The Bible

 

Genesis 15

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1 After these things the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision, saying, Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward.

2 And Abram said, Lord GOD, what wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless, and the steward of my house is this Eliezer of Damascus?

3 And Abram said, Behold, to me thou hast given no seed: and lo, one born in my house is my heir.

4 And behold, the word of the LORD came to him, saying, This shall not be thy heir; but he that shall come forth out of thy own bowels shall be thy heir.

5 And he brought him forth abroad, and said, Look now towards heaven, and tell the stars, if thou art able to number them: and he said to him, So shall thy seed be.

6 And he believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness.

7 And he said to him, I am the LORD that brought thee out of Ur of the Chaldees, to give thee this land to inherit it.

8 And he said, Lord GOD, by what shall I know that I shall inherit it?

9 And he said to him, Take me a heifer of three years old, and a she-goat of three years old, and a ram of three years old, and a turtle-dove, and a young pigeon.

10 And he took to him all these, and divided them in the midst, and laid each piece one against another: but the birds he did not divide.

11 And when the fowls came down upon the carcases, Abram drove them away.

12 And when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and lo, a horror of great darkness fell upon him.

13 And he said to Abram, Know certainly that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years;

14 And also that nation which they shall serve, will I judge: and afterward shall they come out with great substance.

15 And thou shalt go to thy fathers in peace; thou shalt be buried in a good old age.

16 But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.

17 And it came to pass, that when the sun had gone down, and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp that passed between those pieces.

18 In that same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, To thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates:

19 The Kenites, and the Kenizzites, and the Kadmonites,

20 And the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Rephaims,

21 And the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.

   

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Arcana Coelestia #1815

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1815. He said unto him, I am Jehovah. That this signifies the Lord’s internal man, which is Jehovah, and from which He had perception, is evident from what has been already said, namely, that the Lord’s Internal, that is, whatever the Lord received from the Father, was Jehovah in Him, for He was conceived from Jehovah. What a man receives from his father is one thing, and what he receives from his mother is another. From his father a man receives all that is internal, his soul itself or life being from the father; but he receives from his mother all that is external. In a word, the interior man, or spirit itself, is from the father; but the outer man, or body itself, is from the mother; which everyone can comprehend merely from the fact that the soul itself is implanted by the father, and this begins to clothe itself in a little bodily form in the ovum. Whatever is afterwards added, whether in the ovum or in the womb, is of the mother, for it has no increase from anywhere else.

[2] It may be seen from this that as to His internals the Lord was Jehovah. But because the external, which the Lord received from the mother, was to be united to the Divine or Jehovah, and this through temptations and victories, as before said, it could not appear otherwise to Him in those states, than that when He spoke with Jehovah it was as it were with another; when yet He spoke with Himself, that is, so far as He was in a state of conjunction. The Lord’s perception, which He had in the highest perfection above all who have been born, was from His Internal, that is, from Jehovah Himself, which is here signified in the internal sense by the words, “Jehovah said unto him.”

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