“Jeremiah actually has quite a bit to say about the human mind but this fact often escapes notice because of faulty translation. The Hebrew word lev (לב), taken literally, refers to the physical organ we call the heart, and as a consequence most translations use the English heart whenever the original Hebrew has lev…
“The fact that most Westerners read the biblical authors as though they are talking about the heart whenever they refer to the mind means that the entire biblical corpus takes on a kind of romantic, sentimental feeling that is absent in the original. and as a byproduct, it makes it almost impossible to understand what the biblical authors have to say about human thought. This is certainly the case for Jeremiah, whose orations regularly use the word lev to refer to the mind.” (p. 171)
Yoram Hazony, The Philosophy of the Hebrew Scripture
