Proverbs 4:23

4:23 Guard your heart with all vigilance, ¹ 

for from it are the sources ²  of life.

Jeremiah 17:10

17:10 I, the Lord, probe into people’s minds.

I examine people’s hearts. ³ 

I deal with each person according to how he has behaved.

I give them what they deserve based on what they have done.

Matthew 15:19

15:19 For out of the heart come evil ideas, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander.

Mark 7:21-22

7:21 For from within, out of the human heart, come evil ideas, sexual immorality, theft, murder, 7:22 adultery, greed, evil, deceit, debauchery, envy, slander, pride, and folly.

Romans 7:8-9

7:8 But sin, seizing the opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of wrong desires. ⁴  For apart from the law, sin is dead. 7:9 And I was once alive apart from the law, but with the coming of the commandment sin became alive

James 4:5

4:5 Or do you think the scripture means nothing when it says, ⁵  “The spirit that God ⁶  caused ⁷  to live within us has an envious yearning”? ⁸ 

¹ tn Heb “more than all guarding.” This idiom means “with all vigilance.” The construction uses the preposition מִן (min) to express “above; beyond,” the word “all” and the noun “prison; guard; act of guarding.” The latter is the use here (BDB 1038 s.v. מִשְׁמָר).

² sn The word תּוֹצְאוֹת (tots’ot, from יָצָא, yatsa’) means “outgoings; extremities; sources.” It is used here for starting points, like a fountainhead, and so the translation “sources” works well.

³ tn The term rendered “mind” here and in the previous verse is actually the Hebrew word for “heart.” However, in combination with the word rendered “heart” in the next line, which is the Hebrew for “kidneys,” it is best rendered “mind” because the “heart” was considered the center of intellect, conscience, and will and the “kidneys” the center of emotions.

⁴ tn Or “covetousness.”

⁵ tn Grk “vainly says.”

⁶ tn Grk “he”; the referent (God) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

⁷ tc The Byzantine text and a few other mss (P 33 Ï) have the intransitive κατῴκησεν (katwkhsen) here, which turns τὸ πνεῦμα (to pneuma) into the subject of the verb: “The spirit which lives within us.” But the more reliable and older witnesses (Ì⁷⁴ א B Ψ 049 1241 1739 al) have the causative verb, κατῴκισεν (katwkisen), which implies a different subject and τὸ πνεῦμα as the object: “The spirit that he causes to live within us.” Both because of the absence of an explicit subject and the relative scarcity of the causative κατοικίζω (katoikizw, “cause to dwell”) compared to the intransitive κατοικέω (katoikew, “live, dwell”) in biblical Greek (κατοικίζω does not occur in the NT at all, and occurs one twelfth as frequently as κατοικέω in the LXX), it is easy to see why scribes would replace κατῴκισεν with κατῴκησεν. Thus, on internal and external grounds, κατῴκισεν is the preferred reading.

⁸ tn Interpreters debate the referent of the word “spirit” in this verse: (1) The translation takes “spirit” to be the lustful capacity within people that produces a divided mind (1:8, 14) and inward conflicts regarding God (4:1-4). God has allowed it to be in man since the fall, and he provides his grace (v. 6) and the new birth through the gospel message (1:18-25) to counteract its evil effects. (2) On the other hand the word “spirit” may be taken positively as the Holy Spirit and the sense would be, “God yearns jealously for the Spirit he caused to live within us.” But the word for “envious” or “jealous” is generally negative in biblical usage and the context before and after seems to favor the negative interpretation.