or the kidneys. The verse is not asking for a feeling. It is asking for the direction of your mind.
Every language maps interior life onto body parts, and no two languages map it the same way. Heart is the right English word for levav and it carries four hundred years of English sentiment that the Hebrew never had.
Body-part words are almost never safe to read straight across. When a verse tells you to do something with an organ, find out what that organ was thought to do in that culture before you decide what is being asked of you.
No translator has a better option. This is a case where the English is correct and the reader still ends up somewhere the Hebrew was not going, which is why the entry exists.
- Hans Walter Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament, on leb/levav as the seat of intellect and will
- Mark 12:30 adds dianoia, mind, when quoting this verse in Greek, which suggests the first century already read it that way
