Bible Dictionary
FEELING
Feeling may mean touching, perceiving, understanding, experiencing pain, or sharing another’s suffering. Scripture also describes sinners who become callous and lose moral sensitivity through hardened hearts.
Definition
Feeling may mean touching, handling, groping, knowing, understanding, experiencing, having compassion, suffering pain, or remaining sensitive to harm. It may also describe the loss of moral sensitivity through hardening.
Biblical Usage
Scripture speaks of feeling by touch, knowing through experience, and sharing another’s suffering with compassion. It also describes sinners as becoming past feeling, without reverence for God, awareness of sin, or fear of judgment.
Historical Background
The biblical terms cover physical touch, perception, understanding, fellow feeling, suffering, and apathy. The entry distinguishes compassion with another from sharing the same suffering and emphasizes moral callousness as a condition produced by hardened hearts.
Historical Bible Dictionaries
International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (ISBE)
<p>fel'-ing: The following varieties of meaning are to be noted:</p><p>(1) "To touch," "handle," "grope after" (mashash (Ge 27:12,22; Ex 10:21; mush, Ge 27:21; Jud 16:26; pselaphao, Ac 17:27).</p><p>(2) "To know," "understand," "experience" (bin, Ps 58:9; yadha`, Pr 23:35; ginosko, Mr 5:29).</p><p>(3) "To have a fellow feeling," "to place one's self into the position of another," especially while suffering, "to have compassion" (sumpathein, Heb 4:15; compare 10:34; which is to be carefully distinguished from the similar verb sumpaschein, which means "to share in the same suffering with another," Ro 8:17; 1Co 12:26). See Delitzsch, Commentary on Heb 4:15.</p><p>(4) "To feel harm," "pain," "grief," "to be sensitive" (paschein, with the roots path- and penth-, Ac 28:5); or with the negation: "to have ceased to feel," "to be apathetic," "past feeling," "callous," apelgekos, perfect participle of apalgeo (Eph 4:19) which describes the condition of the sinner, who by hardening his heart against moral influences is left without a sense of his high vocation, without an idea of the awfulness of sin, without reverence to God, without an appreciation of the salvation offered by Him, and without fear of His judgment.</p><p>H. L. E. Luering</p>