Nephesh in the Rest of the Torah: Sellers on the Soul—Part VI

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ for over 73 years, was an assiduous student of the Holy Scriptures. His business in life was the study and proclamation of God’s Word through radio broadcasts, the writing and distribution of Bible-study literature, a tape-recorded ministry, and semiannual Bible conferences throughout the United States. He arrived at his conclusions after considering all the Biblical and any other material that shed light on the subject under consideration. He studied Hebrew and Greek words to bring forth their historical and grammatical meanings. As constant study forced him to alter some of his beliefs, he asked his readers always to take his latest writing to be his latest light. Sellers received Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior at age 18 on November 23, 1919. Throughout 1921 he attended Moody Bible Institute (Chicago); the following year he was ordained a Baptist minister. He traveled with an evangelistic party for several years and served as pastor in Baptist churches. By 1932, however, after his studies led him away from the rituals and ordinances (such as water baptism), he left the Baptist Church, never looked back, and never joined another. He began writing pamphlets in 1935; by 1936 he was publishing The Word of Truth (17 Volumes over the next 20 years). He expanded this ministry with booklets, radio broadcasts, and 570 recorded messages covering most books of the Bible and many doctrinal issues. In 1971 he began publishing Seed and Bread, four-page leaflets, 196 of which he had produced by the time of his passing in 1992. With the cooperation of his daughter, Jane Sellers Hancock (1927-2020) and her son Rusty Hancock and the assistance of Sam Marrone (who remembers Sellers teaching at the Marrone home in the 1950s when Sam was a boy), I’ve been researching his life and thought for a book tentatively entitled “Maverick Workman: How Otis Q. Sellers Broke with the Churches, Discovered the Premillennial Kingdom, and Embodied Christian Individualism.” I would be grateful to anyone who could share information, memories, or photos for the purpose of this study.—Anthony G. Flood

[Previous installments: I, II, III, IV, V.]

After citing the 17 times in Exodus that forms of נֶ֖פֶשׁ (nephesh) appear, Sellers says it’s “not my desire to pass lightly over any group of passages, yet I feel that there is nothing in the [listed] seventeen occurrences of nephesh in Exodus that contradicts any previous finding.” He singles out a few verses for examination, however, because of problems that King James’s translators created for the Bible students who came after them. Here’s an example:

The enemy said, I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil; my lust [נַפְשִׁ֔י, naphshi, from nephesh] shall be satisfied upon them; I will draw my sword, my hand shall destroy them. Exodus 15:9

Sellers comments: “‘Lust’ is indeed a strange rendering for nephesh. ‘My soul shall take her fill of them,’ would be a more accurate translation.”

Strange, we add, for had God wished to communicate the idea of lust, He could have breathed the word עֲגָבָה (agabah) into Moses. (In fact, He breathed it only into Ezekiel as he inked chapter 23, verse 11 of his book of prophecy, making עֲגָבָה a hapax legomenon.)

The KJV translators also misrendered נֶ֖פֶשׁ (nephesh) the two times it appears in Exodus 21:23 as “life”: “And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life [נֶ֖פֶשׁ] for life [נֶ֖פֶשׁ].” But, Sellers notes, “Man cannot give life or take life. Soul for soul is the divine commandment set forth here. And so it was that Jesus Christ poured out his soul [נַפְשׁ֔וֹ, naphshow, “himself,” Isaiah 53:12] that my soul, I, might be saved. Not some fraction of me, but all of me.”

In Exodus 23:9 (KJV) we read that “ye know the heart of a stranger,” but the Hebrew word for “heart” is לֵב (lev), not נֶ֣פֶשׁ (nephesh). “Change heart to soul,”  Sellers suggests, “and this passage glows with a new light.”

When the Scriptures speak of the sensations or conscious experiences of a person it always is in connection with the soul. Life demonstrates the presence of spirit, and sensation demonstrates that man is a soul. Sensation is not possible in human beings except where there is a body energized by the spirit.

After listing the verses in Leviticus in which נֶ֣פֶשׁ (nephesh) occurs, Sellers notes that through “fourteen straight occurrences of nephesh, the translators rendered it correctly by the word soul.” But for some reason when they came to Leviticus 11:10:

And all that have not fins and scales in the seas, and in the rivers, of all that move in the waters, and of any living thing which is in the waters, they shall be an abomination unto you:”

“… their prejudices came to the front again and they used the word ‘thing’” to translate נֶ֥פֶשׁ (nephesh). What a thing to do! Sellers thinks he knows the reason:

These translators believed that the soul was a person dwelling within the human body, and that this soul was immortal. They did not believe this of the animals, so they were obliged to deny them the possession of any such thing. When they came to nephesh used in relation to man, they generally translated it soul, but when it was related to the animals, they translated it by some other term. Thus. these men carried Plato’s philosophy into their noble work of translating the Scripture. (My emphasis.—A.G.F.)

“Every student should know,” he continued, “that a translation is to a certain extent a commentary. When the same word in the original is translated in different ways, then the translator has put his comment upon the original. A translation can be as biased as any commentary.”

As for the soul’s alleged indestructibility: God declares in Leviticus 23:30 that “whatsoever soul it be that doeth any work in that same day, the same soul (הַנֶּ֥פֶשׁ, hannephesh) will I destroy (וְהַֽאֲבַדְתִּ֛י, wehaabadti) from among his people.” That is, Sellers underscores, the “soul is not only subject to death; it is subject to destruction.”

In the Torah’s fourth book, Numbers, “we read of dead souls, souls dying, and souls being killed…. A passage such as Numbers 6:6 actually speaks of a dead soul [נֶ֥פֶשׁ מֵ֖ת, nephesh met],” but King Jimmy’s team obscured that truth by translating it as “dead body.”

Man as originally created was earth and was as lifeless as any lump of earth. Into this earth God breathed the breath of life, and man became a living soul. A living soul is what man is as a result of the final act of creation. He possesses life from God, and as long as he possesses this life, he is a living soul. When God sees fit to withdraw life from man, he is no longer a living soul. He is a dead soul.

Of the 33 instances of נֶ֣פֶשׁ (nephesh) in the Bible’s fifth book, Sellers singles out Deuteronomy 4:29 for comment: “But if from thence thou shalt seek the Lord thy God, thou shalt find him, if thou seek him with all thy heart (לְבָבְךָ֖, lebabeka; from לֵב, lev) and with all thy soul (נַפְשֶֽׁךָ, naphsheka, from nephesh).”

This is one of the first passages in which the heart is used in connection with the soul. In Scripture the heart is always related to the motives as the soul is related to the senses. The heart is used as a figure of the starting point of all the manifestations of personal life and character. (My emphasis.—A.G.F.)

But the heart is not the soul.

Related Posts