367. Clothed with white robes, with palm branches in their hands. This symbolizes a communication and conjunction with the higher heavens, and a confession springing from Divine truths.
To be clothed with white robes means, symbolically, to have a communication and conjunction with the heavens (see no. 328 above). Holding palm branches in the hands symbolizes confessions springing from Divine truths because palm branches symbolize Divine truths. For every tree symbolizes some element of the church, and palm branches symbolize Divine truth in outmost expressions, which is the Divine truth in the literal sense of the Word.
Engraved, therefore, on all the walls of the Temple in Jerusalem, inside and out, and also on its doors, were cherubim and palm trees (1 Kings 6:29, 32). Likewise in the New Temple described in Ezekiel 41:18-20. Cherubim symbolize the Word (no. 239), and palm trees the Divine truths in it.
That palm trees symbolize Divine truths in the Word, and palm branches in the hands confessions springing from them, can be seen from the fact that the Israelites were commanded to take, at the feast of Tabernacles, "the fruits of honorable trees and branches of palms, and rejoice before Jehovah." (Leviticus 23:39-40)
It can be seen also from the fact that when Jesus came to Jerusalem for the feast of Passover, the people "took palm branches and went to meet Him, crying, 'Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!'" (John 12:12-13)
These symbolize a confession of the Lord springing from Divine truths.
A palm tree symbolizes Divine truth also in the book of Psalms:
The righteous man shall flourish like a palm tree; he shall grow... planted in the house of Jehovah; he shall sprout in the courts of our God. (Psalms 92:12-13)
So, too, elsewhere.
Because Jericho was a city near the Jordan, and the Jordan river symbolized that which is first in the church, namely Divine truth such as it is in the literal sense of the Word, therefore the city was called the city of palms (Deuteronomy 34:3, Judges 1:16; 3:13). For the Jordan was the first boundary of or point of entrance into the land of Canaan, and the land of Canaan symbolizes the church.
