It can be assumed that every atom of one’s being is summoned in these moments of crisis and revelation, so that all of one’s emotions are roused: sadness and anguish, love and joy, bitterness and confusion, delight and praise (Jer. 13:17; 1 Sam. 1:10; Ps. 31:8, 35:9; Song of Songs 1:7). The Bible makes prodigal use of human sentiments, preferring the idioms of pathos, poetry, song, and prayer to philosophical discourse. By gathering together the untidy array of human desires, it employs a volcanically emotive manner of speech, combining spontaneous, heart-felt effusions with moments of carefully scripted artifice. The balance between artlessness and artifice gives many of these texts a vitality and throbbing pulse that separates this stormier art from other more polished, cerebral styles.
Though there are numerous cases in which heart and soul touch and melt into one another, there are also boundaries drawn in the Bible. It seems, for example, that biblical writers assigned a special place to knowledge when speaking of the geography of heart: the heart, not the mind, is the dwelling place of human reason. Hence the author of the Psalms can pray that “the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart” will be acceptable to God (Ps. 19:14). If reason operates from the terrain of the heart, as this text implies, we can assume that human knowledge, in the biblical view, is undivided from the emotions and shares a kinship with them.
The Melodians’s classic song the “Rivers of Babylon” ruminates on this exact sentiment. When they pray that God will receive the words of their mouths and the meditation of their hearts, the song beautifully explores the tangled threads of knowledge and emotions in the Bible. Better than many academic exegetes, they capture the desolation of the Psalms, as well as their impossible dreams and hopes. In a wistful, plaintive key, the song pleads for justice and redemption in a world far away from home, somewhere in exile on the lonely shores of the river of Babylon, believing that the musings and ponderings of the heart will guide those in bondage to a land of freedom and truth. In the magic of such art, affect is subtly transformed into knowledge and knowledge into affect:
By the rivers of Babylon, where we sat down
And there we wept when we remembered Zion
Cause the wicked carried us away, captivity
Requiring of us a song
How shall we sing King Alpha’s song
In a strange land?7
Indeed, how shall we sing God’s song in a strange land? This is the question that has been the provocation and inspiration for a lot of black music in the Americas. In drawing on the biblical text, The Melodians saw themselves and their peoples through the predicament of the ancient Israelites, and they joined their melodies and prayers with the black Israelites in captivity and diaspora. By summoning the spirit of Moses and using the narratives of the Bible to confront the oppressive pharaohs of their age, reggae artists were faithful to Hebrew conceptions of redemption and justice. And they were faithful to the rebellious and melodious understanding of nephesh in the Psalms, its curious ability to achieve wisdom through the right ingredients of protest, passion, affection, melody, and cadence. What Bob Marley called a “soul rebel” (the title of Bob Marley’s 1970 studio album) belongs to this Hebrew bloodline of nephesh.8
In this world of the Psalms, then, the heart is capable of penetrating insights, so that human reason is never estranged from the passions and sentiments. A crucial biblical insight follows on the heels of this understanding, one that is key to my study: namely, that knowledge of the heart is accessible to all, educated or illiterate, lowly or highborn. In the biblical vision God makes wisdom lavishly open to everyone (and flagrantly, too, when it threatens the official scribes and priests). Since the Sinai covenant was established with all the Israelites, both the lettered and the unlettered, knowledge and obedience are enjoined on all; it is not a covenant made only with a philosophical or aristocratic elite. “And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thy heart; and thou shall teach them diligently to thy children” (Deut. 6:6–7).
Since it makes no discriminations between rank, class, or wealth, divine wisdom is widely disseminated in this tradition. If anything, the Hebrew God seeks out those barren of such distinctions and rescues them from oblivion and disregard (cf. Hannah’s prayer, 1 Sam. 2:7–8). In the biblical vision the heart of the humble person is more likely to be the bearer of wisdom than the puffed-up heart of the proud and powerful one. The heart is a conduit of a special kind of knowledge unlike anything the eye can see or ear can hear, a custodian of an ironical wisdom, as in this pivotal text when Samuel goes against convention to anoint Jesse’s youngest son, David: “And the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Look not to his appearance and to his lofty stature, for I have cast him aside [Jesse’s oldest son, Eliab]. For not as man sees does the Lord see. For man sees with the eyes and the Lord sees with the heart’” (1 Sam. 16:7). In the ways of the corrupt world, the firstborn will always inherit position and power, but the biblical God casts this preference aside and exalts the lowly, a transformation of great historic significance. In the prophetic tradition (as in this case of Samuel’s choice of David), the eyes of the seer—clouded over and blind to the world’s values—follow this intuitive vision of the heart, in which truth and justice are revolutionary and subversive of the status quo.
Isaiah puts it this way: “I dwell in a high and holy place, say the Lord, but with those who are contrite and humble in spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble and to revive the heart of the contrite” (Isa. 57:15). Though God comes from on high, he appears on the stage of human history among the simple and lowborn. And this message is central to the story of Exodus, in which God appears to Moses as a God of the oppressed slave. Though Moses was summoned to mountainous heights, he was assured that the God of his ancestors had seen the Israelites’ afflictions and heard their cries, and “therefore I have come down to rescue them from the power of the Egyptians” (Exod. 3:7–8).
In branding this memory of slavery on the soul of the Torah, the biblical authors demanded that its hearers and readers constantly revisit this sacred theophany, never allowing comfort or success to induce the stupor of forgetfulness. For our purposes, this means that the matter of soul in the Bible is represented in earthly shades and colors, in black and brown hues that are indicative of the struggles of the lowly. Any search for soul in the Bible must accordingly travel with the Israelites through these narratives of captivity and exile, cross the river Jordan, and always welcome the Other who comes in the form of the poor and enslaved. These circumstances and injunctions alone place the Hebrew concept of the soul at an infinite distance from Greek, aristocratic conceptions of the soul (whether the aristocracy of the hero, as in Homer, or the aristocracy of the philosopher, as in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle).
NEPHESH IN ITS NARRATIVE CONTEXT
The Inscrutability of God and Man in the Bible: The Shadows of Nephesh
Auerbach opens Mimesis, his extraordinary journey through Western literature, with a contrast between Homer and the Bible, the Greeks and the Jews. Though his subject is the story of literature from antiquity to the twentieth century, one of its key themes is the formative influence of biblical narrative