Merriam-Webster's online dictionary credits soul with the same, or at at least equivalent, meanings to those of the Blue Letter Bible site's cited source attributes to napheshStanJ said:The meaning of soul in Elizabethan English was 'life', not a metaphysical/spiritual being, and even today airline companies use the terminology 'souls on board' to determine how many living people are on the aircraft.
They are not referring to spiritual/metaphysical beings, they are referring to actual living human beings.
Soul is an English word that did not exist when the Bible was written and was greatly misused when the King James version was written as it had and ambiguity even then but made for this very misconception. The NIV is much more accurate than the KJV is in that and many other regards and your insistence on using the KJV just shows how little you understand of modern-day English and vernacular. Judaism teaches that the body and soul are separate yet indivisible partners in human life. This animating element is not, in early biblical tradition, separate from the body in life, nor does it possess any personality. As tripartite human beings made in the image of God we are Body Soul and Spirit. The soul is separated from the body at death and the spirit moves on to a special place whether it be paradise or hell. When Jesus returns at the resurrection our bodies will be reanimated with a life-giving soul and our bodies will be made immortal. The living soul is not a metonym or substitute word, it is an actual translation of the original Hebrew that describes our lives.
An English word cannot be a synonym of a Jewish word and this only shows not only your inability to understand English but your inability to understand any grammatical principles of any language.
Soul has addition meanings as does naphesh but in the case of the later they are dubious and for earlier they are not used in Scripture.
The meanings of soul may have changed over the last few centuries but I see nowhere in Scripture where that effected the message in which it is used.
Most of the difficulty in reading AV of the KJV comes from the fact it uses more formal equivalency than the NIV and not necessary the change in English.