all from which one has to protect himself (ab omni re cavenda), guard thine heart; but: before all that one has to guard (prae omni re custodienda), guard it as the most precious of possessions committed to thy trust. The heart, which according to its etymon denotes that which is substantial (Kernhafte) in man (cf. Arab. lubb, the kernel of the nut or almond), comes here into view not as the physical, but as the intellectual, and specially the ethical centrum.
Verse 24
The תּוצאות are the point of a thing, e.g., of a boundary, from which it goes forth, and the linear course proceeding from thence. If thus the author says that the תּוצאות חיּים go out from the heart,[1] he therewith implies that the life has not only its fountain in the heart, but also that the direction which it takes is determined by the heart. Physically considered, the heart is the receptacle for the blood, in which the soul lives and rules; the pitcher at the blood-fountain which draws it and pours it forth; the chief vessel of the physically self-subsisting blood-life from which it goes forth, and into which it disembogues (Syst. der bib. Psychol. p. 232). What is said of the heart in the lower sense of corporeal vitality, is true in the higher sense of the intellectual soul-life. The Scripture names the heart also as the intellectual soul-centre of man, in its concrete, central unity, its dynamic activity, and its ethical determination on all sides. All the radiations of corporeal and of soul life concentrate there, and again unfold themselves from thence; all that is implied in the Hellenic and Hellenistic words νοῦς, λόγος, συνείδησις, θυμός, lies in the word καρδία; and all whereby בּשׂר (the body) and נפשׁ (the spirit, anima) are affected comes in לב into the light of consciousness (Id. p. 251). The heart is the instrument of the thinking, willing, perceiving life of the spirit; it is the seat of the knowledge of self, of the knowledge of God, of the knowledge of our relation to God, and also of the law of God impressed on our moral nature; it is the workshop of our individual spiritual and ethical form of life brought about by self-activity - the life in its higher and in its lower sense goes out from it, and receives from it the impulse of the direction which it takes; and how earnestly, therefore, must we feel ourselves admonished, how sacredly bound to preserve the heart in purity (Psa 73:1), so that from this spring of life may
- ↑ The correct form here is כּי־ממּנּוּ, with the Makkeph to כי.
