Consider what The New Catholic Encyclopedia has to say about the Hebrew word nephesh (or nepes) and the Greek word psuche as it appears in the manuscripts of the Bible:
“Nepes comes from an original root…to breathe, and…thence, breath of life. Since breath distinguishes the living from the dead, nepes is used in regard to both animals and humans… After death, the nepes goes to sheol [Hebrew word for grave]. The above summary indicates that there is no dichotomy of body and soul in the Old Testament…other words in the Old Testament such as spirit, flesh, and heart also signify the human person and differ only as various aspects of the same being. The notion of the soul surviving after death is not readily discernible in the Bible. The concept of the human soul itself is not the same in the Old Testament as it is in Greek and modern philosophy…The soul in the Old Testament means not a part of man, but the whole man—man as a living being” (The New Catholic Encyclopedia, 1967, art. "Soul, Human, Immortality of").
And in another place:
“The soul in the OT means not a part of man, but the whole—man as a living being. Similarly in the NT, it signifies human life: the life of an individual conscious object (Matt 2:20; 6:25; Luke 12:22-23; 14:26; John 10:11,15,17; John 13:37; Acts 27:10, 22; Phil 2:30; 1Thess 2:8). Recent exegetes…have maintained that the NT does not teach the immortality of the soul in the Hellenistic sense of survival of an immortal principle after death (The New Catholic Encyclopedia, art. "Soul, Human, Immortality of, In The Bible.").
Check out this ARTICLE I wrote some time ago. It gets to the heart of the question asked in this thread.
Thanks, I’ll take a look at your article.