The very first people on earth to have some spiritual awareness were part of what Swedenborg refers to as "The Most Ancient Church," represented in the Bible by Adam. It existed in the land of Canaan. These people were in a state from the Lord in which their internal love was love of the Lord, with loves of marriage, of children, and of one another flowing from that love. From love of the Lord they also had great wisdom; rather than learning about the world and other people and figuring out how to serve them, they could simply feel love and from love instantly understand right and wrong down to the smallest details. Indeed, in looking at the natural world they barely saw it; what they saw was the greater reality of the spiritual world reflected in all the details of the natural world.

The Lord knew, however, that this church would eventually fall, so he inspired a group, represented in the Bible by "Enoch," to record the church's knowledge and concepts so they could be passed on. And the Most Ancient Church did fall; people began letting pride and self-reliance creep into their hearts, their loves got corrupted, and with their loves driving their ideas they drowned in a sea of false thinking, represented in the Bible by the great flood.

The Lord responded by making a subtle but significant change in the nature of human beings: He separated our thoughts from our feelings, giving us the ability to want one thing but think another, so that using our minds we could let knowledge and understanding rule our corrupt hearts. He then took a remnant of the Most Ancient Church and gave it the doctrine of "Enoch." This group, the first and noblest of the Ancient Church, is represented in the Bible by Noah.

According to the Writings, the Ancient Church quickly spread throughout the ancient world, all over the Middle East and northern Africa, with different forms of worship represented by Noah's sons and his grandson Canaan. Its peoples had a deep understanding of the nature of the Lord, and knew Him as "Jehovah." They also had vast knowledge of how every detail of the natural world reflected details of the spiritual world, and used those details to guide themselves in their spiritual development.

But the Ancient Church was also doomed to fall, so the Lord inspired a group starting with Eber to create forms of worship based on the relationship between the natural world and the spiritual world. From understanding the meaning of mountains and groves, this group started worshipping on mountains and in groves. From understanding the meaning of grains and domestic animals, this group started sacrificing them as a form of worship. Meanwhile, the rest of the church had turned from worshipping the Lord to worshipping themselves, and people were twisting their understanding of natural things into idolatry and magic. So the Lord cut them off from a true understanding of spiritual things, an event represented by the story of the Tower of Babel, leaving the descendants of Eber – the Hebrews – to preserve the knowledge that had been passed on from the Most Ancience Church.

But the Hebrews were surrounded by the increasingly pagan descendants of the Ancient Church, and were slowly corrupted to the point that almost none of their knowledge remained. So the Lord ordered Abraham to the Land of Canaan – a land full of spiritual meaning because it was home to the Most Ancient Church – and began re-establishing the representative worship of the Hebrews as a purely external thing. It's noteworthy that the Lord had to introduce himself to Abraham as "God Shaddai" because even the name "Jehovah" had been forgotten.

This third version of the Ancient Church preserved representatives of the Holy Land and forms of worship including sacrifice and circumcision, and also established new representatives, particularly through the 12 sons of Jacob and the resulting tribes. Meanwhile, other pieces of the corrupted Ancient Church continued collapsing, the destruction of Sodom being a notable example.

The preserved ideas nearly vanished again as the Hebrews spent 400 years in captivity in Egypt – like Abraham, Moses did not know the name "Jehovah" when he turned aside to see the burning bush – but were restored as external forms as Moses led the Children into the wilderness. There, at the foot of the "mountain of God," the Lord established the ultimate replacement for the Ancient Church: the Jewish or Israelitish Church, which preserved the name "Jehovah," and preserved spiritual representatives through the ark, the Tabernacle, the Ten Commandments and the laws of Moses. This third church did not have any of the internal spiritual knowledge which existed in the Ancient Church, but kept its ideas alive so the meaning could be restored by the Lord when He came on earth as Jesus.

The Writings also tell us that the Ancient Church had a holy scripture of its own, a written collection of the wisdom preserved by "Enoch." It is the source of the first seven chapters of Genesis (up to the flood), and includes the Book of Jasher, referred to in Joshua 10:12-13, and again in 2 Samuel 1:18, and the books of "Oracles" (aka "Pronouncements", or "Annunciations") and the Wars of Jehovah, which are quoted by Moses in Numbers 21:14, 27.