3. One inner person, many words

The first thing I noticed, and kept noticing, is that the Bible's words for the inner person refuse to stay in separate boxes. They sit side by side, they swap places, they are added together, and they are placed one inside another. Before looking at any single word, it helps to see how they behave together.

Side by side

Hebrew poetry says a thing twice, the second line echoing the first. Again and again the inner words are the two halves of such a pair.

Heart and spirit: "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me" (Psalm 51:10). "The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise" (Psalm 51:17). "The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit" (Psalm 34:18).
Soul and spirit: "My soul yearns for you in the night; my spirit within me earnestly seeks you" (Isaiah 26:9). "I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul" (Job 7:11). "My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior" (Luke 1:46–47).
Heart and soul: "wisdom will come into your heart, and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul" (Proverbs 2:10). "How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day?" (Psalm 13:2).

Even when people give to God, the words stand together: "everyone whose heart stirred him, and everyone whose spirit moved him" (Exodus 35:21).

Hannah's day at Shiloh shows the same thing in a story. She is "deeply distressed" (bitter of soul, 1 Samuel 1:10). She is "speaking in her heart; only her lips moved" (1:13). Her husband asks, "why is your heart sad?" (1:8). And she explains herself to Eli: "I am a woman troubled in spirit … I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord" (1:15). One woman, one grief, one prayer, and four ways of naming what is going on inside her.

The translators move between them

The translators feel this too. The same Hebrew word for "soul" is rendered "heart" in some places ("you know the heart of a sojourner," Exodus 23:9), "mind" in others (1 Samuel 2:35), and once "spirit" (Lamentations 1:16). The Hebrew word for "heart" is often rendered "mind": Solomon asks for "an understanding mind" (1 Kings 3:9), and "many are the plans in the mind of a man" (Proverbs 19:21). The word for "spirit" is sometimes "mind" as well (Ezekiel 11:5). In the Greek, "soul" can become "heartily" or "minds" (Colossians 3:23; Acts 14:2).

I do not read this as carelessness. The words' ranges genuinely overlap, and English cannot follow them with one word each.

Adding words to name the whole

When Scripture wants to speak of the whole person, it does not define parts. It adds words.

"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might" (Deuteronomy 6:5).
"May your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless" (1 Thessalonians 5:23).
"Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul" (Matthew 10:28).
"My flesh and my heart may fail" (Psalm 73:26).
"Holy in body and spirit" (1 Corinthians 7:34).

The list is not fixed. Deuteronomy says heart, soul and might. Matthew says heart, soul and mind (22:37). Mark adds strength (12:30). Luke puts mind last (10:27). When a scribe repeats the command back to Jesus, he says "with all the heart and with all the understanding and with all the strength". He leaves out the soul altogether, and Jesus says he answered wisely (Mark 12:33–34). What stays the same every time is the word all.

So I no longer read 1 Thessalonians 5:23 as a diagram of three components ranked from top to bottom. It is a prayer that the whole person be kept, named from three sides.

One inside another

The words are also placed inside one another. God's Spirit is given "in our hearts" (2 Corinthians 1:22; Galatians 4:6). "My spirit faints within me" (Psalm 143:4). "My soul is cast down within me" (Psalm 42:6). "I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh" (Ezekiel 36:26). The heart, more than any other word, is where things are placed: God's law, his words, wisdom, fear of him, eternity, and also idols, deceit and folly. I come back to this in the next chapter.

Causes running in every direction

The inner words also affect each other and the body, and the influence runs every way.

A heart state reaches the spirit: "by sorrow of heart the spirit is crushed" (Proverbs 15:13).
The inner state reaches the body: "A joyful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones" (Proverbs 17:22). "A tranquil heart gives life to the flesh" (Proverbs 14:30).
The body and the senses reach inward: "The light of the eyes rejoices the heart" (Proverbs 15:30). Bread "strengthen[s] man's heart" (Psalm 104:15). When the exhausted Egyptian had eaten, "his spirit revived" (1 Samuel 30:12).

The influence runs in more than one direction.

Shared between people

Finally, the inner person is not sealed inside one skin. "The soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David" (1 Samuel 18:1). "You are in our hearts, to die together and to live together" (2 Corinthians 7:3). "The full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul" (Acts 4:32). A heart can be stolen: "Absalom stole the hearts of the men of Israel" (2 Samuel 15:6). A spirit can be shared out: "I will take some of the Spirit that is on you and put it on them" (Numbers 11:17). I say more about this in Chapter 11.

What I take from this

Scripture speaks of one inner person, seen from several angles. Each word brings its own angle, and the rest of this narrative follows those angles one by one. In the verses, they are seldom pulled apart. The places where the Bible does draw a line between them are few, and they are important. I have kept those for Chapter 9.