yetser

This is the down-to-earth sense of the word, rooted in the picture of a potter at his wheel. The verb behind it means to form or shape, and this noun names what comes off the wheel: the thing that has been made.

The Bible uses it three ways at this concrete end. It can name a manufactured object held up to ridicule, as when a prophet calls a cast metal idol a mere "thing made" that its own maker foolishly trusts. It can name a clay pot, in the absurd image of the pot talking back to the potter who shaped it. And, most movingly, it can name the human being as a formed thing: Psalm 103 says God knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, echoing the opening of Genesis where God shapes the first human out of the ground.

What ties these together is the relationship between a maker and the made. The word keeps the reader's eye on the fact that the object did not make itself. That is why it lends itself both to mocking an idol (a made thing that cannot save) and to comforting a frail person (a made thing whose Maker has not forgotten how fragile he built it).

By a natural stretch, the same word that names a thing shaped by hand comes to name a thing shaped in the mind: a plan, a purpose, the habitual cast of someone's thinking. An old description put it well: thoughts (מחשׁבה) are things formed in the heart (לב). The image moves inward, from the potter's lump to the inner shaping the heart now does for itself.

It is important to see that the word by itself is morally neutral. It simply names which way a person is inwardly bent, and the text has to tell you whether that bent is good or bad. In the flood story it is paired with the word for "evil," so the human heart's bent is condemned as evil from youth. But the very same word is used for a praiseworthy frame of mind: a king prays that God would keep the people's inner intent fixed on him, and a prophet promises peace to the mind that stays steadfastly trusting. The good and the bad uses sit side by side, which is the strongest evidence that the negative color in the flood story comes from its surroundings, not from this word.

Readers should be careful here. Later Jewish tradition turned this word into a technical name for an "evil impulse" wrestling inside every person, and Christian readers have sometimes found a doctrine of inborn corruption in the Genesis verses. Both are reading a much later, fuller idea back into a modest Hebrew word that, on its own, just means "the inward bent a person has," for better or worse.