245. The inner sense of the Word establishes fairly clearly the symbolism of he said to the snake, "A curse on you, above every beast and above every wild animal of the field!" The meaning is that the sensory level of their mind turned away from what was heavenly toward what was bodily, damning itself, or bringing a curse on itself. Jehovah God — the Lord — never curses anyone, is never angry at anyone, never leads anyone into crisis. He does not even punish us, let alone curse us. It is the Devil's crew that does such things. Nothing of the sort could ever come from the fountain of mercy, peace, and goodness. 1
This passage and many others in the Word describe Jehovah God as not only turning his face away, being angry, punishing, and testing, but even killing — and, yes, cursing. 2 This was in order to foster the belief that the Lord controls and arranges every last detail in the universe, including evil itself, punishments, and times of trial. After accepting this very general idea, people would learn just how he controls and arranges things. They would see that he transforms the evil involved in punishment and in our ordeals into good.
All scriptural teaching and learning begins with the most general things; for this reason the literal meaning abounds in broad ideas.
Footnotes:
1. Swedenborg here states what will become a recurring if minor theme of his theology: The common biblical description of divine action in the language of human emotion is in fact merely a subjective redescription in terms we understand rather than an objective statement about the nature of the divine. (Among many passages, §§357, 588:1, 1093, 1408:3, 1874, 2553, 3425:4, 3605:4 could be cited; for a fuller list, see Swedenborg's references to Secrets of Heaven in the footnote to Heaven and Hell 545.) This preliminary instance of the theme is unusual in its ascription of evil events to "the Devil's crew," a phrase that must be taken figuratively, as Swedenborg does not subscribe to the notion of the Devil as an independent being (see note 2 in §154). His reiterated denial of the anger of God is a response both to the frequency of such anthropomorphizing in the Bible and to the criticisms of contemporary atheists and Deists (see note 1 in §179) that the God of the Bible is implausibly capricious and unforgiving. These critics cited instances of an apparently cruel and wrathful God in the Bible, or the sanctioning of cruel human conduct by God, as evidence that the Scriptures were not divine revelation but the product of human minds. [RS, SS]
2. For a sampling of the many passages in the Old Testament that characterize God as turning his face away from people, see Ezekiel 7:22; as being angry toward people, see Exodus 4:14; Numbers 11:1; 32:13; Deuteronomy 29:27; as punishing people, see Exodus 32:34; Leviticus 26:18, 24; Jeremiah 44:13; as testing (or tempting) people, see Genesis 22:1; Deuteronomy 13:3; as killing or slaying people, see Genesis 38:7, 10; Psalms 78:34; Lamentations 2:21; Amos 4:10; and as cursing people, see Deuteronomy 30:7; Proverbs 3:33; Jeremiah 17:5; 48:10; Malachi 2:2; 4:6. [JSR]
