54. Male and female He created them. What 'male and female' is used to mean in the internal sense was very well known in the Most Ancient Church, but when among later generations the interior sense of the Word was lost, so too was this particular arcanum. Marriages gave them their highest forms of happiness and delight; and they used to liken to a marriage anything that could be likened to it, in order that from it they might feel the happiness of marriage. And because they were internal men they took delight solely in internal things. As to external things, they did no more with them than take them in with their eyes, but their thoughts involved what those things represented - so much so that external things meant nothing to them except insofar as they could reflect internal things in them, and in those internal things reflect celestial things, and in so doing reflect the Lord, who was to them everything. Consequently they reflected the heavenly marriage in those things, which, they perceived, was the source of the happiness in their own marriages. For this reason they called the understanding in the spiritual man Male and the will Female, and when the two acted as one, they called it Marriage. From that Church sprang the common usage of referring to the Church itself, because of its affection for good, as 'a daughter', and also 'a virgin' - as in Virgin of Zion, Virgin of Jerusalem - and 'a wife' as well. On these matters however see verse 23 of the next chapter, and Chapter 3:15.

10216. 'When you take the sum of the children of Israel' means all things of the Church. This is clear from the meaning of 'the sum' as all; and from the representation of 'the children of Israel' as the Church, dealt with in the places referred to in 9340. The reason why all things of the Church are meant by 'the sum of the children of Israel' is that the internal sense of the Word is the kind of meaning it has in the heavens. Names do not come through to those there, such as the names Israel, Moses, Aaron, and many others; for those names belong to things that are material, which exist solely for the benefit of human life on the level of the physical senses. Instead of those names things on a spiritual level that belong to heaven and the Church are perceived. For angels in heaven are spiritual, and the things that come to their attention they see according to the inner nature of those things, thus on a spiritual level. There in place of the children of Israel they understand the Church. They do so because in the inmost heaven, where the Lord's presence is more immediate than in the heavens below, the Lord Himself is understood by names in the Word, when they are used in a good sense, names such as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, David, Joseph, Judah, or Israel. And since the angels there understand the Lord by these names, they also perceive - in accord with the train of thought in the Word - the Divine things which belong to heaven and the Church, and are derived from the Lord. The perception flows in from the Lord, who is the Word; for the Lord is the source of all intelligence and wisdom, and none at all exists without Him.