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Genesis 48:1

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1 Pärast seda sündmust öeldi Joosepile: 'Vaata, su isa on haige!' Siis ta võttis oma kaks poega enesega, Manasse ja Efraimi.

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Arcana Coelestia # 6226

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6226. 'And sat on the bed' means which was turned towards the natural. This is clear from the meaning of 'the bed' as the natural, dealt with in 6188. The reason why 'Israel sat on the bed' means that spiritual good was turned towards the natural is that in the last verse of the previous chapter, Chapter 47, 'Israel bowed himself over the head of the bed' meant that spiritual good turned itself towards things of the interior natural, see 6188, and therefore moving himself from the head and sitting on the bed means that spiritual good turned itself towards the natural. Nothing intelligible can be said to show what turning itself to the interior natural is, or to the exterior natural, because very few people know of the existence of the interior natural and the exterior natural, or that thought takes place at one time in the first, at another in the second. And people who do not know these things do not stop to reflect on them and consequently cannot have gained any knowledge of this particular matter by anything they have experienced. Yet this turning to one and then to the other goes on in everyone, though with variations; for at one time a person's thought is raised to things on a higher level, and at another it comes down to those on a lower level, so that at one time his thought looks upwards, at another time downwards.

[2] Apart from all this anyone can see that 'Israel bowed himself over the head of the bed' and that after that 'he sat on the bed' are matters which would have been too trivial for mention in the most holy Word unless they had held some arcanum within them. That arcanum cannot be brought to light except by means of the internal sense, except therefore through a knowledge of what each individual word means in the spiritual sense, that is, the sense that angels understand. For angels thoughts are not based, as men's are, on worldly, bodily, and earthly objects, but on heavenly ones. The nature of the difference between those two kinds of objects is particularly evident from correspondences, which are the subject at the ends of a number of chapters.

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

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Arcana Coelestia # 3416

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3416. 'And Isaac went away from there' means that the Lord abandoned interior truths. This is clear from the meaning of 'going away from there' as abandoning, here abandoning interior truths since these are the subject; and from the representation of 'Isaac' as the Lord's Divine Rational. The Lord's abandonment of interior truths means that He does not expose these to such persons. Every part of the Word contains internal truths, but when such people read the Word as possess a knowledge of cognitions but are not at the same time concerned with life they do not even notice those truths, as becomes clear from the fact that those who make the essential thing of salvation to reside in faith pay no attention at all to those things which the Lord spoke of so many times regarding love and charity, 1017, 2371. And those who do pay any attention to them call them the fruits of faith, which they distinguish and indeed separate from charity, the nature of which is not known to them. Thus the things of the Word that are secondary are seen by them but not those that are primary, that is, its exterior features are seen but not the interior ones. And seeing the things that are secondary or exterior without those that are primary or interior amounts to seeing nothing Divine at all. These are the implications of the explanation that the Lord abandoned interior truths, meant by 'Isaac went away from there'. Not that the Lord abandons, but that those people remove themselves from the Lord by removing themselves from matters of life.

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