Heart or intellect?
When these ancient texts say ‘heart’, it usually didn’t mean the same thing that we think when we hear that word.
In our culture, the heart is the seat of our emotions. It’s where we feel love, anger, sadness, and so on.
However, in the ancient world, the heart was the seat of our intellect. It was where we did our thinking, our planning, our decision making.
So when the Bible says ‘heart,’ it’s often not talking about our emotions. It’s talking about our intellect.
This completely ruins a lot of soppy greetings cards with Bible verses printed on them.
For example, when it says in Jeremiah 17:9 (according to the NIV) that:
‘The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?’
…it’s not talking about our feelings, but our thoughts. It probably means our capacity to deceive ourselves with rationalizations. In other words, our own thoughts deceive us.
Or when Luke 2:19 says this about Mary:
‘But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.’ (NIV)
Again, this is talking about her keeping these things in her mind, in her thoughts, not in her feelings in some soppy, romanticised way.
And so on.