@DickHarfield I know that ("I was using a historical-critical method"). Sometimes it takes more than a "page or a para", so do invest the time if you're going to make this kind of statement. It shows quite a misunderstanding of both the concept of inspiration (in much Christian theology) and how historical-critical biblical scholars think and work.

Does anybody know if it's true that ancient (take your pick, but pre-Greek at least) Israelites actually thought that cognition took place in the (physical) heart rather than the brain?

This seems to me a little ridiculous: somebody gets hit in the head, they get knocked out. They wake up, and they're confused. Nobody ever got confused after getting hit in the chest.

But this claim is made.

@Susan I don't know. But you can see this. :)

> In the Bible the heart, and not the brain, is revealed to be the center of thinking. For a long time science maintained a steady opposition to the Biblical standpoint, but modern psychologists are now slowly coming to find it necessary to revise their previous unbiblical findings in order to explain the facts of conscious life.

I think Oswald Chambers never talked to anybody after a heart transplant. (Granted, I've never talked to anybody after a brain transplant, but there's a reason for that...) Is he actually saying that?! I'm totally confused.

@Susan Is there really something called biblical psychology?

@PaulVargas I don't know, but if so I don't think it has anything to do with the (physical) heart.

@Susan You could try this; also the leb/lebab article in TDOT vol. 7. More to be said, but a bit on the hoof here. ;)

@PaulVargas At least, there's a section of SBL on Psychology and Biblical Studies which isn't quite the same thing! But the phrase does get used, as you've discovered.

@Susan That reminds me of Acts 1:18.

A brain-related question.

Oh! There are no questions about σπλάγχνα in the site.

@PaulVargas Do you know that it was actually that word, -- well, that root, the verb σπλαγχνίζομαι -- that made me decide to learn Greek? It was Matt 9:36:

> > Ιδὼν δὲ τοὺς ὄχλους, ἐσπλαγχνίσθη περὶ αὐτῶν, ὅτι ἦσαν ἐσκυλμένοι καὶ ἐρριμμένοι...

In addition to my special affinity for the gamma nasal, the word has an obscure English cognate "splanchnic" (an adjective that describes the nerves and vessels which supply the gut), and somehow the re-contextualization in the mouth of Jesus was just too wonderful not to learn more of this language.

@Davïd Fascinating.

I had actually just recently been trying to figure out why in the world Gen 32's sciatic gı̂d occasionally gets glossed "nerve" (nobody glosses it that way in Eze 37!.... and why would anyone attempt to avoid eating a nerve?), which the paper by North addresses....though I haven't quite figured out the answer yet.

I didn't even know what the ESV's "sinew" meant.

@Davïd I know different people have different ideas of what an inspired text is, along a continuum from wholly inerrant word-of-God to a vaguely "written by a man who was in some way inspired by God". However, as soon as we say the author was not a "free agent" and was obeying the will of God in what he wrote, it means that to truly understand the text from a historical-critical perspective I need to know the mind of God. I do not.

@Davïd Therefore if I am going to use the historical-critical method, I can only read texts on the assumption they were written by fallible men, for all the right reasons, guided by church teachings etc, but not by God.

@Davïd I may not now and perhaps never will be an expert on exactly how the best scholarship uses the method. However, I have at least studied what some eminent critical scholars do and how they do it. I have in my own library a couple of texts that explain how to use hermeneutic methods. One of these, that I can refer to when I wish, is Oeming's Contemporary Biblical Hermeneutics. You may have even better knowledge and resources on hermeneutics, including h-c method, but I have some knowldge.