Sense: Heart (center)
n. — the middle area of something understood as its heart; often referring to something that has depth, such as the sea.
Your rowers have brought you into great waters; The east wind has broken you In the heart (לֵב) of the seas.
Ezekiel 27:26 (NASB)
Translations are not always uniform in the way that they render metaphors. Today’s example may not in itself be exegetically significant, but it serves to illustrate the issue. In the verse above, the word לֵב, often rendered as “heart,” can refer to the middle of something, like the seas. When this word refers to the middle of something, the NASB is fairly uniform rendering it as “heart.” However, in two places in Proverbs the word is rendered as “middle” (23:34, 30:19). So if you wanted to see every time the word לֵב referred to the middle of something, an English search of the NASB would miss these two occurrences. Yet a Hebrew search for לֵב would give results for all the other meanings of this word as well, which are quite numerous. But the Bible Sense Lexicon can capture just the times לֵב refers to the middle of something. When dealing with a sense label, it is possible to avoid choosing between the literal rendering “heart” and the metaphorical rendering “middle,” as translations must. Can you think of other more significant issues like this to compare the Bible Sense Lexicon with your preferred translation?
What is the Bible Sense Lexicon?
Sense of the Day is based on content from Logos’ Bible Sense Lexicon, which organizes biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek words by meaning based on a variety of semantic relationships. Sense of the Day provides examples of senses in context, along with insight into their application for theology and interpretation.
The Bible Sense Lexicon is a Logos dataset available in Logos 5 Gold and higher base packages. If you’re enrolled in the Logos Academic Discount Program, you can also find the Bible Sense Lexicon in the Biblical Languages base package. Take your studies even further by exploring semantic domains, engaging the biblical text like never before.
Learn more about the Bible Sense Lexicon.