How (Not) to Read the Bible: Making Sense of the Anti-women, Anti-science, Pro-violence, Pro-slavery and Other Crazy-Sounding Parts of Scripture

by Dan Kimball

For example, at the time Genesis was written, the ancient Israelites didn’t know that the brain was the part of the human body that was the source of thinking, learning, and controlling other parts of our body. They believed the control center was the heart, since the heart muscle pumps masses of blood around our bodies. When you see the word “heart” in Genesis (Genesis 24:45; 34:3), you should know that it is referring to the source of our emotions and thinking. Today we would likely refer to this as our brain, not our heart. But they didn’t have a word for the brain back then, and they believed the physical heart was the source of thinking. They also believed our emotions and thinking came from our entrails, or our “gut.”5 The people of that time thought the human intellect came from the actual heart and abdominal organs.