At the inmost level, the story of Moses -- like all of the Bible -- is about the Lord and his spiritual development during his human life as Jesus. Moses's role represents establishing forms of worship and to make the people obedient. As such, his primary representation is "the Law of God," the rules God gave the people of Israel to follow in order to represent spiritual things. This can be interpreted narrowly as the Ten Commandments, more broadly as the books of Moses, or most broadly as the entire Bible. Fittingly, his spiritual meaning is complex and important, and evolves throughout the course of his life. To understand it, it helps to understand the meaning of the events in which he was involved. At a more basic level, Moses's story deals with the establishment of the third church to serve as a container of knowledge of the Lord. The first such church -- the Most Ancient Church, represented by Adam and centered on love of the Lord -- had fallen prey to human pride and was destroyed. The second -- the Ancient Church, represented by Noah and the generations that followed him -- was centered on love of the neighbor, wisdom from the Lord and knowledge of the correspondences between natural and spiritual things. It fell prey to the pride of intelligence, however -- represented by the Tower of Babel -- and at the time of Moses was in scattered pockets that were sliding into idolatry. On an external level, of course, Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt through 40 years in the wilderness to the border of the homeland God had promised them. Along the way, he established and codified their religious system, and oversaw the creation of its most holy objects. Those rules and the forms of worship they created were given as containers for deeper ideas about the Lord, deeper truth, and at some points -- especially when he was first leading his people away from Egypt, a time before the rules had been written down -- Moses takes on the deeper representation of Divine Truth itself, truth from the Lord. At other times -- especially after Mount Sinai -- he has a less exalted meaning, representing the people of Israel themselves due to his position as their leader. Through Moses the Lord established a third church, one more external than its predecessors but one that could preserve knowledge of the Lord and could, through worship that represented spiritual things, make it possible for the Bible to be written and passed to future generations.

7014. 'And Moses went and returned' means a resumption of the former life. This is clear from the meaning of 'going' as life, dealt with in 4882, 5493, 5605; from the meaning of 'returning', or going back, as living where he had done so formerly; and from the representation of 'Moses' as the Lord in respect of the law or truth from God, dealt with in 6771, 6827. When Moses was on Mount Horeb with Jehovah, who appeared in a flame of fire, he represented the Lord in respect of Divine Truth; but now that he is with Jethro his father-in-law, who is the good of the Church which is guided by the truth that goes with simple good, he represents the Lord in respect of truth from God. Here and elsewhere in the Word the internal sense describes how, during all the states of life which the Lord passed through in the world, He was making His Human Divine. These states followed one after another, as may be recognized from the fact that when He was a young child the Lord was like a young child, and after that grew in intelligence and wisdom, all the time instilling Divine Love into them till at length His Human too became Divine Love, which is Divine Being (Esse) or Jehovah. And this being the way in which the Lord put on the Divine - that is, in one state after another - He therefore first made Himself truth from God, after this Divine Truth, and finally Divine Good. These were the stages in the glorification of the Lord that are described here and elsewhere in the internal sense of the Word.