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Genesis 8

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1 And God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the cattle that was with him in the ark: and God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters asswaged;

2 The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained;

3 And the waters returned from off the earth continually: and after the end of the hundred and fifty days the waters were abated.

4 And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat.

5 And the waters decreased continually until the tenth month: in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, were the tops of the mountains seen.

6 And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made:

7 And he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from off the earth.

8 Also he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground;

9 But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him into the ark, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth: then he put forth his hand, and took her, and pulled her in unto him into the ark.

10 And he stayed yet other seven days; and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark;

11 And the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth.

12 And he stayed yet other seven days; and sent forth the dove; which returned not again unto him any more.

13 And it came to pass in the six hundredth and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from off the earth: and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and, behold, the face of the ground was dry.

14 And in the second month, on the seven and twentieth day of the month, was the earth dried.

15 And God spake unto Noah, saying,

16 Go forth of the ark, thou, and thy wife, and thy sons, and thy sons' wives with thee.

17 Bring forth with thee every living thing that is with thee, of all flesh, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth; that they may breed abundantly in the earth, and be fruitful, and multiply upon the earth.

18 And Noah went forth, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons' wives with him:

19 Every beast, every creeping thing, and every fowl, and whatsoever creepeth upon the earth, after their kinds, went forth out of the ark.

20 And Noah builded an altar unto the LORD; and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar.

21 And the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.

22 While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.

   

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Arcana Coelestia #848

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848. When temptations have come to an end there is so to speak fluctuation. And if the temptations are spiritual it is fluctuation between truth and falsity, as also becomes quite clear from the fact that temptation is the starting point to regeneration. The purpose of all regeneration therefore is that a person may receive new life, or rather that he may receive life, and from not being a man may become one, that is, from being a dead man may become one who is alive. When therefore his former life, which is purely animal, is destroyed by means of temptations he cannot after temptations do other than fluctuate between truth and falsity. Truth belongs to the new life, falsity to the old. Unless the former life is destroyed and this fluctuation takes place, spiritual seed can never be implanted because there is no ground for it.

[2] Once that former life has been destroyed however, and this kind of fluctuation is taking place, a person knows almost nothing at all of what truth and good are. Indeed he scarcely knows of the existence of any such thing as truth. Take, for example, the situation in which a person considers whether he is able to perform from the proprium any good deeds that stem from charity, that is, good works, as people call them, and whether merit rests in his proprium. He is in that case in such obscurity and darkness that when told that nobody is able to do anything good from himself, that is, from his proprium, still less merit anything, and that all good comes from the Lord and all merit is the Lord's, it must inevitably astonish him. The same applies to all other matters of faith. Nevertheless that obscurity or darkness in which he dwells is slowly and gradually lightened.

[3] Regeneration is exactly like when a person is born as an infant. At this point he is living in the greatest obscurity, knowing virtually nothing. This being so, general ideas of things flow in first, which gradually become more definite as specific ideas are introduced into the general, and further still as yet more detailed ideas are introduced into the specific. Detailed ideas light up the general so that he knows not merely of their existence but also the nature of them. A similar process takes place with everyone emerging from spiritual temptation; and the state is similar in the case of people in the next life who have been under the influence of falsities and who are now being vastated. This state is called fluctuation and is described here as 'the waters receding, going back and forth'.

  
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Thanks to the Swedenborg Society for the permission to use this translation.