2
und überzog sie mit feinem Golde inwendig und auswendig und machte ihr einen goldenen Kranz umher.
2 Mose 37:2
Secrets of Heaven # 120
120. Like Egypt, the Euphrates symbolizes secular knowledge — facts — and the sensory impressions on which facts are based. The prophetic parts of the Word make this clear, as in Micah:
My enemy has said, "Where is Jehovah your God?" A day will come on which he will build your bulwarks. That is the day the set limit will be far off; that is the day when he will come all the way to you from Assyria, and to the cities of Egypt and to the River [Euphrates]. 1 (Micah 7:10, 11, 12)
This is how the prophets spoke about the Coming of the Lord, who was to regenerate us, so that we would come to be like heaven's inhabitants. In Jeremiah:
Why should you go to Egypt to drink the waters of the Sihor? And why should you go to Assyria to drink the waters of the River [Euphrates]? (Jeremiah 2:18)
Egypt and the Euphrates alike stand for facts, Assyria for rationalizations constructed out of them. In David:
You have caused a grapevine to travel from Egypt; you have driven away the nations; you have planted it. You have sent its offshoots all the way out to the sea, and its tendrils to the River [Euphrates]. (Psalms 80:8, 11)
In this passage the river Euphrates again stands for sensory and factual information. The Euphrates, after all, formed the boundary of Israel's dominions on the Assyrian side. 2 Similarly for spiritual and heavenly people, facts in the memory are the outer limit of understanding and wisdom.
These words spoken to Abraham have the identical symbolism:
To your seed I will give this land, from the river of Egypt all the way to the great river, the river Euphrates. (Genesis 15:18)
These two boundaries symbolize the same things.
Poznámky pod čarou:
1. This bracketed gloss, and the other two in subsequent quotations in this section, are Swedenborg's. [LHC]
2. Swedenborg views the land of Canaan as extending farther than is generally thought. He saw it as stretching to the Euphrates River — presumably on the north rather than the east, since he describes the borders of Canaan as being the Mediterranean, the Nile, the Jordan, and the Euphrates (see, for example, §5196). His reason, as he says at the end of §4454, is that these were considered the borders of Canaan in scriptural times, by the evidence of Genesis 15:18. According to 2 Samuel 8:3-6, David did take land in the area of the Euphrates and place garrisons in Syria. [LHC]
