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Japanese No. The phrase “soul tie” is not in the Bible. It is used mostly in modern deliverance ministry, which means by it for a spiritual bond said to form through sex or close relationships and to need breaking by prayer. The verses people cite speak of real bonds, but none asks for a tie to be broken.
Still, the Bible knows what it is to be bound to someone. When David had finished speaking to Saul, “the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David” (1 Samuel 18:1), and the Hebrew verb behind “knit”, qashar, means to tie. The same word carries Judah’s fear for his old father if Benjamin does not come home: “his life is bound up in the lad’s life” (Genesis 44:30). God made us to be held by one another. So the questions that matter are what we are bound to, and who sets us free when a bond has become a chain.
What is a soul tie?
Those who teach it describe a link between two people that reaches past the body and the feelings into the soul. Frank Hammond worked in deliverance ministry with his wife, and the description of his booklet Soul Ties begins: “There are good soul ties and bad soul ties, just as there are healthy relationships and unhealthy ones.” He is candid that the name came late. He and his wife met such bonds in their ministry, he writes, “long before someone introduced the designation ‘soul ties,’” and back then “we referred to them as ‘unholy alliances’ or ‘perverse relationships.’”
The idea has reached some Catholics too, though it is not Catholic teaching. Women of Grace, a Catholic apostolate, describes soul ties as “a kind of spiritual umbilical cord that connects one person to another in the spiritual realm,” formed “through intense relationships or inordinate affections with spouses, close friends, sexual partners, business partners, cults, religious denominations and lodges.” It reports the practice of one priest, its theological advisor at the time, Fr. Edmund Sylvia, C.S.C., who linked soul ties to Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 6: “I have used explicit prayers for the breaking of these ties, usually in confession, and I ask the person to explicitly renounce the ties and forgive the person they were involved with, thereby setting them free.”
Are soul ties biblical?
The phrase is not, and Christians disagree about the idea. Deliverance ministries such as Hammond’s teach soul ties as a real spiritual bond that can need breaking, and Fr. Sylvia prays to break them in confession. Many evangelical teachers reject the idea. GotQuestions.org calls it “a man-made speculation which some teachers superimpose onto Scripture in an attempt to explain certain human behaviors,” and says the remedy for sin is simpler: “to confess it and forsake it.”
On one thing Scripture leaves no doubt: our relationships shape us, body and soul, and sin with another person does not simply stay in the past. The disagreement is over how that works. The Bible speaks of hearts knit together, of husband and wife as one flesh, and of sin that clings. It never describes a strand running from one soul into another, and it never gives a prayer for cutting one.
What do the verses about soul ties actually say?
These are the verses that come closest to the idea. Read in their places, each says something true and serious about how people are joined.
1 Samuel 18:1: Jonathan and David
This is the verse that sounds most like the phrase. “The soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.” What follows is a covenant: “Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul,” and Jonathan gives David his robe, his sword, his bow and his girdle (1 Samuel 18:3–4). Years later Jonathan “caused David to swear again, because he loved him: for he loved him as he loved his own soul” (1 Samuel 20:17).
Nothing in this bond needs breaking. It is a holy friendship, sealed with a covenant, and it held while Saul “eyed David from that day and forward” (1 Samuel 18:9). When David heard that Jonathan had fallen, he grieved for him: “I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me” (2 Samuel 1:26). A tie of the soul, in the Bible’s own picture of one, is a gift.
Genesis 2:24: one flesh
“Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.” The Hebrew verb for “cleave”, dabaq, means to cling or stick fast. Jesus quoted the verse and added, “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matthew 19:6). Paul quoted it again and saw in marriage something larger still: “This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:32). The joining is God’s work, and Scripture treats it as lasting.
1 Corinthians 6:16: one body
This is the passage people mean when they ask whether sex creates a soul tie. Paul is warning Christians in Corinth against going to prostitutes: “What? know ye not that he which is joined to an harlot is one body? for two, saith he, shall be one flesh.” He takes Genesis 2:24 and applies it even to a night with a prostitute. Sex joins two people, and it is never only physical.
Then he turns the argument. “But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:17). The Greek word for “joined”, kollaō, is the same in both verses, and it comes from the word for glue. Paul’s answer to the wrong joining is a stronger one. “Flee fornication,” he says, and then reminds them whose they are: “ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s” (1 Corinthians 6:18–20). GotQuestions notes that in verse 16 it is the body that is joined, and the verse says nothing of souls. Those who teach soul ties read “one flesh” as reaching further. Either way, Paul calls the Corinthians to flee fornication and to belong to Christ, and he never asks them to renounce a tie.
Genesis 34:3: Shechem and Dinah
One more verse sounds close to the phrase, and it is a dark one. Shechem “saw her, he took her, and lay with her, and defiled her,” and afterward “his soul clave unto Dinah the daughter of Jacob, and he loved the damsel, and spake kindly unto the damsel” (Genesis 34:2–3). The word for “clave” is dabaq again. Scripture records the attachment honestly, and it names the violence first. It does not let desire excuse what Shechem did, and the chapter goes on to tell how Simeon and Levi slew Shechem and every male of his city (Genesis 34:25–26).
How do Christians break an unhealthy soul tie?
If the person you cannot let go of controls you, threatens you or hurts you, please do not carry that alone as a spiritual puzzle. In the United States the National Domestic Violence Hotline answers at 1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788. Wherever you live, if you are in danger now, call your local emergency number.
And if you are still bound to someone who abused you, hear this plainly: what was done to you is not your sin to confess. Dinah did nothing wrong in Genesis 34, and neither did you. The pull you feel toward the one who hurt you, or the fear that will not let go, is a wound, and wounds are healed in company. A pastor, a priest or a trained counsellor can help you carry it, and the hotline’s advocates offer support and can refer you to help in your own community.
If what holds you is the other kind of bond, an old relationship that still pulls at the heart or a guilt that will not lift, Scripture does not leave you there, whatever name we give it. If sin made the bond, the way out begins where every Christian life begins. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). Catholics and Orthodox bring this to a priest in confession; many Protestants confess to God alone or to a pastor or a trusted friend, and Lutherans and Anglicans also keep private confession. Those who pray against soul ties go further. Fr. Sylvia asks the person to renounce the ties and forgive the other person, and the prayer he publishes cuts “any and all soul ties” and commands the spirits attached to them, “in the Name of Jesus Christ, by His Precious Blood and the authority of my Priesthood,” to go “to the foot of the Cross of Jesus Christ.”
Then we hold to what God says is true of us now. “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Paul wrote to the Galatians, “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage” (Galatians 5:1). Standing fast is often plain and slow: ending contact that keeps a wound open, putting away what feeds the memory, telling someone who will pray with us, and letting time pass. None of this is magic, and none of it is weak. It is the ordinary road of grace.
Not every tie is meant to be cut. Paul prayed that the Colossians’ hearts “might be comforted, being knit together in love” (Colossians 2:2), and the church is meant to be that: a people bound to one another because each is joined to the Lord. The bonds that heal us are the ones God makes.
And when a bond has torn us, the Lord himself binds up what it tore. “He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds” (Psalm 147:3).
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