This can, of course, be a wonderful thing: It is essential for our journey to heaven, and is the reason for the holiness of marriage. But when the men represent falsity it can also be horrendously twisted, as in the attempted homosexual rape in Sodom (Genesis 19) and the rape of the concubine in Gibeah (Judges 19). In a general sense, men represent things of the intellect -- facts, ideas, knowledge, everything from the deepest truths to the most pernicious falsities about life and the Lord. Women in general represents things of affection -- desire, passion, caring, everything from the most exalted love for the Lord to the darkest hatred. When a man “knows” a woman in the Bible, then, it represents a joining together of those intellectual and affectionate faculties. “Know" is also often used in connection with virginity. A women who has “not known a man” represents the affection for truth, unsullied by falsity.

6437. 'And on the crown of the head of the Nazirite among his brothers' means with respect to the exteriors. This is clear from the meaning of 'the crown of the head of the Nazirite' as the exteriors, dealt with below; and from the representation of the sons of Israel, to whom Joseph's 'brothers' refers here, as spiritual truths in the natural, dealt with in 5414, 5879, 5951. Which are also exterior ones when considered in relation to other truths. For the good that resides with the member of the spiritual Church is the good of truth, and this good is an interior one because it resides in the interior part of the natural. The reason why 'the Nazirite' means the exteriors is that Nazirites represented the Lord's Divine Natural, which is the External Divine Human. That this is what Nazirites represented is clear from the fact that naziriteship is identified with the hair, and the holiness of that state lay in the hair. It did so for the sake of the representation already mentioned; for 'the hair' corresponds to and consequently means the natural, see 3301, 5247, 5569-5573. This is also evident from those who took the nazirite vow. They were forbidden to shave their hair during the time of the vow, Numbers 6:5; but afterwards, when the period of their naziriteship had been completed, they had to shave their head at the door of the tent of meeting and cast their hair into the fire under the eucharistic sacrifice, Numbers 6:13, 18. The same thing is further evident from Samson, who was a Nazirite. His strength lay in his hair, Judges 13:3, 5; 16:1-end, see 330. This is why it says in Jeremiah,

Cut off the hair of your naziriteship and throw it away, and take up a lamentation on the hills. Jeremiah 7:29.

From all this it is clear that 'the crown of the head of the Nazirite' means the exteriors, for the crown of the Nazirite's head is where his hair is. So much for the arcanum meant in the Word by 'the Nazirites'.