437. And the sound of their wings was like the sound of many horse-drawn chariots rushing into battle. This symbolizes their reasonings, as though founded on doctrinal truths from the Word fully understood, which they had to ardently defend.

The sound of wings symbolizes reasonings, because to fly means, symbolically, to perceive and teach (nos. 245, 415). Chariots symbolize doctrinal teachings, as we are about to show. Horses symbolize an understanding of the Word (no. 298), and many horses a full understanding. Plainly to rush into battle symbolizes an ardor to fight.

That a chariot symbolizes doctrine is clear from the following passages:

The chariots of God are twenty thousand, thousands of peaceful ones, the Lord among them... (Psalms 68:17)

(Jehovah) makes the clouds His chariots, He walks on the wings of the wind. (Psalms 104:3)

O Jehovah..., ...You ride on Your horses, Your chariots are salvation. (Habakkuk 3:8)

...behold, Jehovah will come with fire, and like a whirlwind His chariots... (Isaiah 66:15)

You shall be filled at My table with horses and chariots... (Thus) I will set My glory among the nations. (Ezekiel 39:20-21)

I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the horse from Jerusalem. (Zechariah 9:10)

I will overthrow the throne of kingdoms... I will overthrow the chariots and those who ride in them. (Haggai 2:22)

...set a watchman, let him declare what he sees. He saw therefore a chariot, a pair of horsemen..., a chariot of camels..., and... the chariot of a man... And he... said, "Babylon is fallen, is fallen!" (Isaiah 21:6-7, 9)

Since Elijah and Elisha represented the Lord in respect to the Word and thus symbolized doctrine drawn from the Word, as did all the prophets (no. 8), therefore they were called "the chariots of Israel and its horsemen;" and for the same reason Elisha saw Elijah taken up into heaven in a chariot of fire, and Elisha's servant saw chariots and horses of fire around Elisha (2 Kings 2:11-12; 6:17; 13:14).

See also elsewhere where chariots are mentioned, as in Isaiah 31:1; 37:24; 66:20; Jeremiah 17:25; 22:4; 46:2-3, 8-9; 50:37-38; 51:20-21.

The word "woman" is used a number of different ways in the Bible – as a simple description, as someone connected to a man ("his woman"), as a temptation to the men of Israel (women of other nations) and even as a term of address (Jesus addresses Mary as "woman" twice). There are also various spiritual meanings, and context is important. In most cases, a "woman" in the Bible represents a church, either a true one following the Lord or a false one out to deceive. This follows from the idea that the true character of an organization – or of an individual person – is determined by its goals, its mission, what it cares about most. This is well represented by women, because women are, at their inmost levels, forms of affection and love. Men, by contrast, are forms of thought and intellect, which appear prominent but actually play the secondary role of describing and supporting the defining loves and affections. The most central of a woman's loves and affections is the love of truth. On an individual scale this is central to the union between a wife and a husband: She loves his intellect and ideas, and blends them with her own to produce acts of love and kindness; meanwhile her love inspires him to seek more true ideas and greater wisdom so those acts of love and kindness can be ever better. The relationship between the church and the Lord is different, obviously, because the Lord is perfect love and perfect wisdom in balance, and is ultimately both masculine and feminine. The church is also not specifically feminine, being made up of men and women working in harmony. Even so, the defining aspect of a church is its love for truth, and how it receives ideas from the Lord. So while "woman" sometimes represents a church in general, it can also represents the love of truth that exists in that church, or the love of truth itself. Not all churches are true, of course. The reason the people of Israel were so strongly forbidden to intermarry with the people that surrounded them was that the foreign women represented false churches and false beliefs. And for an Israeli woman to take a foreign husband represented introducing falsity into the Israeli church. Two other uses of "woman" are more limited, primarily to the Book of Genesis. One of them is Eve, the first woman, formed from the rib of Adam. In that story Adam represents the Most Ancient Church, and the woman represents what the Writings call the "proprium," a sense of self, of identity, of control that the Lord gave to people of the church at that time. In a way this fits with the more general representation, because the love of truth is an important way we can feel a sense of power in our own spiritual growth, but the representation of Eve is relatively unique. Much of the rest of Genesis is dealing rather directly with the Lord's own development during his childhood on earth. Since the Lord thought and felt more deeply than we can possibly imagine, the women in this stories – Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, Rachel and others – represent true ideas themselves, rather than affections for truth.