‘Soul’ in the Bible

Extract

‘Soul’ has come to be almost exclusively a religious word in modern languages, like ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ and ‘prayer’. The soul is something which people beheve in or do not believe in, like God. It is thought of as an important but highly mysterious part of a human being, which it is the aim of the Christian religion to save. We talk about the salvation of souls, but not of bodies or minds or even of people, because ‘bodies’, ‘minds', and ‘people’ are profane every-day concepts shared by believers and unbelievers alike. No one would dream of saying they believed or did not beheve in the body, the mind, or people, because they are all more or less evident phenomena of which we all have experience. Soul is not an evident phenomenon, but a mysterious hypothesis which rehgious people believe in and others often do not.