Some believe the ideas or definitions that most english speaking people have on the word “soul” are not in agreement with the meaning of the Hebrew and Greek words as used by the inspired Bible writers and they have done research and study and seen this fact steadily gain wider acknowledgment. Like back in 1897, in the Journal of Biblical Literature (Vol. XVl, p. 30), Professor C. A. Briggs, as a result of detailed analysis of the use of nephesh, observed: “Soul in English usage at the present time conveys usually a very different meaning from nephesh in Hebrew, and it is easy for the incautious reader to misinterpret.”
More recently, when The Jewish Publication Society of America issued a new translation of the Torah, or first five books of the Bible, the editor-in-chief, H. M. Orlinsky of Hebrew Union College, stated that the word “soul” had been virtually eliminated from this translation because, “the Hebrew word in question here is ‘Nefesh.’” He added: “Other translators have interpreted it to mean ‘soul,’ which is completely inaccurate. The Bible does not say we have a soul. ‘Nefesh’ is the person himself, his need for food, the very blood in his veins, his being.” (The New York Times, October 12, 1962) So the editor-in-chief, H. M. Orlinsky of Hebrew Union College, is saying the flesh and blood human being who needs to eat food, drink water and breathe oxygen is a soul. He isn't saying that the soul is some invisible or immortal person inside the human body that separates at death.
The origin of the teaching that the human soul is invisible and immortal doesn't come from the Hebrew or Christian Greek Scriptures, but from ancient Greek philosophy, which is pagan religious thought. Greek philosopher Plato, for example, quotes Socrates as saying: “The soul, . . . if it departs pure, dragging with it nothing of the body, . . . goes away into that which is like itself, into the invisible, divine, immortal, and wise, and when it arrives there it is happy, freed from error and folly and fear . . . and all the other human ills, and . . . lives in truth through all after time with the gods.”(Phaedo, 80, D, E; 81, A)
In direct contrast with the Greek teaching of the
Greek word psykhe (soul) as being immaterial, intangible, invisible, and immortal, the Scriptures show that both the Greek word psykhe(soul) and the Hebrew word nephesh(soul) as used with reference to earthly creatures, refer to that which is material, tangible, visible, and mortal. The scriptures don't teach that the soul is some invisible or immortal person inside the human body or that it separates from the body at death.
The
New Catholic Encyclopedia says:
“Nepes [
neʹphesh] is a term of far greater extension than our ‘soul,’ signifying life (
Exodus 21.23; Deuteronomy 19.21) and its various vital manifestations: breathing (
Genesis 35.18; Job 41.13[21]), blood [
Genesis 9.4; Deuteronomy 12.23; Psalm 140(141).8], desire (
2 Samuel 3.21; Proverbs 23.2). The soul in the Old Testament means not a part of man, but the whole man, man as a living being. Similarly, in the New Testament it signifies human life: the life of an individual, conscious subject (
Matthew 2.20; 6.25; Luke 12.22-23; 14.26; John 10.11, 15, 17; 13.37).”(1967, Vol. XIII, p. 467)
The Roman Catholic translation, The New American Bible, in its “Glossary of Biblical Theology Terms” (pp. 27, 28), says: “In the New Testament, to ‘save one’s soul’ (
Mark 8:35) does not mean to save some ‘spiritual’ part of man, as opposed to his ‘body’ (in the Platonic sense) but the whole person with emphasis on the fact that the person is living, desiring, loving and willing, etc., in addition to being concrete and physical.”(Edition published by P. J. Kenedy & Sons, New York, 1970)
At Ecclesiastes 12:7 the Hebrew word ruach or the Greek word pneuma translated spirit isn't the same as the Hebrew word nephesh and the Greek word psykhe which is translated soul. So Ecclesiastes 12:7 isn't saying the, nephesh or psykhe both being translated soul, is leaving the body, Ecclesiastes 12:7 is saying that ruach(spirit) or pneuma(spirit) is leaving the body but also we have to understand that Ecclesiastes 3:19 shows us that both animals and humans have the same spirit.(ruach or pneuma) So the spirit that returns to God isn't some invisible immortal person.
