Bowels - UPDV Updated Bible Version

In the older English of the Authorized Version, "bowels" rendered the Hebrew and Greek words for the inward parts — the organs lodged in the trunk of the body. UPDV, like most modern revisions, retires the word in favor of "insides," "heart," "compassion," or "tender mercies," depending on context. The same range survives, however, behind those English choices: the inward organs are at once the locus of physical disease and the figurative seat of the deepest sensibilities — yearning, grief, mercy, and love.

Disease of the Insides

The clearest literal use is Jehoram's lingering judgment in 2 Chronicles 21. The prophetic warning sets the terms: "and you with many sicknesses by disease of your insides, until your insides fall out by reason of the sickness, day by day" (2Ch 21:15). Yahweh first stirs up the Philistines and Arabians against the king (2Ch 21:16), and then, after two years of plundering, "Yahweh struck him in his insides with an incurable disease" (2Ch 21:18). The end is exactly as foretold: "his insides fell out by reason of his sickness, and he died of intense diseases. And his people made no burning for him, like the burning of his fathers" (2Ch 21:19). His epitaph is bare — "he departed without being desired; and they buried him in the city of David, but not in the tombs of the kings" (2Ch 21:20). The body's inward parts here are not figure but fact: the seat of a divine sentence carried out organ by organ.

Inward Turmoil

The same word that names the diseased organs names the place where grief and dread are felt. Job protests against his ruin in this register: "My insides are troubled, and do not rest; Days of affliction have come upon me" (Job 30:27). The psalmist's lament fuses bones, heart, and inward melt: "I am poured out like water, And all my bones are out of joint: My heart is like wax; It is melted inside me" (Ps 22:14). Jeremiah, hearing the alarm of war for Israel, breaks into the same idiom: "Inside me, inside me! I am pained at my very heart; my heart is disquieted in me; I can't hold my peace; because you have heard, O my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war" (Jer 4:19). And the daughter of Zion, surveying her ruin, prays in identical terms: "Look, O Yahweh; for I am in distress; my insides are troubled; My heart is turned inside me; for I have grievously rebelled" (La 1:20). In each, the inward parts are not anatomical specimens but the body's witness to an unbearable inner state.

Yearning Love

The same physiology, turned outward toward another, registers as love and longing. Joseph, recognizing Benjamin in Egypt, must leave the room before he gives himself away: "And Joseph hurried; for his heart yearned over his brother: and he sought where to weep; and he entered into his chamber, and wept there" (Ge 43:30). The true mother before Solomon's throne pleads in the same idiom — "her heart yearned over her son" — and would rather lose her child to a stranger than see him cut in two (1Ki 3:26). The bride's response in the Song uses the identical figure for desire: "My beloved put in his hand through the hole, And my insides were moved for him" (So 5:4). What the older English captured with "bowels" the UPDV captures with "heart yearned" and "insides were moved" — the same inward organ as the seat of love's reach toward another.

The Divine Insides

The figure rises to its highest pitch when applied to Yahweh's own affection for his people. Speaking of Ephraim — the rebellious northern son repeatedly threatened — Yahweh asks, "Is Ephraim my dear son? Is he a darling child? For as often as I speak against him, I earnestly remember him still: therefore my insides yearn for him; I will surely have mercy on him, says Yahweh" (Jer 31:20). The same anatomical word that diagnosed Jehoram's organs and spoke Joseph's yearning here names the depth at which God himself moves toward a wayward son — the inward turning that resolves into mercy.

Tender Mercies in Christ

The Greek register of the New Testament carries the figure forward. Paul writes the Philippians under oath: "For God is my witness, how I long after all of you⁺ in the tender mercies of Christ Jesus" (Php 1:8). The "tender mercies" here is the same inward register, now located in Christ — the place from which Paul himself loves the church. He returns to it as he opens the appeal of chapter 2: "If there is therefore any exhortation in Christ, if any consolation of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any tender mercies and compassions," (Php 2:1) — laying the bowels-register alongside love, the Spirit, and consolation as the wellspring from which the church's unity must flow.

Compassion as Garment, and Its Refusal

What Paul names as the source becomes, in the parenetic letters, something to be put on. Colossians prescribes the dress of the elect: "Put on therefore, as God's elect, holy and beloved, a heart of compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, long-suffering" (Col 3:12). A "heart of compassion" is the inward register made into a garment — the bowels figure deliberately put on each morning. The refusal of this garment is the test John applies in his first letter: "But whoever has the world's goods, and looks at his brother in need, and shuts up his compassion from him, how does the love of God stay in him?" (1Jn 3:17). Compassion can be shut up — closed off the way an organ can be closed — and when it is, the question of whether the love of God still resides in such a person is left as a question.