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Exodus 27

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1 And make an altar of hard wood, a square altar, five cubits long, five cubits wide and three cubits high.

2 Put horns at the four angles of it, made of the same, plating it all with brass.

3 And make all its vessels, the baskets for taking away the dust of the fire, the spades and basins and meat-hooks and fire-trays, of brass.

4 And make a network of brass, with four brass rings at its four angles.

5 And put the network under the shelf round the altar so that the net comes half-way up the altar.

6 And make rods for the altar, of hard wood, plated with brass.

7 And put the rods through the rings at the two opposite sides of the altar, for lifting it.

8 The altar is to be hollow, boarded in with wood; make it from the design which you saw on the mountain.

9 And let there be an open space round the House, with hangings for its south side of the best linen, a hundred cubits long.

10 Their twenty pillars and their twenty bases are to be of brass; the hooks of the pillars and their bands are to be of silver.

11 And on the north side in the same way, hangings a hundred cubits long, with twenty pillars of brass on bases of brass; their hooks and their bands are to be of silver.

12 And for the open space on the west side, the hangings are to be fifty cubits wide, with ten pillars and ten bases;

13 And on the east side the space is to be fifty cubits wide.

14 On the one side of the doorway will be hangings fifteen cubits long, with three pillars and three bases;

15 And on the other side, hangings fifteen cubits long, with three pillars and three bases.

16 And across the doorway, a veil of twenty cubits of the best linen, made of needlework of blue and purple and red, with four pillars and four bases.

17 All the pillars round the open space are to have silver bands, with hooks of silver and bases of brass.

18 The open space is to be a hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide, with sides five cubits high, curtained with the best linen, with bases of brass.

19 All the instruments for the work of the House, and all its nails, and the nails of the open space are to be of brass.

20 Give orders to the children of Israel to give you clear olive oil for the lights, so that a light may be burning there at all times.

21 Let Aaron and his sons put this in order, evening and morning, before the Lord, inside the Tent of meeting, outside the veil which is before the ark; this is to be an order for ever, from generation to generation, to be kept by the children of Israel.

   

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Apocalypse Revealed # 322

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322. And power was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill. This symbolizes the destruction of all good in the church.

Since death means the extinction of a person's spiritual life, and hell his damnation, it follows that to kill here means to destroy the life of a person's soul. The life of the soul is spiritual life.

A fourth of the earth means, symbolically, all good in the church. The earth is the church (no. 285).

That a fourth means all good can be known only by someone who knows what numbers in the Word symbolize. The numbers two and four are said in application to goods, and they symbolize those goods. And the numbers three and six are said in application to truths, and they symbolize those truths. Thus a fourth part, or simply a fourth, symbolizes all good, while a third part, or simply a third, symbolizes all truth. Therefore to kill a fourth of the earth here means, symbolically, to destroy all good in the church.

Clearly he who sat on the pale horse was not given the power to kill a fourth part of the habitable earth.

[2] In addition, the number four in the Word symbolizes the union of goodness and truth.

That the number four has these symbolic meanings can, indeed, be confirmed from the Word, as by the four living creatures or cherubim in Ezekiel 1,3, 10; by the four chariots between two mountains in Zechariah 6:1; by the four horns in Zechariah 1:18ff.; by the four horns of the altar in Exodus 27:1-8, and Revelation 9:13; and by the four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, in Revelation 7:1 (cf. Matthew 24:31). It can be confirmed, too, by the "visiting the iniquity to the third and fourth generation" in Numbers 14:18, and by the third and fourth generation mentioned elsewhere. By these passages in the Word and more, I say, one can confirm that the number four is said in application to goods, and that they symbolize those goods, and also the conjunction of goodness and truth. But because it would take a lengthy explanation of these passages to make this apparent, it is enough to briefly state that this is the meaning that the number four and a fourth part have in heaven.

  
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Many thanks to the General Church of the New Jerusalem, and to Rev. N.B. Rogers, translator, for the permission to use this translation.