Starting from H.W.Wolff’s reflection (Anthropologie de l’Ancien Testament, the article questions the legitimacy of an approach which takes only four terms into account to define the vision of man in the Old Testament: life, flesh, spirit, heart. The meaning of those terms is first revisited with examples taken from the Old Testament, with the special way in which biblical texts associate those words. Those terms are actually not a limit within the anthropological field and other aspects or parts of man are associated with the basic four. Finally, quite often, the words referring to a part of man refer by way of a synecdoche to man as a whole. Thus it is correct to develop a wider anthropological approach than that of Wolff and discover the abundance of terms and images that characterize man essentially as a living being.