לֵב

The derivation

BDB treats lēb as the shorter of two closely related nouns: the lexicon cross-references lēb directly to its longer cognate לֵבָב (lēbāb, Strong's H3824), glossed identically "inner man, mind, will, heart," and the two forms function as free variants across the Hebrew Bible rather than as etymologically distinct words (BDB s.v. לֵב and לֵבָב). BDB's sense list for lēb traces the same rich, undivided territory the lexicon gives lēbāb: the inner man in contrast to the outer; the soul in a general sense, "comprehending mind, affections and will"; specific reference to the mind, to the will and its resolutions, to conscience, and — the tenth and final sense BDB records — to courage (BDB s.v. לֵב, H3820). No separate consonantal root distinct from the noun's own attested sense range is recorded in the audited BDB extract; as with rûaḥ, the lexicon presents the word's full range as one continuous semantic field.

This tenfold sense list — mind, will, conscience, emotion, and courage housed in a single organ-word — is the closest Hebrew analogue to the double life Ernout-Meillet document for Latin cor (see cor), where Cicero can ask, as a live philosophical question, whether the animus itself simply is the heart. BDB's own ordering makes the same ambiguity visible from within Hebrew: sense 5 is "spec. ref. to conscience," sense 9 "as seat of emotions and passions," sense 10 "seat of courage" — the same organ carrying reason, morality, feeling, and bravery without any felt contradiction across the biblical corpus.

Root

• BDB records no separate root beyond the noun's own attested sense range (inner man → mind/will → seat of conscience, emotion, and courage) — treated as one continuous semantic field, identically to its longer cognate לֵבָב (BDB s.v. לֵב, H3820; לֵבָב, H3824).
• No HALOT cross-check is available: the single HALOT volume in the audited library covers only the letters zayin through ṭet, not ל — an honest gap, not an omission. BDB is the verified authority for this lemma.

In the corpus

596 occurrences, all within the single indexed work Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), 19.43 per 10,000 words. The corpus tooling does not yet break the Tanakh into constituent books for frequency profiling, so no book-level distribution table is available — an honest limitation of the current indexing. Individual attestations recovered by concordance include Deuteronomy 4:11 (the mountain "burning with fire unto the lēb of heaven"), Deuteronomy 29:3 and 29:18 (Moses on Israel's hardened lēb), and Deuteronomy 28:65 (a trembling lēb among the covenant curses). The closely related Shema of Deuteronomy 6:5 — "with all your lēbāb" — uses the longer cognate form (H3824) rather than this exact lemma, an honest distinction the corpus tooling preserves rather than blurring the two forms together.

The word's world

Lēb is the Hebrew Bible's most integrated organ-word: where later traditions will separate mind from feeling from will from moral character, BDB's own tenfold sense list shows the biblical lēb holding all four together without strain — the same word names the seat of Moses's intellectual argument with a hardened people, the trembling of fear under covenant curse, and the courage a person musters in crisis. The word's variation with its own longer form, lēbāb — the form the Shema's command to love God "with all your heart" actually uses — shows a single concept-word flexing between two nearly interchangeable shapes rather than settling into one fixed term, much as Latin's cor and mens divide a similar territory between two separate words (see cor and mens) that Hebrew is content to let a single root carry.

Authorities: Brown, Driver & Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906) s.v. לֵב (Strong's H3820) and לֵבָב (H3824) — from the audited BDB (1906) layer, public domain. HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner) cross-check unavailable: the single volume in the audited library covers letters zayin–ṭet only, not ל — an honest gap, not an omission. Corpus figures and citations from the live Logoi corpus record — receipt soul-word-journey-v0. Cross-reference: cor, mens, kardia.