the heart: the hidden inner self where a person thinks, wants, and decides, named by the rarer of Hebrew's two words for heart and used mostly of the hearts God searches
Hebrew has two words for the heart, and this is the rare one. It turns up seven times, all of them in poetry: five in Proverbs and Psalms, one in Ezekiel. Like the common word (לֵב), it does not mean the seat of feeling that English "heart" suggests. It names the hidden inner person: what someone actually thinks, wants, and intends, as against what they say or show.
Five of the seven uses share one striking pattern, and in every one of them God is the one looking. The verbs come from the metal trade and the marketplace, testing and weighing, and what they test is human hearts, in the plural:
- The LORD tests hearts the way a furnace tests silver and gold (Proverbs 17:3).
- The LORD weighs hearts, whatever a person judges about his own way (Proverbs 21:2).
- The one who weighs hearts sees through the excuse that we did not know (Proverbs 24:12).
- If the world of the dead lies open before the LORD, human hearts certainly do (Proverbs 15:11).
- A righteous God tests hearts along with the kidneys (כִּלְיָה), the still deeper seat of the secret self (Psalm 7:9).
The two remaining uses look at the same inner self from the person's own side. Psalm 125:4 asks God to do good to those who are straight in their hearts, so the word carries a person's honesty and settled direction. Ezekiel 16:30 turns it toward appetite: the prophet says the heart of the unfaithful city has gone weak, a picture of craving that nothing satisfies. That verse is also the one place where scholars are not sure the word here is "heart" at all.
Nuances
Whether לִבָּתֵךְ in Ezekiel 16:30 is the noun לִבָּה "heart" or a homonymous noun meaning "rage", compared with Akkadian libbatu, which would make the clause an expression of divine fury rather than a description of the woman's inner state.
- majorityThe form is the noun "heart", with אֲמֻלָה taken from the root meaning to languish or be weak, yielding "how weak is your heart" as a comment on insatiable desire.; BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), 525, s.v. לִבָּה; David J. A. Clines, ed., Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (DCH) IV, 509, s.v. לִבָּה
- minorityThe form belongs to a distinct noun cognate with Akkadian libbatu "rage", so the clause reports the LORD's anger rather than the woman's failing heart.; HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner-Stamm), s.v. לִבָּה