the heart: a person's inner self, above all the mind that thinks and knows, and the self that either lifts itself up in pride or is brought low
This is the Aramaic word for "heart", and it turns up only in the Aramaic chapters of Daniel, eight times in all. It is the same word as the Hebrew לֵב, and it pictures the same thing: a hidden inner center where a person thinks, decides, and is measured. The Aramaic uses are far fewer, and they cluster tightly around thinking and around pride.
Its most striking use is an exchange. In Daniel the heart is something that can be taken from one owner and handed to another, and what changes hands is a whole reasoning nature:
- Nebuchadnezzar's heart is to be changed from a man's, and a beast's heart given to him instead (Daniel 4:16).
- Looking back on it, Daniel says the king's heart was made like the beasts' while he lived among wild donkeys (Daniel 5:21).
- In the vision of the four beasts, the first is set upright on two feet and given a man's heart (Daniel 7:4).
Exactly half the occurrences of the word are these. In them the heart is not feeling but reason, the thing that makes someone a person rather than an animal, and God is the one who takes it away and gives it back.
The other main use is the language of pride. A heart lifted high is an arrogant one, and in Daniel 5:20 it stands beside the word for a person's spirit or temper (רוּחַ), the two together naming Nebuchadnezzar's swelling self-importance. Belshazzar's failure, a chapter later, is that he has not made his own heart low even though he knew the story (Daniel 5:22).
Its plainer duties survive as well. It is where a king's own thoughts sit, next to the Aramaic word for those thoughts themselves (רַעְיוֹן) in Daniel 2:30, and it is where Daniel stores a vision he explains to nobody (Daniel 7:28). What an English reader should not expect from it is warmth. Affection and tenderness, the first things our word "heart" suggests, are not what this word is doing in Daniel.