“And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.” (Deuteronomy 6:6, ESV)
Semitic languages and customs are fascinating. The more we study the cultures of the Easter world, the more we come to find out that our perspectives on life are claustrophobically small. One of these areas is on our western understanding of “the heart”, especially in passages like Deuteronomy 6:6. A Western mind reads this verse and imagines God’s commands to be residing in the emotional seat of our psyche, but when Israelites meditated on the same passage and the word Hebrew lebab (rather than “heart” in English), their interpretation was of the intellectual seat of our psyche. The Hebrew word lebab refers to the part of the mind responsible for insight and critical judgement. When Moses gave The Law for the second time, he was not calling for the Israelites’ emotions to be affected by God’s commands. No, more fundamentally, Moses was commanding the peoples’ way of thinking to be under the weight of God’s law.
Let your light shine!