35. 28 shows that the Old Testament prophets represented the Lord in respect to the Word and therefore meant the teaching of the church drawn from the Word, and that because of this they were addressed as “children of humanity.” It follows from this that by the various things they suffered and endured they represented the violence done to the literal meaning of the Word by Jews. Isaiah, for example, took the sackcloth off his waist and the sandals off his feet and went naked and barefoot for three years (Isaiah 20:2-3). Similarly, Ezekiel the prophet took a barber’s razor to his head and his beard, burned a third of the hair in the middle of the city, struck a third with a sword, and scattered a third to the wind; also, he bound a few hairs in his hems and eventually threw a few into the midst of a fire and burned them (Ezekiel 5:1-4).

Since the prophets represented the Word and therefore meant the teaching of the church drawn from the Word (as just noted), and since the head means wisdom from the Word, the hair and the beard mean the outermost form of truth. It is because of this meaning that inflicting baldness on yourself was a sign of immense grief and being discovered to be bald was an immense disgrace. This and this alone is why the prophet shaved off his hair and his beard - to represent the state of the Jewish church in regard to the Word. This and this alone is why two she-bears tore apart forty-two boys who called Elisha bald (2 Kings 2:23-25)-because as just noted the prophet represented the Word, and his baldness signified the Word without an outermost meaning.

We shall see in §49 below that the Nazirites represented the Lord’s Word in its outermost forms, which is why they were commanded to let their hair grow and not to shave any of it. In Hebrew, “Nazirite” actually means “hair.” It was commanded also that the high priest was not to shave his head (Leviticus 21:10) and that the fathers of their families as well were not to do so (Leviticus 21:5).

That is why they regarded baldness as such an immense disgrace, as we can tell from the following passages:

There will be baldness upon all heads, and every beard will be cut off. (Isaiah 15:2; Jeremiah 48:37)

There will be shame upon all faces and baldness on all heads. (Ezekiel 7:18)

Every head was made bald and every shoulder hairless. (Ezekiel 29:18)

I will put sackcloth around all waists and baldness upon every head. (Amos 8:10)

Make yourself bald and cut off your hair because of your precious children; make yourself still more bald, because they have left you and gone into exile. (Micah 1:16)

Here making yourself bald and making yourself still more bald means distorting truths of the Word in its outermost forms. Once they have been distorted, as was done by Jews, the whole Word is ruined, because the outermost forms of the Word are what it rests on and what holds it up. In fact, every word in it is a base and support for the Word’s heavenly and spiritual truths.

Since a head of hair means truth in its outermost forms, in the spiritual world everyone who trivializes the Word and distorts its literal meaning looks bald; but those who respect and love it have good-looking hair. On this, see §49 below.

378, 3. Volition corresponds to the heart. As I mentioned above [375], this cannot be shown in a clearer and more precise way than by examining the effects of volition. It can be shown in some detail by the fact that all the feelings that arise from love induce changes in the motions of the heart. We can tell this from the arterial pulse that acts synchronously with the heart. It has countless changes and motions in response to feelings that arise from love. The only ones we can detect with the finger are that it may beat slower or faster, boldly or gently, soft or hard, regularly or irregularly, and so on. So it varies from happiness to sorrow, from peace of mind to rage, from courage to fearfulness, from fevers to chills, and so on.

Since the motions of the heart (called systole and diastole) do vary in this way depending on the feelings that arise from someone's love, many of the ancients and some moderns have ascribed feelings to the heart and named it as the home of the feelings. So in common language we have come to speak of a magnanimous heart or a timid one, a happy or a sorrowful heart, a soft or a hard heart, a great or a mean heart, a whole or a broken heart, a heart of flesh or one of stone, of being heavy, soft, or gentle at heart, of putting our heart into a task, of giving our whole heart, giving a new heart, resting at heart, taking to heart, of not laying something to heart, of hardening the heart, of being a friend at heart. We have the words concord and discord and envy and many others that have to do with love and its feelings.

The Word says similar things because it was composed in correspondences. It makes no difference whether you say love or volition, since volition is the vessel of love, as already noted [358-361].