Chapter 8
Have you ever felt something that your body couldn’t explain?
I don’t mean the ache in your back after a long day. I don’t mean the growl in your stomach when you’ve skipped lunch. I mean the deeper ache—the one that hits you at two in the morning when everything is quiet and you lie awake longing for something you can hardly name. A hunger for God. A grief that goes beyond tears. A cry from somewhere inside you that the word “body” doesn’t quite capture.
The writers of the Psalms knew that feeling. And they had a word for it. They called it the nephesh—the soul.
In this chapter, we turn to six passages from the Psalms and Isaiah that open a window into what I’m calling the interior life of the human person. These texts don’t talk about the soul departing the body at death (we covered that in Chapter 6). They don’t talk about the soul in Sheol (that was Chapter 7). Instead, they describe something just as important for the body-soul question: the soul as the seat of desire, longing, anguish, and spiritual experience. The soul as the part of you that reaches toward God when your body is exhausted, broken, or failing. The soul as something with its own interior weather—its own thirst, its own groaning, its own restlessness—that cannot be reduced to brain chemistry or physical processes.
The six passages we will examine are Psalm 6:3, Psalm 31:9, Psalm 42:1–2, Psalm 44:25, Psalm 63:1, and Isaiah 26:9. Together they paint a portrait of the nephesh as an experiencing subject—a center of consciousness, emotion, and desire that is consistently distinguished from the body in the text itself. In several of these passages, the psalmist names the soul and the body side by side, attributing different experiences to each. That matters enormously. If the soul is just another word for the whole person, as the physicalist claims, why would the biblical writers keep drawing this distinction?
Every single one of these passages was ignored by Edward Fudge in The Fire That Consumes. All six. He never discussed them. He never listed them. He never engaged with the way the Psalms portray the soul as a distinct seat of interior experience.1 That silence matters. Fudge built his anthropology largely on word-study arguments about nephesh—claiming that the word simply means “whole person” or “life.”2 But these passages use nephesh in a way that his word-study approach cannot explain. They describe a soul that longs, thirsts, trembles, and aches—and they describe it as something other than the body.
That is the story these six passages tell. And it’s a story that deserves to be heard.
Text (NKJV): “My soul also is greatly troubled; but You, O Lord—how long?”
Psalm 6 is a psalm of desperate prayer. David is sick. He is broken. He begs God to heal him, crying out, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I am weak; O Lord, heal me, for my bones are troubled” (v. 2). His bones ache. His body is failing. And then he adds something more: “My soul also is greatly troubled.”3
Notice the word also. It’s easy to skim right past it. But it carries real weight. David has already told us that his bones are troubled—that his physical body is in pain. Then he says, “My nephesh (soul) also is greatly troubled.” The word also adds the soul’s distress on top of the body’s distress. It treats the soul’s trouble as something in addition to the body’s trouble—not as a restatement of it.4
This is a problem for the physicalist reading. If nephesh simply means “the whole person” or “me,” then verse 3 is just saying, “I also am troubled.” But that would be oddly redundant after verse 2, where David has already told us his bones are troubled. Of course he is troubled—he just told us his body is in agony. The word also makes no sense unless the nephesh is picking out something distinct from the bones.5 David is saying: my body hurts, and my soul is in anguish too. Two dimensions of one person, both suffering—but distinguishable.
The Hebrew verb behind “greatly troubled” is bahal, which means to be shaken, terrified, or thrown into confusion.6 It’s the kind of inner turmoil that goes beyond physical pain. Bones can ache. But the soul trembles with a different kind of distress—the kind that involves dread, confusion, the desperate question: “How long, O Lord?” That question is not a bodily response. It is the cry of a conscious inner self reaching toward God in the dark.
John Cooper, in Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, acknowledges that Hebrew anthropological terms sometimes function as synecdoche—where a part-word stands for the whole person. “My nephesh cries out” can sometimes simply mean “I cry out.”7 But Cooper also warns against overapplying this principle. Some scholars, he writes, seem to imply in “fits of antidualist enthusiasm” that all instances of Old Testament anthropological terms are cases of synecdoche.8 He points out that the variety of linguistic usage in the Old Testament defies any simple generalization. Hebrew words for body parts, soul, and spirit do sometimes refer to the whole person. But they also often pick out genuine parts, aspects, or dimensions of the person. Psalm 6:2–3 is precisely such a case. The bones and the nephesh are not interchangeable here. They carry different experiences. They point to different dimensions of David’s suffering.
The physicalist might respond that David is simply using poetic parallelism—saying the same thing in two different ways for literary effect. But that reading stumbles on the word also, which adds something new rather than restating what has already been said.9 Hebrew parallelism does not always mean exact synonymy. As James Kugel has argued, the second line of a poetic couplet frequently advances or deepens the thought of the first.10 In this case, David moves from the physical to the interior—from bone pain to soul anguish—and the force of the passage depends on recognizing that these are different.
There is another dimension worth noticing. When David says “my soul is greatly troubled,” he is not reporting a medical symptom. He is reporting an experience that belongs to the category of consciousness—the felt sense of dread, confusion, and spiritual anguish. The bones can ache because of disease or injury; the medical explanation is straightforward. But what is the physicalist explanation for soul-trouble? If the soul is just a word for the whole person, then “my soul is troubled” reduces to “I am troubled”—and the rich, layered portrait David paints collapses into a single flat statement. The dualist reading preserves the depth. David’s body hurts. And something deeper than his body—the immaterial center of who he is—is also shaken. Both are real. Both are his. But they are not the same thing.
Fudge’s Treatment: Fudge does not discuss Psalm 6:3 anywhere in The Fire That Consumes. This passage, which distinguishes the soul’s trouble from the body’s trouble within the same two-verse unit, is entirely absent from his analysis. Given that Fudge’s anthropological case rests heavily on the claim that nephesh just means “the whole person,” the omission is significant.11
Text (NKJV): “Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I am in trouble; my eye wastes away with grief, yes, my soul and my body!”
Psalm 31 is another psalm of desperate prayer. David is surrounded by enemies, consumed by sorrow. In verse 9 he describes the toll this is taking on him—and the way he describes it is remarkable. He names three things that are wasting away: his eye, his nephesh (soul), and his beten (a word that can mean “belly,” “body,” or “inner parts”).12
What catches our attention is that David lists the soul and the body as a pair. “My soul and my body” waste away together. He does not say “I am wasting away,” though he could have. He does not say “my whole self is wasting away.” He names two things: the soul and the body. And he says both of them are wasting away under the weight of his grief.
This kind of language is hard to explain on a purely physicalist reading. If nephesh is just a synonym for the whole person, then “my nephesh and my body” would be saying something like “myself and my body”—which is peculiar, because on physicalism, your self is your body.13 On substance dualism, the language makes perfect sense: David is a composite being—body and soul—and both dimensions of his person are suffering.
The Hebrew word beten is illuminating here. Cooper notes that the Hebrews spoke frequently of the inner parts of the body—the stomach, liver, bowels, kidneys, and heart—as locations of conscious experience.14 What is striking about this vocabulary is that the Hebrews did not draw a sharp line between the physical organ and the subjective experience associated with it. The kidneys could “rejoice” (Prov. 23:16). The heart could “know” (Prov. 14:10). This is the language of an embodied people for whom body and soul were deeply intertwined—but not identical. The fact that David can name the nephesh alongside the beten as two aspects of himself that are wasting away presupposes that they are distinguishable, even if they are closely related.
J. P. Moreland makes a helpful philosophical point here. On substance dualism, the body and the soul are united in a deeply integrated way during earthly life. They are not two ships passing in the night. They affect each other constantly. When the body suffers, the soul feels it. When the soul is anguished, the body shows it. David’s language in Psalm 31:9 captures exactly this picture: two dimensions of one person, both groaning under the same burden, yet distinguishable enough to name separately.15
The broader context of Psalm 31 strengthens this reading. Just a few verses earlier, David declared, “Into Your hand I commit my spirit” (Ps. 31:5)—the very words Jesus would echo from the cross (Luke 23:46). We examined that verse in Chapter 6. It depicts the spirit as something that can be entrusted to God, handed over to His care—language that implies the spirit is a real, personal entity that God can receive.16 When we reach verse 9 of the same psalm, the soul and body are named as a pair. The psalm is soaked in the language of body-soul duality, even though it is also deeply holistic in its depiction of David’s total suffering. Holism and dualism are not enemies. David is one person. But he is a person composed of distinguishable dimensions.
Fudge’s Treatment: Fudge does not discuss Psalm 31:9 in The Fire That Consumes. He does briefly reference Psalm 31:5 (“Into Your hand I commit my spirit”), but he passes over verse 9 entirely—the very verse in the same psalm that explicitly pairs soul and body as distinguishable aspects of the person.17 This is a telling omission. Fudge engages the verse about the spirit being committed to God but ignores the verse—just four verses later—that puts the soul and the body side by side as two things that are both wasting away. One suspects the reason is that Psalm 31:9 does not fit the framework Fudge has adopted. If nephesh is just another word for “person,” then the pairing of soul and body in this verse is awkward. Better to skip it and move on.
Text (NKJV): “As the deer pants for the water brooks, so pants my soul for You, O God. My soul thirsts for the living God; when shall I come and appear before God?”
This is one of the most beloved passages in all of Scripture. It is also one of the most anthropologically revealing.
The image is vivid. A deer, desperate with thirst, races toward the water. Its tongue is dry. Its legs are trembling. Every instinct drives it toward the stream. That, says the psalmist, is what my nephesh does when it reaches for God.18
The Hebrew word for “pants” here is ’arag, which means to long for, to yearn, to strain toward something with desperate intensity.19 It carries the sense of gasping—like a runner who can barely catch her breath. And what does the soul gasp for? Not food. Not shelter. Not physical safety. The soul thirsts for God. For the living God. The desire is spiritual, relational, intensely personal. It is the cry of a conscious self that knows it was made for communion with its Creator and cannot rest until that communion is found.
The physicalist reads this and says: that’s just poetry. The psalmist is saying “I long for God,” and he’s using nephesh as a synonym for “myself.” Fair enough—synecdoche is possible. But consider what the passage actually describes. The soul is portrayed as the seat of a specific kind of experience: spiritual longing. It thirsts not for water but for God. The desire is explicitly contrasted with physical need by the metaphor itself—the deer’s physical thirst illustrates the soul’s spiritual thirst. The comparison works precisely because the soul’s longing is like physical thirst but is not physical thirst. It is something deeper.20
Psalm 42 continues with one of the most psychologically transparent passages in the Psalter. In verses 5 and 11 (repeated in Ps. 43:5), the psalmist speaks to his own soul: “Why are you cast down, O my soul? And why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God, for I shall yet praise Him.”21 The psalmist addresses his soul as though it were a conscious companion—a distressed inner self that he can exhort, reason with, and encourage. He does not say, “Why am I sad?” He says, “Why are you cast down, O my nephesh?” This is the language of self-reflection, and it presupposes a degree of interior complexity that is hard to explain on strict physicalism.22
Moreland and Rickabaugh argue that experiences like self-reflection—the ability to step back from your own emotional state and evaluate it—point to the existence of an immaterial self that is not reducible to brain states.23 When the psalmist says, “Why are you cast down, O my soul?” he is exercising exactly this capacity. He is aware of his soul’s condition. He evaluates it. He speaks to it. This is not the kind of thing a mere physical organism does. Neurons don’t talk to themselves. But a person with an immaterial soul can reflect on his own inner states—and that is precisely what we see in Psalm 42.
Derek Kidner captures the emotional force of the psalm: the writer is an exile, cut off from the temple, homesick for the presence of God. His grief is not abstract theology. It is the raw ache of someone who has lost access to what matters most to him.24 The soul that thirsts in Psalm 42 is not a philosophical abstraction. It is the deepest part of a real human being, reaching for God with the kind of desperate urgency that the whole psalm strains to express.
Fudge’s Treatment: Fudge completely ignores Psalm 42 in The Fire That Consumes. This passage, in which the soul thirsts for God, addresses itself, and is explicitly described as an interior subject of experience, receives no attention whatsoever in his anthropological framework.25
Text (NKJV): “For our soul is bowed down to the dust; our body clings to the ground.”
Psalm 44 is a communal lament. The people of God are suffering. They have been defeated in battle, scattered among the nations, made a reproach to their neighbors (vv. 9–14). They insist they have not forgotten God or been unfaithful to His covenant (vv. 17–18). And then, in verse 25, they cry out with this striking pair of images: “Our nephesh is bowed down to the dust; our beten (body/belly) clings to the ground.”26
Once again, we find the soul and the body named as a pair. And once again, different experiences are attributed to each. The nephesh is “bowed down”—a posture of defeat, humiliation, and despair. The beten “clings to the ground”—the image of a body collapsed, prostrate, face down in the dirt. Together they portray a people crushed in both dimensions of their existence: their inner life and their physical life.27
What makes this verse especially useful for the body-soul discussion is its parallel structure. Hebrew poetry loves to say things in paired lines, and often the two lines illuminate each other by contrast or complement. Here the structure is clear:
Line A: Our nephesh → is bowed down to the dust
Line B: Our beten → clings to the ground
The parallelism puts nephesh and beten in corresponding positions—each as the subject of its own clause. This is not a case where one word restates the other. Each word carries its own image. The soul bows; the body clings. If nephesh simply meant “the whole person,” the parallelism would collapse. Why would you say, “We are bowed down to the dust; our body clings to the ground”? That would be two ways of saying the same thing. But Hebrew parallelism in laments typically moves between dimensions—between the inner and the outer, between the spiritual condition and the physical posture. That is exactly what Psalm 44:25 does.28
Cooper observes that one of the antidualist arguments from Hebrew anthropology relies on the claim that Hebrew terms for body parts and soul-terms are used interchangeably, suggesting a holistic view with no ontological distinctions. But Cooper issues a caution: the sheer variety of usage in the Old Testament resists any simple generalization. The Hebrew writers do sometimes use these terms as synonyms for the whole person. But they also use them to pick out genuine dimensions, aspects, or parts of the human being that are distinguishable from each other. Both patterns exist in the same literature.29 Psalm 44:25 is a case where the terms clearly pick out two distinguishable dimensions. The parallelism demands it.
The word “dust” (“’aphar”) also echoes Genesis 2:7, where God forms man from the dust of the ground. When the soul is “bowed down to the dust,” the image carries overtones of a return to mortality, to the raw material out of which we were made. But the soul is not dust. The soul was not formed from the earth. As we saw in Chapter 5, the breath of life that God breathed into the man came from God Himself (Gen. 2:7). So when the psalmist says the soul is bowed down to the dust, the image is of something immaterial being dragged toward the material, the spiritual being pulled toward the earthy. It is the posture of a soul under crushing weight—not the destruction of the soul into mere matter.30
Fudge’s Treatment: Fudge does not discuss Psalm 44:25 in The Fire That Consumes. A verse that places nephesh and beten in direct parallel as two distinguishable dimensions of the human person goes entirely unmentioned.31
Text (NKJV): “O God, You are my God; early will I seek You; my soul thirsts for You; my flesh longs for You in a dry and thirsty land where there is no water.”
Psalm 63 is attributed to David “when he was in the wilderness of Judah.” The setting matters. David is physically in a desert—a dry, harsh, waterless landscape. And from that setting he draws a powerful analogy. His body is thirsty because the land has no water. But his soul is thirsty too—for God.32
What makes this verse a gold mine for the body-soul question is the explicit pairing of two words: nephesh (soul) and basar (flesh). David says: “My nephesh thirsts for You; my basar longs for You.” He names both, and he attributes desire to both. Soul and flesh. Two words. Two subjects. One longing for God that encompasses the entire person.
Now, a physicalist could argue: “See? Both soul and flesh long for God. There’s no distinction being drawn here. David is just describing his whole-person desire using two overlapping terms.” And it’s true that the verse depicts a unified longing. David is not splitting himself in two. He wants God with everything he has.
But look more carefully. The verbs are different. The soul thirsts (tsame’). The flesh longs or faints (kamah). The first verb is spiritual thirst—the same root used in Psalm 42:2. The second verb is physical longing—a word associated with exhaustion, yearning, and even physical collapse.33 David is not using two synonyms. He is describing two dimensions of his desire, each with its own character. His soul experiences a spiritual thirst for communion with God. His flesh experiences a physical ache—the longing of a weary body in a parched land. Both reach for the same God. But they reach in different ways, because they are different aspects of the person.
The context of the psalm reinforces this reading. In verse 5, David says, “My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness, and my mouth shall praise You with joyful lips.” Again: the soul is satisfied (an interior experience), and the mouth praises (a physical action). Verse 8 continues: “My soul follows close behind You; Your right hand upholds me.” The soul follows God—an image of spiritual devotion. God’s hand upholds the person—a more physical image of protection and support. Throughout the psalm, David moves fluidly between the interior and the exterior, the soul and the flesh, the spiritual and the physical. He treats them as two interwoven threads of one life, not as two ways of saying the same thing.35
Hans Walter Wolff, the very scholar Fudge relied on for his anthropological framework, acknowledged that nephesh carries the connotation of “needy man”—the human person in a state of desire and dependence.36 And basar, in Wolff’s analysis, speaks of “man in his infirmity.”37 Even Wolff’s own categories suggest that these words pick out different aspects of the person—not the same thing viewed from the same angle. When David says his soul thirsts and his flesh longs, he is describing two facets of a composite being. The holistic monist may insist that these facets are not ontologically separate. But the text distinguishes them. And the substance dualist simply takes the text at its word.
Fudge’s Treatment: Fudge does not discuss Psalm 63:1 in The Fire That Consumes. A passage that explicitly pairs nephesh and basar as two distinguishable dimensions of the human person—each with its own experience of longing for God—receives no attention in his analysis of what human beings are.38
Text (NKJV): “With my soul I have desired You in the night; yes, by my spirit within me I will seek You early; for when Your judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness.”
Isaiah 26 is part of a prophetic song of praise, set in the context of God’s future deliverance of His people. In verse 9, the speaker describes a yearning for God that operates in two registers: the nephesh (soul) desires God in the night, and the ruach (spirit) within seeks God early in the morning.39
This verse is remarkable because it pairs not soul and body, but soul and spirit—two terms that are sometimes treated as synonyms in the Old Testament and sometimes as complementary but distinct. The physicalist argues that both nephesh and ruach simply mean “the whole person” or “life-force,” with no immaterial referent. Fudge presented exactly this view on pages 26–27 of The Fire That Consumes, drawing on Wolff’s word studies to flatten both terms into holistic categories.40
But look at how Isaiah uses these terms. The nephesh desires God. That is interior longing—a conscious, volitional reaching toward the divine. The ruach within (beqirbi—“in my inward parts”) seeks God. The phrase “within me” is critical. It locates the ruach inside the person, as an inner dimension of the self. This is not the language of a life-force that animates the body like electricity powers a machine. It is the language of an interior agent—a spirit that dwells within the person and actively seeks God from that interior location.41
The phrase beqirbi (“within me”) deserves special attention. Cooper discusses the Hebrew concept of qereb (inner parts, bowels) as a category that the Hebrews used for the interior of the person—the seat of higher conscious capacities that they associated with organs like the heart, kidneys, and bowels.42 When Isaiah says “my spirit within me,” he is locating the spirit in this interior space. The spirit is not “out there.” It is not a force external to the person. It is something inside—an inner self that desires and seeks.
The time references add another layer. The soul desires God “in the night.” The spirit seeks God “early” (at dawn). The movement is from darkness to light, from longing to pursuit. In the stillness of the night, when the body is at rest, the soul still yearns. At first light, when the body awakens, the spirit rises to seek. This is the portrait of an interior life that does not shut down when the body sleeps. The soul desires even in the night. Think about that. When the eyes are closed, when the muscles are still, when the physical senses are muted—the soul is awake, longing for God.43
Richard Swinburne has argued that the continued existence of conscious experience during states of minimal bodily activity—dreams, meditative states, near-sleep awareness—provides philosophical evidence for an immaterial component of the person.44 Isaiah 26:9 offers a poetic version of the same insight. When the body rests, the soul still reaches for God. This does not prove that the soul is an immaterial substance—but it is deeply consistent with that view. The soul’s activity does not appear to depend entirely on the body’s wakefulness.
The substance dualist reading of Isaiah 26:9 is straightforward: the nephesh and the ruach are the interior, immaterial dimensions of the human person, and they are described as actively desiring and seeking God. The physicalist reading must flatten these terms into synonyms for “me” or “my life”—and in doing so, it strips the verse of its most striking feature: the vivid portrait of an interior spiritual life that operates even when the body is at rest.
Fudge’s Treatment: Fudge does not discuss Isaiah 26:9 anywhere in The Fire That Consumes. A passage that pairs nephesh and ruach as the interior agents of spiritual desire and locates the ruach “within me” is absent from his treatment of human nature.46
Step back and look at what we have found. Six passages. Six windows into the interior life of the human person. And every one of them was ignored by Edward Fudge.
Taken individually, each passage contributes something to the body-soul discussion. Psalm 6:3 shows the soul troubled alongside the bones—with the word “also” marking the soul’s distress as something in addition to the body’s. Psalm 31:9 names the soul and body as a pair, both wasting away under grief. Psalm 42:1–2 depicts the soul as a subject of spiritual thirst that transcends physical need. Psalm 44:25 places soul and body in poetic parallel, each with its own posture of defeat. Psalm 63:1 pairs soul and flesh explicitly, assigning different verbs and different kinds of longing to each. Isaiah 26:9 locates the spirit “within me” as an interior agent that desires and seeks God even in the night.
Taken together, these passages paint a portrait. And the portrait looks like this: the human person has an interior life—a conscious, desiring, reflecting self—that the biblical writers call the nephesh or the ruach, and that they consistently distinguish from the body, the flesh, and the physical frame.
Does this prove substance dualism? In the strict philosophical sense, no. A physicalist can always offer a deflationary reading of each passage, reducing the soul-language to synecdoche or poetic metaphor. But here is the question the physicalist must answer: why do the biblical writers keep distinguishing the soul from the body? If there really is no ontological difference between them—if the soul is just another word for the whole person—why does the psalmist say “my soul and my body”? Why does he address his own soul as a “you”? Why does he pair nephesh with basar and assign them different verbs? Why does Isaiah locate the spirit “within me” as though it inhabits an interior space?47
The physicalist has answers for these questions. But every answer requires explaining away the natural reading of the text. And at some point, the cumulative weight of passages that distinguish soul from body, that attribute interior experiences to the nephesh, that describe the soul thirsting and trembling and longing in ways that are contrasted with bodily experience—at some point, the most natural explanation is the simplest one. The biblical writers believed that human beings have an interior, immaterial dimension. They called it the nephesh or the ruach. And they experienced it as something real.48
Cooper makes a crucial distinction that helps here. He grants that the Hebrew anthropological vocabulary does not, by itself, prove philosophical dualism. Word studies alone are not decisive. But Cooper argues that when we combine the vocabulary evidence with the Old Testament narratives about the dead—the rephaim in Sheol, the departure of the soul at death, the spirit returning to God—the cumulative case becomes powerful.49 The passages in this chapter contribute to that cumulative case. They do not stand alone. They are part of a much larger biblical witness. The soul that thirsts for God in Psalm 42 is the same soul that departs at death in Genesis 35:18. The spirit that seeks God in Isaiah 26:9 is the same spirit that returns to God in Ecclesiastes 12:7. The interior self that the psalmist addresses in Psalm 42:5 is the same self that is conscious in Sheol, that Jesus speaks of in Matthew 10:28, that Paul expects to be “present with the Lord” after death (2 Cor. 5:8).
The physicalist framework cannot account for this entire web of testimony. It can explain some individual texts by appeal to synecdoche or metaphor. But it cannot explain the pervasive pattern—the persistent, cross-testamental witness to an interior life that is distinguished from bodily existence and that survives the death of the body.50
Moreland offers a helpful philosophical supplement. He argues that the first-person, subjective character of conscious experience—what philosophers call “qualia”—is precisely the kind of thing that cannot be reduced to physical processes. The redness of red, the sting of pain, the ache of longing: these are experienced from the inside, by a subject, and they resist description in purely physical terms.51 When the psalmist describes his soul thirsting for God, he is describing a qualitative inner experience—a “what it is like” from the inside. That is exactly the kind of experience that substance dualism was designed to explain. The soul is the subject of these experiences. The body may participate, but the experience itself belongs to the immaterial self.
Fudge’s silence on these passages is part of a larger pattern we have been documenting throughout this book. His anthropological framework rests on a selective reading of the evidence. He focused on the broad semantic range of nephesh and ruach, argued that these terms mean “the whole person,” and drew on the work of Wolff and Nikolainen to support that conclusion.52 But he never wrestled with the passages where these very terms are used in ways that his framework cannot easily explain—passages where the soul and body are named as a pair, where different experiences are attributed to each, where the interior life of the nephesh is portrayed as something distinct from physical existence. The word-study approach told him that nephesh means “whole person.” The actual usage of nephesh in these passages tells a richer story.
This matters because Fudge’s approach has been enormously influential. Countless readers of The Fire That Consumes—and countless participants in the Rethinking Hell community that his work inspired—have absorbed the idea that nephesh is a holistic term with no dualist implications. Many of them have done so in good faith, trusting that Fudge surveyed the relevant evidence thoroughly. But the six passages in this chapter demonstrate that he did not. He surveyed the evidence that supported his conclusion and passed over the evidence that challenged it. That is not good scholarship, no matter how admirable the scholar.
I want to be careful here. I am not saying Fudge was dishonest. I have deep respect for his work. The Fire That Consumes changed my own thinking on the question of final punishment, and I remain grateful for his scholarship. But every scholar has blind spots. And Fudge’s blind spot was anthropology. He assumed the physicalist reading of Hebrew soul-language was settled—that Wolff and the holistic scholars had demonstrated once and for all that nephesh just means “the whole person.” He did not reckon with the texts where nephesh functions differently. These six passages are part of that unfinished reckoning.
The interior life of the soul that we have seen in these six passages does not exist in isolation. It connects to themes developed across the entire book.
First, the soul’s interior life is rooted in the creation account of Genesis 2:7, which we examined in Chapter 5. God formed the body from dust and breathed into it the breath of life. That divine breath is the origin of the immaterial dimension that the psalmists describe. When the soul thirsts for God (Ps. 42:1–2) or the spirit seeks God “within me” (Isa. 26:9), it is doing what it was made to do. The breath of God within us reaches back toward its source.53
Second, these passages anticipate the New Testament witness to the inner person. Proverbs 20:27, which we discussed in Chapter 5, says that the spirit of a person is the lamp of the Lord, searching the inner parts. That image of the spirit as God’s lamp within us connects directly to the seeking spirit of Isaiah 26:9.54 And in the New Testament, Jesus will describe His own soul as “exceedingly sorrowful, even to death” (Matt. 26:38)—language that echoes David’s troubled soul in Psalm 6:3 and the downcast soul of Psalm 42. We will examine Jesus’ soul-language in Chapter 11, but the continuity is unmistakable. The interior life described in the Psalms is the same interior life that Jesus experienced and that Paul describes when he speaks of the “inner man” being renewed day by day (2 Cor. 4:16).55
Third, the soul-body pairing in Psalms 31:9, 44:25, and 63:1 points forward to Ephesians 3:16, where Paul prays that believers would be “strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man.” We will examine that text in Chapter 16. The “inner man” language of the epistles is the theological offspring of the nephesh language of the Psalms. The inner person that Paul describes—strengthened by the Spirit, renewed daily, destined for glory—is the same interior self that the psalmist addresses when he says, “Hope in God, O my soul.”56
Fourth, the soul’s experience of spiritual longing—its thirst for God, its desire in the night, its yearning even when the body fails—connects to John 12:27, where Jesus says, “Now My soul is troubled.” The soul-language of the Psalms is not some outdated Hebraism that the New Testament outgrew. Jesus adopted it. He spoke of His own soul in exactly the terms the psalmists used. We will examine that in Chapter 11.57
The cumulative picture is this: from Genesis through the Psalms to the teaching of Jesus and the letters of Paul, Scripture consistently portrays the human person as having an interior, immaterial dimension—a soul or spirit that desires, grieves, hopes, and reaches for God. The passages in this chapter are part of that golden thread. Pull them out, and the thread frays.
Why does any of this matter for the person sitting in the pew?
Because every Christian knows what the psalmist is talking about. Every believer has felt that deep, interior ache for God—the thirst that no earthly comfort can quench, the longing that surfaces in the quiet hours, the sense that the deepest part of you is reaching toward something beyond what your body can touch or taste or see. The Psalms give language to that experience. And the language they use is soul-language.58
When a grieving widow opens her Bible to Psalm 42 and reads, “My soul thirsts for God,” she knows what that means. She feels it in her chest and deeper than her chest. And when she is told that her nephesh is just a word for “the whole person”—that there is no immaterial dimension to her longing, no interior self that will survive the death of her body—something feels wrong. Because the thirst she experiences is not merely physical. It is not brain chemistry. It is not neurons firing. It is the cry of a soul made for God, reaching for God, needing God in a way that her body alone cannot explain.59
The physicalist framework flattens this experience. It tells us that all of our longing, all of our interior life, is ultimately reducible to physical processes. There is no immaterial self that will one day stand before God, no soul that survives when the heart stops beating. The dualist reading preserves it. It says: what you feel is real. The soul that thirsts for God is a real thing—not a metaphor, not a linguistic convention, but the immaterial core of who you are. And when your body fails, that soul will not be extinguished. It will go on. It will be with the Lord (2 Cor. 5:8). And one day, body and soul will be reunited in resurrection glory.60
Think about what the physicalist position means for worship. When the congregation sings, “As the deer pants for the water, so my soul longs after You,” are they expressing a deep truth about who they are? Or are they using outdated metaphorical language for a biological process? When a pastor prays over a dying church member, “Lord, receive her spirit,” is he committing her immaterial self into the hands of God? Or is he engaging in a pious fiction, since on physicalism there is no spirit to receive? The language of soul-thirst, of spirit-longing, of interior communion with God is woven into the very fabric of Christian worship and devotion. Physicalism cannot account for it without relegating it to metaphor. Substance dualism takes it at face value.
And then there is the matter of prayer itself. What happens when you pray? On the dualist view, prayer is a genuine act of the immaterial soul—your spirit communicating with God’s Spirit, heart to heart, person to Person. On physicalism, prayer is a brain event—electrochemical activity in the neural tissue that somehow reaches the Creator of the universe. There is nothing wrong with affirming that the brain is involved in prayer. Of course it is. But to say that prayer is nothing more than brain activity is to strip it of the very quality that makes it prayer: the direct, personal communion of the soul with God. The psalmists knew what prayer was. It was the nephesh reaching for its Maker. It was the ruach seeking God in the night. It was the deepest part of the human person, crying out from a place that no MRI machine could ever map.
That is the hope the Psalms offer. That is the hope substance dualism protects. And it is a hope worth defending.
↑ 1. I conducted a thorough search of Fudge’s The Fire That Consumes, 3rd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011), for any treatment of Psalm 6:3, Psalm 31:9, Psalm 42:1–2, Psalm 44:25, Psalm 63:1, or Isaiah 26:9. None of these passages is discussed, listed, or referenced anywhere in the book.
↑ 2. See Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 26–27, where he draws on Wolff, Nikolainen, and others to present nephesh as a holistic term for the whole person, with no immaterial referent.
↑ 3. All Scripture quotations in this chapter are from the New King James Version (NKJV) unless otherwise noted.
↑ 4. The Hebrew conjunction gam (“also, even, moreover”) signals addition, not restatement. See Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (Leiden: Brill, 2001), s.v. “gam.”
↑ 5. If nephesh here meant only “I” or “the whole person,” verse 3 would redundantly restate what verse 2 already conveys. The gam marks an escalation from the physical (“my bones”) to the interior (“my soul”).
↑ 6. HALOT, s.v. “bahal”: to be terrified, dismayed, shaken, confused. The niphal form intensifies the meaning to “be greatly disturbed.”
↑ 7. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), chap. 2, “The Hebrew Terms.” Cooper acknowledges that synecdoche is common in Old Testament usage of anthropological terms.
↑ 8. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 2. Cooper writes that some scholars seem to imply “in fits of antidualist enthusiasm” that all instances of Hebrew anthropological terms are cases of synecdoche. He warns against this overgeneralization.
↑ 9. On the role of gam in Hebrew poetic structures, see E. W. Bullinger, Figures of Speech Used in the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1968), 318–22.
↑ 10. James L. Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 1–58. Kugel argues that the second line of a Hebrew poetic couplet typically adds, specifies, or intensifies the first—it does not merely repeat it.
↑ 11. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes. Psalm 6:3 is not discussed, listed, or cited.
↑ 12. The Hebrew word beten has a range of meanings including “belly,” “womb,” “body,” and “inner parts.” The NKJV translates it “body” in Psalm 31:9. See HALOT, s.v. “beten.”
↑ 13. On Christian physicalism, the person simply is the body (organized in a certain way). So “my soul and my body” cannot mean two ontologically distinct entities. It must mean “me and my body”—which is a peculiar redundancy if the “me” is identical with the body. See Nancey Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–24.
↑ 14. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 2, “Qereb.” Cooper discusses the Hebrew use of inner organs as locations of higher conscious experience.
↑ 15. See J. P. Moreland, The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters (Chicago: Moody, 2014), chap. 4. Moreland argues that the deep integration of body and soul during earthly life is fully consistent with their ontological distinction.
↑ 16. See the discussion of Psalm 31:5 in Chapter 6 of this book.
↑ 17. Fudge briefly touches on Psalm 31:5 (“Into Your hand I commit my spirit”) but does not examine verse 9, where soul and body are explicitly distinguished. See Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, p. 28.
↑ 18. The image of the deer panting for water is one of the most recognizable images in the Psalter. The Hebrew word ’arag conveys a strong, even desperate, yearning. See HALOT, s.v. “’arag.”
↑ 19. HALOT, s.v. “’arag”: “to long for.” The verb occurs only here and in Joel 1:20 in the Hebrew Bible, both times in contexts of desperate yearning.
↑ 20. The metaphorical structure of Psalm 42:1 requires a distinction between the literal (the deer’s physical thirst) and the metaphorical (the soul’s spiritual thirst). If the soul’s thirst were merely physical, the comparison would collapse—it would be comparing physical thirst to physical thirst, which is no metaphor at all.
↑ 21. Psalm 42:5, 11; 43:5. The refrain is repeated three times, forming the structural backbone of Psalms 42–43 (which many scholars regard as a single psalm divided into two).
↑ 22. The psalmist’s self-address to his own nephesh is a form of interior dialogue that presupposes a reflective self distinct from the emotional state being addressed. This is precisely the kind of first-person self-awareness that substance dualists regard as evidence for an immaterial subject.
↑ 23. Brandon Rickabaugh and J. P. Moreland, The Substance of Consciousness: A Comprehensive Defense of Contemporary Substance Dualism (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2023), chap. 3, “The Self and Self-Awareness.” They argue that the capacity for self-reflection points to an immaterial self that is not reducible to any set of brain states.
↑ 24. Derek Kidner, Psalms 1–72, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1973), 165–68.
↑ 25. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes. Psalm 42 is not discussed, listed, or cited in any of Fudge’s anthropological sections.
↑ 26. The NKJV renders beten as “body” here. Other translations use “belly” (ESV) or “body” (NIV). The Hebrew refers to the physical frame or midsection of the person.
↑ 27. The two images complement each other: the soul bowed down suggests inner defeat and despair; the body clinging to the ground suggests physical prostration and helplessness. Together they portray a people crushed in every dimension.
↑ 28. On the distinction between synonymous and synthetic parallelism in Hebrew poetry, see Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 3–26. Alter argues that the second line in a parallel couplet regularly advances or specifies the thought of the first, rather than simply repeating it.
↑ 29. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 2. Cooper warns that the variety of Hebrew usage defies simple generalization and that the terms do sometimes pick out genuine parts or aspects, not just the whole person.
↑ 30. See the discussion of Genesis 2:7 in Chapter 5 of this book. The body was formed from the dust; the breath of life came from God. When the soul is “bowed down to the dust,” the image resonates with the distinction between the earthly and the divine dimensions of human nature.
↑ 31. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes. Psalm 44:25 is not discussed, listed, or cited.
↑ 32. The superscription attributes the psalm to David in the Wilderness of Judah, likely during his flight from Absalom (cf. 2 Sam. 15–17) or from Saul. The wilderness setting provides the physical backdrop for the thirst imagery.
↑ 33. The Hebrew tsame’ means “to thirst” and is used consistently for the desire for water or, metaphorically, for God (cf. Ps. 42:2; Isa. 55:1). The word kamah (used only here in the Hebrew Bible) means “to pine, to languish, to grow faint with longing.” See HALOT, s.v. “kamah.”
↑ 34. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 2, “Basar.” Cooper notes that basar refers to flesh, the physical body, kinship relations, and human frailty—but it is never used to mean “corpse” and always carries a physical connotation.
↑ 35. The movement between interior and exterior experience is a pervasive feature of Psalm 63. See Tremper Longman III, Psalms, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2014), 239–42.
↑ 36. Hans Walter Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament, trans. Margaret Kohl (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974). Wolff categorizes nephesh as speaking of “needy man.” Fudge cites Wolff’s framework approvingly on pp. 26–27 of The Fire That Consumes.
↑ 37. Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament. Wolff categorizes basar as speaking of “man in his infirmity.” Fudge cites this framework in The Fire That Consumes, p. 27.
↑ 38. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes. Psalm 63:1 is not discussed, listed, or cited.
↑ 39. Isaiah 26 is part of the “Isaiah Apocalypse” (Isa. 24–27), a section of prophetic poetry that anticipates God’s final deliverance and the resurrection of the dead (Isa. 26:19).
↑ 40. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 26–27. Fudge draws on Wolff to argue that nephesh and ruach are holistic terms for the person, not references to an immaterial soul or spirit.
↑ 41. The Hebrew phrase beqirbi (“within me,” “in my inward parts”) locates the ruach in the interior of the person. This spatial metaphor suggests an inner dimension that is distinguishable from the outer, physical body.
↑ 42. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 2, “Qereb.” Cooper discusses the Hebrew concept of the inner parts as the seat of conscious capacities.
↑ 43. The time references in Isaiah 26:9 are significant. “In the night” and “early” (at dawn) bracket the sleeping hours, suggesting that the soul’s desire for God persists through the period when the body is at rest.
↑ 44. Richard Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), chaps. 8–10. Swinburne argues that conscious experience during reduced bodily activity provides evidence for an immaterial component of the person. See also his more recent Are We Bodies or Souls? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
↑ 45. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 2. Cooper argues that word studies alone are insufficient to settle the dualism-monism question. The decisive evidence comes from the biblical narratives about the state of the dead, not from vocabulary analysis alone.
↑ 46. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes. Isaiah 26:9 is not discussed, listed, or cited in the book.
↑ 47. The cumulative force of these questions should not be underestimated. Individually, each passage might be explained away. Collectively, they establish a persistent pattern: the biblical writers consistently distinguish the soul’s experience from the body’s experience.
↑ 48. Cooper makes this point with reference to the Old Testament as a whole: the vocabulary does not prove dualism by itself, but the pervasive pattern of usage—combined with the narratives about the dead—points unmistakably in a dualist direction. See Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 2, conclusion.
↑ 49. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chaps. 2–4. Cooper’s strategy is to combine the vocabulary evidence (chap. 2) with the evidence from the state of the dead (chaps. 3–4) to build a cumulative case for Old Testament dualism.
↑ 50. Moreland, The Soul, chap. 4, makes the philosophical argument that the persistent first-person language of the Psalms—where the self addresses the soul, where the soul experiences things the body does not—is best explained by substance dualism.
↑ 51. Rickabaugh and Moreland, The Substance of Consciousness, chap. 2, “The Argument from Qualia.” They argue that the subjective, first-person character of conscious experience—what it is like to feel pain, see red, or long for God—cannot be explained in purely physical terms.
↑ 52. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 26–27. Fudge quotes Wolff and Nikolainen at length to support the claim that Hebrew anthropological terms describe the whole person holistically, without implying an immaterial soul.
↑ 53. See the discussion of Genesis 2:7 in Chapter 5 of this book. The divine breath constitutes the immaterial dimension of human nature.
↑ 54. See the discussion of Proverbs 20:27 in Chapter 5 of this book.
↑ 55. See the discussion of Matthew 26:38 and John 12:27 in Chapter 11, and the discussion of 2 Corinthians 4:16 and Ephesians 3:16 in Chapter 16 of this book.
↑ 56. See the discussion of Ephesians 3:16 in Chapter 16 of this book.
↑ 57. See the discussion of John 12:27 in Chapter 11 of this book.
↑ 58. Augustine, Confessions, I.1: “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” The restlessness Augustine describes is the same soul-thirst the psalmists portray.
↑ 59. This pastoral concern is not peripheral. As Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro argue in A Brief History of the Soul (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), chap. 7, the denial of the soul has significant consequences for how we understand human dignity, moral responsibility, and the hope of life after death.
↑ 60. See 2 Corinthians 5:8; Philippians 1:23; Revelation 6:9–11. The conscious intermediate state—where the soul is with the Lord between death and resurrection—depends on the reality of the immaterial soul. We will examine these New Testament passages in detail in Chapters 13–14 of this book.