The Bible

 

Genesis 1:16

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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.

From Swedenborg's Works

 

Arcana Coelestia #4786

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4786. 'And his father wept for him' means interior mourning. This is clear from the meaning of 'weeping' as the extremity of grief and sadness, and so as interior mourning. In the ancient Churches the external practices by which, internal things were represented included those of wailing and weeping over the dead. Their wailing and weeping meant interior mourning, although their actual mourning was not interior. One reads the following, for example, about the Egyptians who had set out with Joseph to bury Jacob,

When they came to the threshing-floor of Atad which is at the crossing of the Jordan they wailed there with an exceedingly great and grievous wailing, and he mourned for his father seven days. And the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites, saw the mourning at the threshing-floor of Atad, and they said, This is a grievous mourning by the Egyptians. Genesis 50:10-11.

And one reads about David weeping over Abner,

They buried Abner in Hebron, and the king lifted up his voice and wept at the grave of Abner; and all the people wept. 2 Samuel 3:32.

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

Commentary

 

Two

  

The number "two" has two different meanings in the Bible. In most cases "two" indicates a joining together or unification. This is easy to see if we consider the conflicts we tend to have between our "hearts" and our "heads" -- between what we want and what we know. Our "hearts" tell us that we want pie with ice cream for dinner; our "heads" tell us we should have grilled chicken and salad. If we can bring those two together and actually want what's good for us, we'll be pretty happy. We're built that way -- with our emotions balanced against our intellect -- because the Lord is built that way. His essence is love itself, or Divine Love, the source of all caring, emotion and energy. It is expressed as Divine Wisdom, which gives form to that love and puts it to work, and is the source of all knowledge and reasoning. In His case the two aspects are always in conjunction, always in harmony. It's easy also to see how that duality is reflected throughout creation: plants and animals, food and drink, silver and gold. Most importantly, it's reflected in the two genders, with women representing love and men representing wisdom. That's the underlying reason why conjunction in marriage is such a holy thing. So when "two" is used in the Bible to indicate some sort of pairing or unity, it means a joining together. In rare cases, however, "two" is used more purely as a number. In these cases it stands for a profane or unholy state that comes before a holy one. This is because "three" represents a state of holiness and completion (Jesus, for instance, rose from the tomb on the third day), and "two" represents the state just before it.