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.

2503. That 'Kadesh' is the affection for interior truth coming from rational concepts, while 'Shur' is the affection for exterior truth deriving from factual knowledge, becomes clear from the meaning of 'Kadesh' and of 'Shur'. 'Kadesh' means truth over which there is strife, as has been shown in 1678; thus it means strife over truth regarding its origin, whether it comes from the rational, as is evident from what follows. But because with the Lord all truth came from a celestial origin, 'Kadesh' here means the affection for truth. Residing with every member of the Church there are rational truths and there are factual truths. Rational truths are interior, but factual truths exterior. The former are quite distinct and separate from the latter, altogether so as man's interior memory is from his exterior memory, dealt with in 2469-2473, and following paragraphs. From this it follows that there are two affections for truth, the first more interior, which is an affection for rational truths, the second more exterior, which is an affection for factual truths. The affection for interior truth deriving from rational concepts is meant here by 'Kadesh', while the affection for exterior truth deriving from factual knowledge is meant by 'Shur'. As regards 'Shur' meaning exterior truth, see 1928; and the fact that names in the Word mean nothing other than real things has been shown already in 1224, 1264, 1876, 1888, and many times elsewhere.