3185. 'And they blessed Rebekah and said to her' means heartfelt desires resulting from Divine enlightenment. This is clear from the meaning of 'blessing', when bidding farewell to someone who is leaving, as expressing heartfelt desires for their happiness. The fact that here those desires are the result of Divine enlightenment is evident from what follows immediately after and also for the reason that enlightenment flows into the natural man by way of the affection for truth, which is 'Rebekah', when being introduced into good, which is 'Isaac'.

In most places in the Word, "ten" represents "all," or in some cases "many" or "much." The Ten Commandments represent all the guidance we get from the Lord in life; the ten horns on the beast of Revelation represent all power of falsity; the ten virgins with lamps in Matthew 25 represent all people of the church.

Yet in other places, ten, or especially a "tenth," signifies representing remnants, or tiny scraps of goodness preserved for the future. These can be the remnants of a church -- a few good people that can be built up into a new church. Or they can be tiny subconscious memories of love and joy which the Lord stores in each of us in early childhood, feelings He can use later to draw us toward a life of goodness and affection.

These two meanings seem nearly opposite, but they're actually not. Love is whole and indivisible, so that the tiniest feeling buried inside someone contains all the elements of the love it can become. In a similar way, a remnant of a church that has preserved that church's knowledge has everything it needs to grow into a new church. In a sense, then, those remnants are indeed "all," they're just a version of "all" that is still in a state of potential.