the living self: a person or creature as a breathing, needy, feeling whole, and so by extension their life, their longing, and their very self.
This is one of the great hard-to-pin-down words of the Hebrew Bible. Its oldest concrete sense is the throat or neck, the part of the body through which a creature breathes and swallows, and almost everything the word later means grows out of that picture.
- The throat takes in breath, so it stands for the life that breath carries.
- The throat hungers and thirsts, so it stands for appetite, craving, and desire.
- The throat is where strong feeling rises and catches, so it stands for the inner life that loves, grieves, and longs.
From there the word widens to name the whole living being. A creature that breathes is a living self, so the word can mean simply "a person," "a life," "an animal," even a count of how many people there are. When the self is at risk, it is one's life that can be lost or rescued. And because the word can stand for the whole person, it also works as a plain way of saying myself, yourself, themselves.
The crucial thing for a modern reader is that this is not, in the great majority of its uses, a separate spiritual part trapped inside the body. Hebrew does not divide a person into a body plus a soul. It names the living creature as a single breathing, hungering, feeling whole. The same phrase used of the first human, a living being, is used of fish and cattle, and the word can even cover a dead body. So when English Bibles say soul, they almost always mean the whole self, not an immortal inner ghost.
There is one live debate at the edges of this range. A handful of texts speak of this self going out at death and being brought back, or being kept from and rescued out of the realm of the dead, and some scholars now argue that in certain ritual and folk settings ancient Israelites did picture it as something that could leave the body. The everyday meaning stays firmly the whole living person, but those harder passages keep the question open.