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Journal of the American Academy of Religion 2005 73(3):731-757; doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfi077
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© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the American Academy of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org

Broken Hearts: The Violation of Biblical Law

Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle

Independent scholar and an associate member of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1A1

Broken hearts are a compelling case of the general misinterpretation of the most important anthropological concept in the Hebrew Scriptures, the heart. Scholarship anachronistically assumes that biblical brokenhearted conforms to the dictionary definition of grief. Based on the history of medicine, this research proposes that biblical broken hearts are neither physiological nor psychological but lawless. Broken hearts are embodied in the Hebrew Scriptures as crippled legs that have walked deviant paths, stumbled, and fallen against the law. The deliberate omission of brokenhearted from the New Testament is explained by medical knowledge. The traditional but erroneous insertion of brokenhearted in gospel manuscripts and editions is then reported. The mistranslation "contrite" is exposed as gravely consequential in the Reformation theological controversy about grace and will. The source for the definition of brokenhearted as grieved in English philology is identified as secular, not biblical, literature.


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