120. Like Egypt, the Euphrates symbolizes secular knowledge — facts — and the sensory impressions on which facts are based. The prophetic parts of the Word make this clear, as in Micah:

My enemy has said, "Where is Jehovah your God?" A day will come on which he will build your bulwarks. That is the day the set limit will be far off; that is the day when he will come all the way to you from Assyria, and to the cities of Egypt and to the River [Euphrates]. ¹ (Micah 7:10, 11, 12)

This is how the prophets spoke about the Coming of the Lord, who was to regenerate us, so that we would come to be like heaven's inhabitants. In Jeremiah:

Why should you go to Egypt to drink the waters of the Sihor? And why should you go to Assyria to drink the waters of the River [Euphrates]? (Jeremiah 2:18)

Egypt and the Euphrates alike stand for facts, Assyria for rationalizations constructed out of them. In David:

You have caused a grapevine to travel from Egypt; you have driven away the nations; you have planted it. You have sent its offshoots all the way out to the sea, and its tendrils to the River [Euphrates]. (Psalms 80:8, 11)

In this passage the river Euphrates again stands for sensory and factual information. The Euphrates, after all, formed the boundary of Israel's dominions on the Assyrian side. ² Similarly for spiritual and heavenly people, facts in the memory are the outer limit of understanding and wisdom.

These words spoken to Abraham have the identical symbolism:

To your seed I will give this land, from the river of Egypt all the way to the great river, the river Euphrates. (Genesis 15:18)

These two boundaries symbolize the same things.

Footnotes:

5196. And look: he was standing by the river means from one boundary to the other. This can be seen from the symbolism of a river—here, the river of Egypt, or the Nile—as a boundary. A river means a boundary because major rivers (the Euphrates, the Jordan, and the Nile) and the sea were the outer bounds of the land of Canaan. Canaan itself represented the Lord’s kingdom, so all locations in it represented features of that kingdom. The rivers accordingly represented its outermost parts, or boundaries; see §§1866, 4116, 4240.

The Nile, the river of Egypt, represented sensations under the control of the intellectual side of the mind and therefore pieces of information gleaned from those sensations because these are the outermost spiritual entities of the Lord’s kingdom.

This phrase means from one boundary to the other because Pharaoh is the person said to be standing by the river, and he represents the earthly plane as a whole (§5160). To take a view of anything from its inner level to its outermost level is represented as standing by the outermost part. That is what is done in the spiritual world. One then takes a view from border to border, so this is the symbolism of the clause in an inner sense.