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.

120. 3. The offspring from the Lord as Husband and Father and from the church as wife and mother are all spiritual offspring, and this is what is meant in the spiritual sense of the Word by sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, sons-in-law and daughters-in-law, and by other terms which have to do with descending generations. We have no need to show that spiritual offspring are the only kind of offspring born from the Lord through the church, because reason sees it is so without demonstration. For the Lord is the source from which all good and truth flow, and it is the church which receives this good and truth and puts them into effect. Moreover, the spiritual virtues of heaven and the church all have to do with good and truth.

It is because of this that sons and daughters in the Word in its spiritual sense mean truths and goods - sons meaning truths conceived in a person's spiritual self and born in the natural self, and daughters meaning qualities of goodness similarly conceived and born. In the Word, therefore, people who have been regenerated by the Lord are called sons of God, sons of the kingdom, and ones born of Him; and the Lord called the disciples sons.

The male child whom the woman bore and who was caught up to God in the twelfth chapter of the book of Revelation (Revelation 12:5) has the same symbolism (see The Apocalypse Revealed, no. 543).

Since daughters symbolize a church's qualities of goodness, therefore reference is so often made in the Word to the daughter of Zion, daughter of Jerusalem, daughter of Israel, and daughter of Judah. By daughter in these places is not meant an actual daughter, but an affection for good which is connected with the church (see The Apocalypse Revealed, no. 612).

The Lord also calls those people brothers and sisters who belong to His church (Matthew 12:49, 25:40, 28:10, Mark 3:35, Luke 8:21).