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.

6505. 'And forty days were completed for him' means states of preparation through temptations. This is clear from the meaning of the number 'forty' as temptations, dealt with in 730, 862, 2272, 2273; and from the meaning of 'days' as states, dealt with in 23, 487, 488, 493, 893, 2788, 3462, 3785, 4850. The fact that they are states of preparation is meant by the words 'days were completed for him'; for the completion of that number of days allowed preparation to be made so that bodies might be preserved from putrefaction, by which in the spiritual sense is meant the preparation that is made so that souls may be preserved from the corruption of evil. For more about the removal of evils and falsities by means of temptations, and a person's preparation through temptations to receive truths and forms of good, see 868, 1692, 1717, 1740, 2272, 3318, 4341, 4572, 5036, 5356, 6144.