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Numbers 5

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1 And the Lord said to Moses,

2 Give orders to the children of Israel to put outside the tent-circle every leper, and anyone who has any sort of flow from his body, and anyone who is unclean from the touch of the dead;

3 Male or female they are to be put outside the tent-circle, so that they may not make unclean my resting-place among them.

4 So the children of Israel did as the Lord had said to Moses, and put them outside the tent-circle.

5 And the Lord said to Moses,

6 Say to the children of Israel, If a man or a woman does any of the sins of men, going against the word of the Lord, and is in the wrong;

7 Let them say openly what they have done; and make payment for the wrong done, with the addition of a fifth part, and give it to him to whom the wrong was done.

8 But if the man has no relation to whom the payment may be made, then the payment for sin made to the Lord will be the priest's, in addition to the sheep offered to take away his sin.

9 And every offering lifted up of all the holy things which the children of Israel give to the priest, will be his.

10 And every man's holy things will be his: whatever a man gives to the priest will be his.

11 And the Lord said to Moses,

12 Say to the children of Israel, If any man's wife does wrong, sinning against him

13 By taking as her lover another man, and keeps it secret so that her husband has no knowledge of it, and there is no witness against her, and she is not taken in the act;

14 If the spirit of doubt comes into her husband's heart, and he has doubts of his wife, with good cause; or if he has doubts of her without cause:

15 Then let him take her to the priest, offering for her the tenth part of an ephah of barley meal, without oil or perfume; for it is a meal offering of a bitter spirit, a meal offering keeping wrongdoing in mind.

16 And the priest will make her come near and put her before the Lord;

17 And the priest will take holy water in a pot and put in it dust from the floor of the House;

18 And he will make the woman come before the Lord with her hair loose, and will put the meal offering, the offering of a bitter spirit, in her hands; and the priest will take in his hand the bitter water causing the curse;

19 And he will make her take an oath, and say to her, If no man has been your lover and you have not been with another in place of your husband, you are free from this bitter water causing the curse;

20 But if you have been with another in place of your husband and have made yourself unclean with a lover:

21 Then the priest will put the oath of the curse on the woman, and say to her, May the Lord make you a curse and an oath among your people, sending on you wasting of the legs and disease of the stomach;

22 And this water of the curse will go into your body, causing disease of your stomach and wasting of your legs: and the woman will say, So be it.

23 And the priest will put these curses in a book, washing out the writing with the bitter water;

24 And he will give to the woman the bitter water for drink; and the bitter water causing the curse will go into her.

25 And the priest will take from her hand the meal offering of doubt, waving it before the Lord, and will take it to the altar;

26 And he will take some of it in his hand, burning it on the altar as a sign, and then he will give the woman the bitter water.

27 And it will be that if the woman has become unclean, sinning against her husband, when she has taken the bitter water it will go into her body, causing disease of the stomach and wasting of the legs, and she will be a curse among her people.

28 But if she is clean she will be free and will have offspring.

29 This is the law for testing a wife who goes with another in place of her husband and becomes unclean;

30 Or for a husband who, in a bitter spirit, has doubts in his heart about his wife; let him take her to the priest, who will put in force this law.

31 Then the man will be free from all wrong, and the woman's sin will be on her.

   

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Arcana Coelestia # 10038

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10038. 'You shall burn with fire outside the camp' means that those things must be banished to hell and be consumed by the evils of self-love. This is clear from the meaning of 'burning with fire' as consuming by means of the evils of self-love, for 'burning' means consuming or devouring and 'fire' the evil of self-love (for these meanings of 'burning' and 'fire', see 1297, 5071, 5215, 6314, 6832, 7324, 7575, 9141, 9434); and from the meaning of 'the camp' as heaven and the Church, and in the contrary sense the place where heaven and the Church do not exist, thus where hell exists, dealt with below. The reason why 'being burned with fire' means being consumed by the evils of self-love is that that love consumes every good or truth of faith. Scarcely anyone at the present day knows that self-love does this, nor consequently that this love constitutes hell with a person and that it is what should be understood by hell-fire.

[2] There are two fires of life that exist with a person; one is self-love, the other is love to God. Those in whom self-love predominates cannot be governed by love to God, for those loves are opposites. They are opposites because self-love gives rise to all evils, which are contempt for others in comparison with self, enmity towards those who do not treat oneself favourably, and in the end to hatred, vengeance, brutality, and cruelty; and these evils act in total opposition to Divine influx, consequently annihilate truths and forms of the good of faith and charity, these being the things that flow in from the Lord. Anybody who stops to reflect may know that everyone's love is the fire of his life - for without love there is no life, and the character of the love determines that of the life - and therefore that self-love gives rise to evils of every kind, doing so in the measure that he has only himself in view, that is, self-love reigns in him. The worst kind of self-love is the love of dominion over others for selfish reasons, that is, the love of possessing dominion solely for the sake of position and gain. Those in whom that love predominates may, it is true, make profession of faith and charity, but they do so with their lips, not with their heart; indeed the worst among them look on the things that belong to faith and charity, thus the holy things of the Church, as means to their own ends. But self-love and all the different types of it, also the evils that gush out of it, and the condition of the selfish in the next life, must in the Lord's Divine mercy be stated in detail somewhere else. They have been referred to here to enable people to know what 'being burned with fire outside the camp' means.

[3] The fact that 'the camp' where the children of Israel were encamped represented heaven and the Church, and therefore that 'outside the camp' represented the place where heaven and the Church did not exist, thus where hell was, becomes clear from those places in the Word which mention the camp and the encampment of the children of Israel in the wilderness, such as the following in Moses,

The children of Israel shall camp, [every] man by his own camp, and [every] man by his own standard, according to their armies. And the Levites shall camp around the dwelling-place of the Testimony, that there may be no wrath on the congregation of the children of Israel. Numbers 1:52-53; 2:2.

In addition, Numbers 2:1-end says that the tribes of Judah, Issachar, and Zebulun encamped to the east; the tribes of Reuben, Simeon, and Gad to the south; the tribes of Ephraim, Manasseh, and Benjamin to the west; and the tribes of Dan, Asher, and Naphtali to the north. But the Levites were in the middle of their camps. The like applied when they set out on their journeys, Numbers 2:17; 10:1-end. The reason why their encampments were arranged in that kind of order was so that they might represent heaven and the Church, 9320 (end). Moreover the tribes according to which the children of Israel set up their camps represented all the forms of good and all the truths in their entirety that belonged to heaven and the Church, 3858, 3926, 3939, 4060, 6335, 6337, 6397, 6640, 7836, 7891, 7996, 7997. This explains why it says that Jehovah dwells in the middle of the camps, Numbers 5:3, and that He walks in the middle of them and they will therefore be holy, Deuteronomy 23:14, and why, in the prophecy uttered by Balaam, when he saw Israel dwelling according to their tribes, he said, How good are your tabernacles, O Jacob, and your dwelling-places, O Israel! Numbers 24:2-3, 5.

[4] Since heaven and the Church was represented by the camp it follows that 'outside the camp' meant the place where neither heaven nor the Church existed, thus where hell was. That is why everyone who was unclean and also anyone who was guilty was sent out there, as may be recognized from the following,

You shall send out of the camp everyone who is leprous, and everyone suffering a discharge, and everyone unclean on account of a soul 1 . Whether they are male or female 2 you shall send them outside the camp, so that they may not defile the camps, in the middle of which Jehovah dwells. Numbers 5:2-3; Leviticus 13:45-46.

A man who is not clean by reason of an accident in the night shall go outside the camp and not come into the middle of the camp. When he has washed himself with water and the sun has set he shall enter the camp. There shall be a space for you outside the camp where you may go out, and you shall cover your excrement by means of a spade 3 , since Jehovah walks in the middle of the camp. Therefore the camp shall be holy. Deuteronomy 23:10-14.

And the stoning of people was done outside the camp, Leviticus 24:14; Numbers 15:35-36.

From all this it is now clear that 'you shall burn with fire the flesh, skin, and dung of the young bull, outside the camp' means that evils, meant by these things, must be banished to hell.

[5] The same thing as was represented by the camp and the area outside it was also represented by the land of Canaan and the lands around it after that land had been divided up as inheritances among the children of Israel. This is why in the Word 'the land of Canaan' or simply 'the land' means heaven and the Church, and 'the children of Israel' those who are in heaven and the Church. For the meaning of 'the land' as heaven and the Church, see the places referred to in 9325; and for that of 'the children of Israel' as those who are there, 9340.

Poznámky pod čarou:

1. i.e. unclean through contact with a dead body

2. literally, From male even to female

3. literally, peg or nail

  
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Thanks to the Swedenborg Society for the permission to use this translation.