To strike or smite, when used in the Bible, means to attack, harm or destroy, and is usually in reference to an attack on someone's knowledge and intellect. This is actually true both when evil people strike good people, trying to destroy their understanding of spiritual things, and when the Lord is pictured as striking people (with plagues in Egypt, for example), which most often represents the dulling of the intellect and destruction of knowledge in evil people to prevent them from doing spiritual harm to others.

(Odkazy: Apocalypse Revealed 498; Arcana Coelestia 1487, 6758, 6765, 7330, 7871, 9007, 9034, 9081, 9126, 10510)

10510. 'And Jehovah struck the people' means the ruination of truth and good among the Israelite nation. This is clear from the meaning of 'striking' as destroying, as in 6761, and 'destroying' in the spiritual sense means depriving someone of the truths and forms of the good of faith and love, which in the Word is called desolating and laying waste. The reason why ruination is meant here by 'striking' is that the present chapter has dealt with the shutting off of the internal among the Israelite nation, and the shutting off of the internal constitutes ruination so far as truth and good are concerned.