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Genesis 47

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1 And Joseph came and told Pharaoh and said, My father and my brethren, and their sheep and their cattle, and all that they have, are come out of the land of Canaan; and behold, they are in the land of Goshen.

2 And he took from the whole number of his brethren, five men, and set them before Pharaoh.

3 And Pharaoh said to his brethren, What is your occupation? And they said to Pharaoh, Thy servants are shepherds, both we and our fathers.

4 And they said to Pharaoh, To sojourn in the land are we come; for there is no pasture for the sheep that thy servants have, for the famine is grievous in the land of Canaan; and now, we pray thee, let thy servants dwell in the land of Goshen.

5 And Pharaoh spoke to Joseph, saying, Thy father and thy brethren are come to thee.

6 The land of Egypt is before thee; in the best of the land settle thy father and thy brethren: let them dwell in the land of Goshen. And if thou knowest men of activity among them, then set them as overseers of cattle over what I have.

7 And Joseph brought Jacob his father, and set him before Pharaoh. And Jacob blessed Pharaoh.

8 And Pharaoh said to Jacob, How many are the days of the years of thy life?

9 And Jacob said to Pharaoh, The days of the years of my sojourning are a hundred and thirty years. Few and evil have been the days of the years of my life, and they do not attain to the days of the years of the life of my fathers, in the days of their sojourning.

10 And Jacob blessed Pharaoh, and went out from Pharaoh.

11 And Joseph settled his father and his brethren, and gave them a possession in the land of Egypt, in the best of the land, in the land of Rameses, as Pharaoh had commanded.

12 And Joseph maintained his father, and his brethren, and all his father's household, with bread, according to the number of the little ones.

13 And there was no bread in all the land; for the famine was very grievous; and the land of Egypt and the land of Canaan were exhausted through the famine.

14 And Joseph gathered up all the money that was found in the land of Egypt, and in the land of Canaan, for the grain which they bought; and Joseph brought the money into Pharaoh's house.

15 And when money came to an end in the land of Egypt and in the land of Canaan, all the Egyptians came to Joseph, saying, Give us bread! for why should we die before thee? for [our] money is all gone.

16 And Joseph said, Give your cattle, and I will Give you for your cattle, if [your] money be all gone.

17 And they brought their cattle to Joseph; and Joseph gave them bread for horses, and for flocks of sheep, and for herds of cattle, and for asses; and he fed them with bread for all their cattle that year.

18 And that year ended; and they came to him the second year, and said to him, We will not hide [it] from my lord that since [our] money is come to an end, and the herds of cattle are in the possession of my lord, nothing is left before my lord but our bodies and our land.

19 Why should we die before thine eyes, both we and our land? Buy us and our land for bread, and we and our land will be bondmen to Pharaoh; and give seed, that we may live, and not die, and that the land be not desolate.

20 And Joseph bought all the soil of Egypt for Pharaoh; for the Egyptians sold every man his field, because the famine prevailed over them; and the land became Pharaoh's.

21 And as for the people, he removed them into the cities, from [one] end of the borders of Egypt even to the [other] end of it.

22 Only the land of the priests he did not buy; for the priests had an assigned portion from Pharaoh, and ate their assigned portion which Pharaoh had given them; so they did not sell their land.

23 And Joseph said to the people, Behold, I have bought you this day and your land for Pharaoh: lo, here is seed for you, and sow the land.

24 And it shall come to pass in the increase that ye shall give the fifth to Pharaoh, and the four parts shall be your own, for seed of the field, and for your food, and for them of your households, and for food for your little ones.

25 And they said, Thou hast saved us alive. Let us find favour in the eyes of my lord, and we will be Pharaoh's bondmen.

26 And Joseph made it a law over the land of Egypt to this day, [that] the fifth should be for Pharaoh, except the land of the priests: theirs alone did not become Pharaoh's.

27 And Israel dwelt in the land of Egypt, in the land of Goshen; and they had possessions in it, and were fruitful and multiplied exceedingly.

28 And Jacob lived in the land of Egypt seventeen years; and the days of Jacob, the years of his life, were a hundred and forty-seven years.

29 And the days of Israel approached that he should die. And he called his son Joseph, and said to him, If now I have found favour in thine eyes, put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh, and deal kindly and truly with me: bury me not, I pray thee, in Egypt;

30 but when I shall lie with my fathers, thou shalt carry me out of Egypt, and bury me in their sepulchre. And he said, I will do according to thy word.

31 And he said, Swear to me; and he swore to him. And Israel worshipped on the bed's head.

   

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Arcana Coelestia # 6135

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6135. 'Nothing is left before [my] lord apart from our bodies and our ground' means that the receptacles of goodness and truth have been made completely desolate. This is clear from the meaning of body' as the receptacle of good, dealt with below; and from the meaning of ground' as the receptacle of truth. The reason why 'ground' is the receptacle of truth is that it receives seeds, and seeds sown in it mean in a specific sense matters of faith derived from charity, thus of truth derived from good, 1025, 1447, 1610, 1940, 2848, 3038, 3310, 3373; consequently 'the ground' means the receptacle of truth. See also what has been stated and shown previously regarding the ground in 566, 1068, 3671. The fact that such receptacles have been made desolate is meant by 'nothing is left before [my] lord apart from'.

[2] In the genuine sense 'body' means the good of love and 'ground' the truth of faith. When truths and forms of the good of truth, meant by 'the silver' and 'the livestock', can be seen no longer on account of the desolation, 'body' means merely the receptacle for good and 'ground' the receptacle for truth. The reason why 'body' in the genuine sense means the good of love is that the body or the entire person meant by the body is a receptacle of life from the Lord, thus a receptacle of good; for the good of love composes the actual life in a person. The vital heat that consists in love is vital heat itself; and unless that heat exists in a person, the person is something dead. This then is the reason why in the internal sense 'body' means the good of love. Even if a person does not have heavenly love present in him but hellish love, the inmost centre of his life still owes its existence to heavenly love. For this love flows in constantly from the Lord and provides him with vital heat in its primary and original form; but as it comes to that person it is perverted by him, and this gives rise to hellish love, from which an unclean heat is radiated.

[3] I have been able to see quite clearly from the angels that 'body' in the genuine sense is the good of love. When they are present, love floods out of them, so much so that you think they are nothing but love; it floods out of their entire bodies. Also their bodies have a dazzling appearance, full of light shining from them; for the good of love is like a flame sending out from itself light, which is the truth of faith derived from that good. If this therefore is what the angels of heaven are like, what of the Lord Himself? He is the Source of every spark of love among the angels, and His Divine Love is seen as the Sun from which the whole of heaven receives its light, and from which all who are there derive their heavenly heat, that is, their love and so their life. The Lord's Divine Human is what appears in that way and is the Source of all those things. From this one may now see what is meant by the Lord's body - Divine Love, the same as is meant by His flesh, dealt with in 3813. Also, the Lord's very body - having been glorified, that is, made Divine - is nothing else than such Love; so what else can one feel the Divine, which is the Infinite, to be?

[4] From all this one may recognize that nothing else is meant by 'body' in the Holy Supper than the Lord's Divine Love towards the entire human race, described in the Gospels as follows,

Jesus, taking the bread and saying a blessing, broke and gave to the disciples and said, Take, eat, this is My body. Matthew 26:26; Mark 14:22; Luke 22:19.

He said, referring to the bread, 'this is My body' because 'bread' too means Divine Love, 276, 680, 2165, 2177, 3464, 3478, 3735, 4735, 5915.

[5] Divine Love is again meant by the Lord's body in John,

Jesus said, Destroy [this] temple and in three days I will raise it up again. But He was speaking of the temple of His body. John 2:19, 21.

'The temple of His body' is Divine Truth derived from Divine Good, for 'the temple' is the Lord's Divine Truth, see 3720. And since 'body' in the highest sense is the Divine Good of the Lord's Divine Love, all in heaven are said to be in the Lord's body.

[6] That the Lord's body is Divine Good is also clear from the following words in Daniel,

I lifted up my eyes and saw, and behold, a man clothed in linen whose loins were girded with gold of Uphaz, and his body was like tarshish, 1 and his face was like the appearance of lightning, and his eyes were like fiery torches, and his arms and his feet like the shine of burnished bronze, and the sound of his words like the sound of a multitude. Daniel 10:5-6.

'The gold of Uphaz' with which the man's loins were girded, 'the appearance of lightning' that his face had, 'the fiery torches' descriptive of his eyes, and 'the shine of bronze' descriptive of his arms and feet mean aspects of the good of love. 'Gold is the good of love, see 113, 1551, 1552, 5658, as also is 'fire', 934, 4906, 5215; and since 'fire' has that meaning, so does 'lightning'. 'Bronze' is the good of love and charity in the natural, 425, 1551; 'tarshish' which the rest of his body looked like, that is to say, which his trunk between head and loins looked like, means the good of charity and faith; for tarshish is a sparkling and precious stone.

Poznámky pod čarou:

1. A Hebrew word for a particular kind of precious stone, possibly a beryl.

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