Hearts and Reins

Introduction

Tell a churchgoer that his emotions sit in his kidneys, and the usual answer is a laugh. The look that follows says the speaker has lost his grip. Yet the people laughing are Bible readers, and the Bible they read says this very thing, over and over, in plain words.

Jeremiah 17:10

I Yahuah search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings.

Notice what the text does not say. Yahuah does not search the mind. He does not search the brain. He searches two places, the heart and the reins, and “reins” is simply the old English word for the kidneys. The laugh does not come from Scripture. It comes from a Greek picture of man that slipped into the church and has sat there so long that the Hebrew picture now sounds foolish.

This study traces that Hebrew picture from its words, through the Law and the Prophets, into the Greek writings, and out to its meaning for the believer. The thesis is simple. In Scripture, the heart is where a man thinks, decides, and holds the law that rules him. The reins and the bowels are where he feels what moves underneath. Neither one is the skull.

Part I — The Language of the Inward Man

Three Words for the Inside

The Hebrew Scriptures speak of the inner life through organs of the body. Three carry most of the weight.

לֵב (lev) — heart. Strong’s H3820. The inner man as a whole: understanding, thought, will, purpose, and decision. In Hebrew the heart is not a soft word for feelings. It is the command seat.

כִּלְיָה (kilyah) — kidneys, reins. Strong’s H3629. Rendered “reins” in the King James when it speaks of the inner life, from the Latin renes, kidneys. The hidden place of motive, grief, joy, and conscience.

מֵעִים (me’im) — bowels, inward parts. Strong’s H4578. The belly and gut. The place where pity, yearning, and distress are felt.

Here is the key. These are not poetic decorations laid over a modern map of the body. They are the map. The Hebrew Scriptures contain no word for the brain at all. Not once in the Law, the Prophets, or the Writings does a man think with his head.

The Loins Are a Different Word

Many readers fold the loins into this picture, but the loins belong to a different idea. The word for loins (mothnayim, H4975) speaks of strength, readiness, and offspring. A man “girds up his loins” to run or to fight (1 Kings 18:46; Job 38:3). Children come “out of the loins” of a father (Genesis 35:11). The loins carry power. The reins carry feeling. Keeping the two apart keeps the study clean.

Part II — The Old Testament Thread

The Heart Thinks and Decides

Every activity the modern world assigns to the mind, Scripture assigns to the heart.

Genesis 6:5

And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

Thoughts and imaginations live in the heart. “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he” (Proverbs 23:7). When Solomon asked for wisdom to rule, he asked for “an understanding heart to judge thy people, that I may discern between good and bad” (1 Kings 3:9). Moses told Israel that Yahuah had not yet given them “an heart to perceive” (Deuteronomy 29:4). Perceiving, understanding, discerning, and judging are all heart work.

That is why the heart must be guarded: “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life” (Proverbs 4:23). The heart is not where a man reacts. It is where he rules his life from.

The Heart Holds the Law

Because the heart is the seat of decision, it is the place where law is kept. Every man has a law in his heart. The only question is whose law it is.

Deuteronomy 6:6

And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart.

Psalm 37:31

The law of his God is in his heart; none of his steps shall slide.

Notice the order in Psalm 37:31. The law is in the heart first, and the steps follow. The Law is not filed away in the heart like papers in a drawer. It is placed where the deciding happens, so that it governs what the heart already does. Moses said the same: “The word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it” (Deuteronomy 30:14). The heart holds the word so the hands can do it.

The opposite is also true. A heart can be ruled by a man’s own law. Yahuah warned of the man who would “bless himself in his heart, saying, I shall have peace, though I walk in the imagination of mine heart” (Deuteronomy 29:19). A self-made law sits on the same throne. The heart is the seat of rule either way.

The Reins Feel and Are Searched

The reins carry what lies beneath the decision: the motive a man may not admit, the grief he cannot shake, the joy he did not plan, and the counsel that comes in the dark before it has words.

Psalm 73:21

Thus my heart was grieved, and I was pricked in my reins.

Psalm 16:7

I will bless Yahuah, who hath given me counsel: my reins also instruct me in the night seasons.

Proverbs 23:16

Yea, my reins shall rejoice, when thy lips speak right things.

The reins can be wounded. Job says, “he cleaveth my reins asunder” (Job 16:13), and Jeremiah mourns that Yahuah “hath caused the arrows of his quiver to enter into my reins” (Lamentations 3:13). The reins were also formed by Yahuah from the start: “For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13).

Most of all, the reins are searched. David prays, “Examine me, O Yahuah, and prove me; try my reins and my heart” (Psalm 26:2). Jeremiah calls on “Yahuah of hosts, that judgest righteously, that triest the reins and the heart” (Jeremiah 11:20; compare 20:12). Of the hypocrite, he says Yahuah is “near in their mouth, and far from their reins” (Jeremiah 12:2). Think about that. A man can speak Yahuah’s name all day while the place that actually moves him has never been touched.

The Bowels Yearn

The bowels carry the same kind of weight, especially pity and distress. Jeremiah cries out, “My bowels, my bowels! I am pained at my very heart” (Jeremiah 4:19). Isaiah says, “My bowels shall sound like an harp for Moab” (Isaiah 16:11). And when Joseph saw his brother Benjamin after many years:

Genesis 43:30

And Joseph made haste; for his bowels did yearn upon his brother: and he sought where to weep; and he entered into his chamber, and wept there.

Feeling, in Scripture, is located in the gut, not the chest. The modern picture of the heart as the home of emotion is not a Hebrew picture at all.

The Reins on the Altar

The Law gives the kidneys a special place in worship. In the peace offering, the two kidneys and the fat upon them were removed and burned on the altar.

Leviticus 3:4-5

And the two kidneys, and the fat that is on them, which is by the flanks, and the caul above the liver, with the kidneys, it shall he take away. And Aaron’s sons shall burn it on the altar upon the burnt sacrifice.

The instruction is repeated for every kind of peace offering (Leviticus 3:10, 15), and the chapter closes, “all the fat is Yahuah’s” (Leviticus 3:16). The same parts went up at the consecration of the priests (Exodus 29:13, 22). The worshipper ate of his peace offering, but the kidneys were never his. The seat of a man’s hidden motives was the portion that belonged to Yahuah alone. The offering pictured what Yahuah asks of His people: not only the outward act, but the inward part that drives it.

Part III — The Greek Word Enters

A Fourth Word in the Great Command

Yahushua named the first and greatest commandment, and He took it straight from the Torah.

Deuteronomy 6:5

And thou shalt love Yahuah thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.

Three words stand in the Torah: heart (lev), soul (nephesh), and might (me’od). When the Gospels record the same command in Greek, a fourth word appears.

Matthew 22:37

Thou shalt love Yahuah thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.

Matthew reads heart, soul, and mind. Mark reads heart, soul, mind, and strength (Mark 12:30), and Luke follows Mark (Luke 10:27). The added word is the Greek dianoia.

διάνοια (dianoia) — mind, understanding. Strong’s G1271. Literally “thinking through.” The faculty of reasoning, treated by Greek thought as its own seat, apart from the heart.

Greek thought had cut reasoning away from the heart and needed a separate place to put it. Hebrew never did, because the heart already reasoned. A Hebrew hearer of Deuteronomy 6:5 heard the mind inside the word “heart.” A Greek hearer needed it spelled out. As supporting evidence, some Greek copies of the Torah rendered “heart” in Deuteronomy 6:5 itself as dianoia. The word entered by translation, to carry Hebrew meaning into a Greek ear.

Inward Parts Become Mind

The clearest example sits in the new covenant promise itself.

Jeremiah 31:33

I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.

Hebrews 8:10

I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts; and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people.

The Hebrew word Jeremiah used for “inward parts” is qereb (H7130), the middle, the inside of the body. In Hebrews, the same promise reads “mind” (dianoia). Hebrews 10:16 quotes it again and keeps the same word. Here is the key: where a Greek reader sees a promise about the intellect, the prophet was speaking of the inside of the man, the same region as the reins and the bowels. Yahuah promised to write His Law where a man decides, and to set it where a man feels.

The Hebrew Picture Survives in the Greek

The Greek writings did not lose the Hebrew map. They kept it in many places. Paul longs after the believers “in the bowels of Yahushua Messiah” (Philippians 1:8) and calls them to put on “bowels of mercies” (Colossians 3:12). John warns against the man who “shutteth up his bowels of compassion” from a brother in need (1 John 3:17). The Greek word there, splanchna, is the same gut-centered word, carrying the same Hebrew sense of yearning pity.

And when Yahushua speaks to the assembly at Thyatira, He uses the kidneys, not the mind:

Revelation 2:23

And all the churches shall know that I am he which searcheth the reins and hearts: and I will give unto every one of you according to your works.

The Greek word for reins there is nephros, the kidneys. Yahushua could have said He searches minds. He did not. He spoke as a Hebrew, in the words of Jeremiah 17:10.

Revelation 2:23 Is Not a Trinity Text

Trinitarian teachers set Jeremiah 17:10, where Yahuah searches heart and reins, beside Revelation 2:23, where the Son says the same, and conclude that the Son is Yahuah. The book answers the claim in its first line: it is “the Revelation of Yahushua Messiah, which God gave unto him” (Revelation 1:1). The same letter to Thyatira closes with the Son speaking of His authority, “even as I received of my Father” (Revelation 2:27). And Yahushua said plainly, “For the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son” (John 5:22). The Son searches the reins because the Father gave Him the judgment, not because He is the Father. A sent judge carries the authority of the one who sent him. He does not become him.

Part IV — What This Means

The Pulpit’s Head-and-Heart Split

The modern pulpit inherited the Greek split and built on it. The heart is taught as the place of feelings and the head as the place of thinking, and the believer is caught in a running contest between the two. One sermon says “follow your heart.” The next says “don’t let your emotions lead, use your head.” Both sayings rest on a Greek picture of man. Neither one is a Hebrew sentence.

Scripture’s pair is different. It is heart and reins: the decision, and the motive beneath it. Yahuah does not referee a contest between feeling and thinking. He searches both the place where a man rules his life and the place where he is moved, and He judges what He finds in each.

The Deceitful Heart and Its Remedy

Jeremiah 17:9 is quoted in nearly every church: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” It is usually left there, as if the answer were to stop trusting feelings and start trusting the intellect. But verse 10 answers verse 9 at once: Yahuah knows it, because He searches the heart and tries the reins. The remedy Scripture offers is never a better brain.

Ezekiel 36:26-27

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.

Notice the order. The new heart comes first, as a gift. The walk in the statutes follows. This is the pattern of the whole of Scripture: deliverance through the Messiah opens the way, and the Law written in the new heart becomes the walk. The heart that once held a man’s own law now holds Yahuah’s, and the steps follow the heart, just as Psalm 37:31 said they would.

The Knot in the Stomach

A man who had broken with his sister could not rest. A knot sat in his stomach and would not leave until he went and mended the break. He gave the credit for that pull to the Spirit, and rightly so. But the picture Scripture gives for what happened inside him is exact.

His heart held the command: “Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart … thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am Yahuah” (Leviticus 19:17-18). His gut pressed until he obeyed it. That is Joseph’s yearning bowels in a modern man. It is Jeremiah 31:33 working as written: the Law written in the heart gave the verdict, and the inward parts would not let him settle until the verdict was kept. He felt the wrong in his gut before he could name the verse it broke.

Conclusion

Scripture searches two places, and neither of them is the skull. The heart thinks, decides, and holds the law that rules the man, whether that law is his own or Yahuah’s. The reins and the bowels carry what moves underneath: grief, joy, yearning, and the hidden motive. The kidneys went up on the altar because the inward man belongs to Yahuah, and the new covenant promise is that He will write His Law in both places.

The word “mind” entered the conversation through Greek, and the pulpit built a contest of head against heart on top of it. The Hebrew Scriptures never staged that contest. A believer who says his feelings sit in his kidneys is not confused. He is reading his Bible.