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“with all your heart”

Hebrew Old Testament Deuteronomy 6:5

Hebrew lēb refers to the inner person as a whole — thought, will, desire, intention, and emotion are not separated as they are in modern Western categories. Lēb is not primarily 'the mind' in a modern cognitive sense, nor is it purely emotional — it encompasses the entire inner life. Hebrew anthropology distributed some emotional functions to other organs (me'eh, kilyot) but lēb itself was the integrative inner centre. 'Love the LORD with all your heart' calls for the engagement of the whole person, not 'mind' versus 'feeling.'

The word itself

לֵב lēb

Lexicon citation

HALOT s.v. לֵב (lēb): heart, mind, will, understanding, inner person. The Hebrew heart encompasses thought and intention; emotional centre was located lower in the body.

Hebrew anatomy of the inner life

Modern English speakers locate emotion in the heart and reason in the head. This is a specific cultural anatomy, not a universal one. Hebrew thought distributed the inner life differently:

Inner facultyHebrew wordBody location
Reason, will, decisionlēb (לֵב) — heartChest
Strong emotion (compassion, love)me’eh (מֵעֶה) — bowelsAbdomen
Conscience, deepest intentionkilyot (כִּלְיוֹת) — kidneysLower back

When the Hebrew Bible says God “tests the heart and kidneys” (Jeremiah 17:10), it means God examines both the rational decisions and the deepest moral intentions. When it says someone is “moved in their bowels” (the same root in Greek as splanchna), it describes deep emotional response.

HALOT s.v. lēb documents the Hebrew heart’s range: heart, mind, will, understanding, inner person. The translation work English does between heart-as-emotion and mind-as-thought is not how the Hebrew language is constructed.

The Shema

Deuteronomy 6:4-5 (BSB) — the Shema:

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is One. Love the LORD your God with all your heart [lēb] and with all your soul [nephesh] and with all your strength [me’od].

The three faculties together cover the whole person:

  • lēb — mind, will, decision (the reasoning self)
  • nephesh — soul, life-breath (the living self)
  • me’od — strength, muchness (the resourced self)

To love God with all of these is to engage the whole person, with the lēb primarily naming the cognitive-volitional centre.

Jesus’s adaptation in Mark 12

Mark 12:29-30 (BSB) — Jesus quotes the Shema:

“The most important commandment is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is One. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’”

Jesus adds a fourth element — dianoia (mind, understanding) — that is not in the Hebrew of Deuteronomy 6:5. Why?

The standard explanation: when the Hebrew lēb was translated into Greek, the Greek kardia (heart) had already absorbed both the cognitive sense (which Hebrew lēb primarily carries) and the emotional sense (which Hebrew lēb did not primarily carry, but which Greek and later usage attached to the heart). The Greek translator then added dianoia (mind/understanding) to recover the cognitive dimension that kardia alone might leave ambiguous.

The expansion, in other words, is Jesus or the gospel tradition restoring in Greek what the Hebrew lēb had carried alone.

What gets lost in modern usage

When “love the LORD with all your heart” is heard in modern English as a call to emotional warmth — fervent feeling, devotional ardour — the Hebrew sense recedes. The Hebrew commandment is to engage the whole person — mind, will, decision, life-breath, strength — not primarily to feel a particular way.

This does not exclude emotion. The whole person includes the emotions. But the primary content of lēb-based love is rational, deliberate, intentional engagement, not sentiment.