Tool Beta
Is It Actually in the Bible?
Phrases people quote as Scripture. The real verse, or the honest answer that there is not one.
"Bowels of mercies" is Scripture making a crude joke about intestines
"Bowels" meant the seat of deep emotion and compassion, what we'd now call the heart or gut feeling.
Colossians 3:12, in every translation this tool compares.
Colossians 3:12 instructs believers to "put on… bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering." In the physiology of the ancient world, strong emotion, especially compassion, was felt in the internal organs, not the heart, so "bowels" was the natural word for deep, gut-level tenderness. It's the same idea behind our own phrase "gut feeling," which is really the last surviving trace of this older way of talking.
Modern English kept "bowels" only in its clinical, digestive sense, so the verse now reads as unintentionally comic or gross to readers who don't know it's simply asking Christians to be deeply, viscerally compassionate.
