What the lexicon says. אַף (aph) is defined by Strong's as "Properly, the nose or nostril; hence, the face, and occasionally a person; also (from the rapid breathing in passion) ire." The TBESH sense list is short and blunt: "nostril, nose, face" and "anger". Brown-Driver-Briggs gives "Nostril, as organ of breathing", "face", and "mostly anger".
What the text does with it, both senses, in two famous verses. In Genesis the nose is a nose: "and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life" (Genesis 2:7, ASV), where the tagged word is H0639H. In Exodus the same word is anger: "a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abundant in lovingkindness and truth" (Exodus 34:6, ASV), where the tagged word is H0639G. The KJV renders the same phrase "longsuffering" (Exodus 34:6, KJV).
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What the Hebrew phrase is, and what it is not. The expression behind "slow to anger" is built from this noun and a word meaning long, so the literal shape is long of nostrils. That is an observation about how the phrase is built, not a claim that its speakers pictured a nose whenever they said it, English speakers do not picture a heart when they say someone is disheartened. The idiom's meaning is patience; its parts are anatomical. Both facts are true and only the first is usually printed.
The counts. H0639 splits three ways: the "anger" sense in 219 verses, the "nose/nostril" sense in 27, and a third sense in 24, 270 verses in all.
Sources: Genesis 2:7; Exodus 34:6 (ASV and KJV); TBESH entries H0639G and H0639H; Strong's Hebrew Dictionary (1890), entry H639; Brown-Driver-Briggs (1906), entry H639.
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