A company might have executives setting policy and strategy, engineers designing products, managers handling personnel and others handling various functions. They all do different things -- but if they're doing them with a shared underlying purpose, the company -- and the individuals in it -- will likely be successful. The Lord wants all human society to function in a similar way. We have different skills and individual loves, but if we all share a mutual love -- a love of serving others -- then society will function as one, will be a reflection of heaven and will be a good receptacle for the Lord's love. This can also happen within each of us, as we unify our talents and ideas around a central love. And in an abstract sense, it illustrates how a wide collection of varying ideas can be unified around a shared good intention. That is the kind of love pictured when “one” is used in the Bible, either as a specific number or in the sense of several people or objects “being one.” In more casual references -- when used to identify a specific person or object -- the meaning is relatively literal, and is connected to that person or object.

1226. That 'the sons of Shem' means the attributes of wisdom is clear merely from the fact that 'Shem' is the internal Church whose sons mean nothing else than attributes of wisdom. The expression wisdom is used for everything that springs from charity, for it comes by way of charity from the Lord, the source of all wisdom because He is Wisdom itself. From that Wisdom true intelligence derives, also true knowledge, and true cognition. All of these are 'sons' of charity, that is, the Lord's sons begotten by means of charity. And because they are the Lord's sons begotten by means of charity, each one is referred to as wisdom, for each one has within itself wisdom from which it draws its life; so much so in fact that neither intelligence nor knowledge, nor cognition, receives any life except from the wisdom that belongs to charity, which is the Lord's.