The Bible

 

Genesis 1

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1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first Day.

6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.

12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.

14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:

15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.

16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,

18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.

19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.

21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.

23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.

25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

Commentary

 

Green

  
by Danielle Schnarr

The color green is almost exclusively used in connection with plants in the Bible, and the meaning is closely connected to the meaning of plants as well. Plants, in general, represent facts, knowledge that we can gather from the world. Green plants are ones that are alive and growing. Since life represents love and goodness, it makes sense that green plants are facts that have the potential for good use. It also indicates that they are the kinds of things we learn through directly through our senses, since to identify green plants we need to actually see the greenness.

(References: Apocalypse Explained 507; Apocalypse Revealed 426; Arcana Coelestia 7691)

From Swedenborg's Works

 

The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Teachings #201

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201. The Lord's spiritual crises. Beyond all others, the Lord suffered the fiercest, most severe spiritual crises; they are barely touched on in the literal sense of the Word but are described extensively in its inner meaning: 1663, 1668, 1787, 2776, 2786, 2795, 2816, 9528. The Lord fought out of his divine love for the whole human race: 1690, 1691, 1812, 1813, 1820. The Lord's love was a love for the salvation of the human race: 1820. The Lord fought from his own power: 1692, 1813, 9937. Through spiritual crises and victories from his own power, the Lord alone became righteousness and merit: 1813, 2025, 2026, 2027, 9715, 9809, 10178. Through crises of the spirit, the Lord united his divine nature, which was within him from conception, to his human nature, and made this latter divine, just as he makes us spiritual through our crises of the spirit: 1725, 1729, 1733, 1737, 3318, 3381, 3382, 4286. The Lord's spiritual crises included despair at the end: 1787. Through the spiritual crises he allowed himself to undergo, the Lord gained control over the hells and brought everything there and in the heavens into proper order; and at the same time he glorified his human nature: 1737, 4287, 9528, 9715, 9937. The Lord alone fought against all the hells: 8273. This is why he allowed himself to undergo spiritual crises: 2816, 4295.

The Lord's divine nature could not have undergone spiritual crises, because the hells cannot attack anything divine. That is why the Lord took on a human nature from his mother, a nature that can undergo spiritual crises: 1414, 1444, 1573, 5041, 5157, 7193, 9315. Through his spiritual crises and victories he drove out everything he had inherited from his mother and divested himself of the human nature he had received from her, even to the point that he was no longer her son: 2159, 2574, 2649, 3036, 10830. Jehovah, 1 who was in him from conception, nevertheless seemed to be absent during his spiritual crises: 1815. This was his state of being humbled: 2 1785, 1999, 2159, 6866. His last spiritual crisis and final victory was in Gethsemane and on the cross, through which he completely overcame the hells and made his human nature divine: 2776, 2813, 2814, 10655, 10659, 10828.

Not eating bread and not drinking water for forty days [Exodus 34:28; Deuteronomy 9:9] means an entire state of spiritual crisis: 10686. Forty years, forty months, or forty days means a full state of spiritual crisis from beginning to end, and this state is meant by the forty-day duration of the Flood [Genesis 7:4, 17], by Moses' sojourn on Mount Sinai for forty days [Exodus 24:18; 34:28], by the Israelites' sojourn in the wilderness for forty years, 3 and by the forty-day-long crisis the Lord experienced in the wilderness [Matthew 4:2; Mark 1:13; Luke 4:2]: 730, 862, 2272, 2273, 8098.

Footnotes:

1. Following a Christian practice of his times, Swedenborg used the name "Jehovah" as a rendering of the tetragrammaton, יָהוֶה, "YHVH" (or "YHWH"), the four-letter name of God in the Hebrew Scriptures. In earliest times, Hebrew was written only with consonants; a system for indicating vowels was not perfected until the eighth century of the Common Era, and even in many modern Hebrew texts, vowels are not marked. The current scholarly reconstruction of the original pronunciation of the name is "Yahweh": see Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, under "YHWH. " A strict understanding of the Second Commandment, "You are not to take the name of YHVH your God in vain" (Exodus 20:7), led pious Jews to avoid pronouncing the name aloud; instead the word y"nod]a ('ăḏōnāi, literally meaning "my lord") was read. To indicate this, vowels similar to those in Adonai were added to YHVH, creating the form Jehovah. Some modern English Bibles use the name "Jehovah," while others render the term as "LORD," so capitalized; "Lord," in capital and lowercase; "Yahweh"; "ADONAI"; or even "God. " [GFD, RS]

2. Swedenborg is here referring to the Christian theological concept denoted by the Latin word humiliatio, here translated "his state of being humbled. " The term denoted the sufferings of Jesus; or even his simply being born, living in the mortal world, and dying; or his denying himself the prerogatives of his own divinity while on earth. The term is often contrasted with Christ's exaltatio, his being raised up. See, for example,Philippians 2:5-11. [SS]

3. For statements about the Israelites' forty-year sojourn in the wilderness, see, for example, Numbers 14:33; Deuteronomy 2:7. [GFD]

  
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Thanks to the Swedenborg Foundation for their permission to use this translation.