Bowel vs spirit

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In Psalm 50 (51) the Douay Rheims use the term “bowel” but other translations use the term “spirit”. To me bowel and spirit seem very different. Can we really use the term “spirit”?
I can see why we the Douay Rheims use heart and bowel. Heart and spirit sounds weird. Who calls the bowel spirit?
And perhaps bowel should be in the plural.
 
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Psalm 50:12 Vulgate, D-R, Knox

Cor mundum crea in me, Deus, et spiritum rectum innova in visceribus meis.

Create a clean heart in me, O God: and renew a right spirit within my bowels.

my God, bring a clean heart to birth within me; breathe new life, true life, into my being.
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I can see visceribus as the ancestor of “viscera” or gut/intestines. However, the overall context is appropriate for “being” - as in “gut feeling”
 
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I had a few minutes to spare and looked it up.

@jesusmademe, these “other versions” you mention, did you by any chance look them up on the internet? I’m asking because, on sites like Biblehub, some versions do not take into account the introduction of the psalms in their numbering, with the result that what they say is verse 12 is, actually, verse 14, which indeed mentions “spirit” in its second part.

If that’s not it, could you point me to these other versions ?
 
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I suspect it is. The Hebrew term the Vulgate (and DR) render with “bowel” is “beqîrbî”, which literally means “in my interior”, which st Jerome translated with “in visceribus meis”.

ETA : But I still cannot find a translation which would have “renew a right spirit within my spirit” (or something similar) instead of “renew a right spirit within my bowel”, which, if I understood rightly, was what the OP hinted at… colour me puzzled.
 
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Yes. With the prefix “be” (“in”) and the desinence “î” (“mine”), which changes the word’s vocalisation.
 
So “bowels” isn’t appearing in the place of “spirit” but “in my bowels” in the place of “within me”.
 
Yes, when I read the title of the thread, “Bowel vs spirit”, I made the mistake of thinking the OP had discovered a curious discrepancy.
 
Isaac Watts wrote that two hundred years ago, give or take. I think he’d word it differently today.
 
It’s probably a metaphor/idiom. Nowadays we still talk about feelings of the heart when we know the heart has nothing to do with feelings. It was probably the same type of thing with the idea of the “bowels” as being associated with some characteristic or appetite of humankind. Except in the twenty-first century we no longer use the word “bowels” in that way. The connotation is always with the literal movements.

This is speculation and I could also be really off base.
 
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BartholomewB said:
Isaac Watts wrote that two hundred years ago, give or take. I think he’d word it differently today.
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Mebbe.
Or maybe he had a sense of humor.

“Bowel” meant intestines back then, or “guts”. But there was also a belief that certain emotions arose from certain organs, like the spleen caused anger, or the bowels caused mercy.
 
That’s not off base. The word used by the Gospels to describe emotion, particularly Jesus’ emotion, is splagknizοmai (no idea what the transliteration conventions are in English, Greek spelling is σπλαγχνίζομαι) which literally means “to have entrails”.

In the Hebrew world, the heart was seen more as the seat of reason, and the stomach as the seat of emotion.

That said, the Hebrew text of Ps 50:12 uses neither word. It simply says “within me”. St Jerome is to blame for the irruption of bowels 😜
 
The word קֶרֶב qerev can explicitly mean inner organs, either generally or specifically the heart or another organ. This is often the case in Exodus and Leviticus when discussing the stipulations of sacrifices.

Outside of this, it’s very much a case of translator interpretation. Jerome likely interpreted the word’s occurence in Ps 50:12 in line with the previous clause where the psalmist asks God to "create in me a new heart’. Another example is Ps 55:15 where qerev is translated variously as “heart” (NRSV, ESV) or “within, among, midst” (RSV, NIV, KJV, DR).
 
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