psuché: breath, the soul
Original Word: ψυχή, ῆς, ἡ
That’s pretty close. Does someone’s Greek expertise want to comment?
I was looking at the Hebrew in the OT.
The Greek word used in the NT does have some crossover with Greek philosophy, but its usage in the NT frequently doesn’t fit this and we translate it as life or mind in those cases. But I question whether we really should be using the meaning from Greek philosophy at all.
Maybe we’re not really? There are lots of words that have their etymology in other languages that do not have same meanings as the originals.
I just love the way people dismiss Biblical translations just because they do not fit with their beliefs.
I never learned Hebrew nor New Testament Greek. What can I do?
Richard
This is close to my understanding, and as the other comments suggest, the term ‘soul’ derives its meaning from the language and culture used. Instead of something remains after the death of the body, the ‘essence’ returns to God (more discussion and debate 
)
Soul:
the spiritual or immaterial part of a human, regarded as immortal.
one’s moral or emotional nature or sense of identity.
emotional or intellectual energy or intensity.
It is obvious that the term soul can be used in several ways. I prefer ‘personhood’, or ‘self’ as these terms are easier to use in these discussions. This would enable a distinction to be made between the ‘true human’ (as God created and intends to restore) and the sinful (or fallen) human being who would be healed (or restored) at the return of Christ. The healing/restoration would be on everyone, be they infermed physically, emotionally, intellectually, and so on.
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It shouldn’t be; the Jews actually solved the problem a long time ago though I suspect without intending to: humans have rational souls, animals have animal souls.
Though given the intelligence of more than a few animals, I’m not so sure about that!
I tend to think of the brain as the spirit/body interface. Thus changes to the brain alter how we think and feel and such but those alterations don’t change who we are. This is what I decided on after some long stretches on the Pacific Crest Trail spent in discussion of “Who are we really, if being tired or on medications can change our personality?”
The interesting aspect to this is how Paul indicates that to die here is to immediately be with the Lord – that is either another one of those situations where things in eternity don’t stick to the temporal progression on Earth, or it’s saying that until the Resurrection we will be disembodied spirits in Heaven… at least I can’t think of any other options. Unfortunately this contradicts my view of how everyone dies and goes straight to judgement, that “stepping off” the timeline lands every person simultaneously at the judgment.
As for my “different kind of body”, I’d like mine from when I had just started my junior year of college: I could run a mile in five minutes, swim five miles with no problem, distinguish individual trees on the hills eight miles from my house, hear a leaf fall in the woods . . . . I’d just want my lungs and feet and shins fixed.
And then whatever transformation takes place, I’d feel at home in the glorified body.
There always is when several different views can legitimately be argued from the scriptures. For the whole situation with body/soul/spirit, I figure God left things uncertain just to remind us He isn’t in the business of providing us with a “Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Matters Spiritual”, He’s in the business of making human beings the way we were intended to be.
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With age, the attitude to life changes. It is not just because of the deteriorating physical condition. When young, the life is full of hopes and new experiences, for many there is also a very optimistic perception of self.
When older, there is a feeling of matters repeating in life, the same problems emerging again and again in the life of different persons around you, noticing how much effort is put in life but doubts about the results being worth the effort, experiences of much pain and suffering among the people you know, including your own life. There is also a growing amount of deaths around you, seeing how lives end and what is left after the deaths - even today I will attend a funeral. Somehow I can understand the feelings of the writer of Ecclesiastes.
When Abraham died, the NASB2020 translates that he was “an old man and satisfied [with life]”. My Finnish translation uses a word that includes the meaning ‘get enough [of life]’. I cannot read Hebrew so I don’t know what would be the best translation of the word(s) but the basic feeling is ‘seen it, lived it, this is enough for me’ - no more of the same for me, thanks.
Based on inherited genes, I might still have 40 years of life to live but the last 40 years will not be comparable to the 40 first years. Learning new things can be interesting, inspiring and useful even during the last decades of life, and I hope I can learn something new every year until the end. Yet, that does not change the fact that the attitude to life has changed. Despite having experienced many times during the last 40 years how wonderful our Lord is, I rather cease to exist than continue this kind of life throughout the eternity.
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I guess my answer to the question of whether the Bible has any value in the context of our understanding of the universe in modern science could always just be, no. In that case, I could just go with the idea that this is a book by a bunch of superstitious primitives with wildly wrong ideas about the universe they inhabit, imagining the earth to be a flat table and babbling about supernatural things that make things alive and turns bodies into human beings.
BUT… instead of dismissing the Bible in this way, I can instead choose to dismiss those who stubbornly insist that the Bible must be understood in such way and read something entirely different in the Bible which is in accord with the scientific evidence… at least to some degree anyway… enough that the principle message remains intact.
The Hebrew is " שָׂבֵ֑עַ" (sa-bey-ah). It’s an interesting word that to catch all the nuances could be rendered as “full to satisfaction”, which is why translations that insist of using just one word can read “full” or “satisfied”. It’s rather like after having gone back for thirds and topping it off with a bog slice of pie a body is left full and satisfied with/after a fine meal. So your “basic feeling” idea is spot on,
I like the way Professor John Walton puts it, that God did not require any of the writers to abandon their own cosmology. He makes the point nicely by showing a picture of Earth taken from between here and the moon and noting that if someone were to show that to an ancient Israelite they would have no idea what it was; to them the Earth was bounded by sea and mountains. If someone were to show them a close-up of a star with flares and all they wouldn’t agree that it had anything to do withe the points of light in the sky. And so we shouldn’t look for anything from our cosmology in writings where their cosmology is taken for granted.
Are you saying then, that even if they believed in transmigrating rational souls, ghosts, and demons, it doesn’t mean we have take that as part of what we should believe from the Bible?
Ok. But it is still my opinion that while they believed in ghosts and demons, I don’t think the inconsistent translation of a word in the Bible as “soul” means they believed in such a thing.
In my Philosophy major at University, the lecturer debated the non-existent ‘Ghost in the Machine’ or soul. His argument was the soul was simply a false brain expression. if it isn’t an expression of the brain, is it external, or what is it? He asked the class. Then his favourite example was Star Trek, where the bean me up Scotty malfunctioned, leaving a copy of you on board and another you on land. He claimed if a soul does exist, can it be split? He then argued how a fertilized egg can be cut in half (at a certain early period), resulting in two identical persons. He questioned the Catholic view that souls are implanted at conception but now are divisible, which he expressed as impossible.
It gets complicated. There is also chimerism, in which cells from two fertilized eggs fuse, and the person has two sets of DNA in them. Two souls?
While I don’t believe in the rational soul (i.e. something nonphysical added to the body to make it alive or a person, or operating the body like a puppet), I guess I do believe in a “ghost in the machine” of sorts… perhaps even two of them. There is the mind which is not the brain, but a self-organizing dynamic organism in the medium of human language, completely physical, just not biological. Then there is the spirit which is non-physical but which doesn’t play any role in the living of our lives but is more of just a repository of our identity outside of space-time – the creation of our choices rather than something which makes our choices.
The copied person simply has their own copy of the mind which diverges from the original and this creates its own spirit with the different choices it makes from that time onward. And I believe all living organisms have a spiritual dimension, but I don’t see why the spirit of fertilized homo sapiens egg is any greater than that for other cells, which also merge in the unity of multicellular organisms. So much for chimeras.
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