259. The meaning of the heel as what is bottommost on the earthly level, or the bodily dimension, cannot be known without information on the way the earliest people viewed the various levels inside us. They connected heavenly and spiritual qualities in us with the head and face. They connected the effects of those qualities — charity and mercy, for instance — with the chest. Things on the earthly level they connected with the lower leg. Those that rank fairly low they associated with the foot, and the very lowest earthly and bodily concerns, with the heel. In addition, not only did they connect such attributes with those body parts, they even called them by those names.

The heel also means the bottommost things in the rational mind, which are the facts we know. They are involved in Jacob's prophecy concerning Dan:

Dan will be a snake on the path, an asp on the track, biting the horse's heels, and its rider falls off behind. (Genesis 49:17)

They are also meant in David:

The wickedness at my heels has surrounded me. (Psalms 49:5)

Genesis 25:26 says that when Jacob came out of the womb, he was grasping Esau's heel (which is why he was called Jacob) and the meaning here is the same. The name Jacob comes from [the Hebrew word for] "heel" because the Jewish church, symbolized by Jacob, was to wound the heel. ¹

[2] Snakes are able to hurt only the lowest things on the earthly plane. Unless they are a species of viper, they cannot harm the more interior things we have on the earthly plane, still less those on the spiritual plane, least of all those on the heavenly plane. All these things the Lord protects, and he stores them away without our awareness. (What the Lord stores away is called "a remnant" [or "survivors"] in the Word.) ²

The pages to come, though, by the Lord's divine mercy, will reveal how the snake destroyed those lowest things in pre-Flood people through a focus on the senses and through self-love. ³ They will show how the snake destroyed them among Jews through a concern with sensory experiences, tradition, and trivialities, and through self-love and materialism. ⁴ Then they will show how the snake has destroyed and is destroying people at the present day through sensory, scientific, and philosophical matters, and once more through self-love and materialism. ⁵

Footnotes:

1200. The symbolism of Canaan as outward worship that has no inner content has been demonstrated in earlier discussions of Canaan [§§1063, 1094, 1103, 1167]. The outward display of worship that is called Canaan is the kind that Jews practiced before the Lord's Coming and after it as well. ¹ They had an external form of devotion that they observed very strictly, without realizing what its inner dimension was. In fact they imagined their bodies alone were alive. They had absolutely no idea what the soul was, what faith was, what the Lord was, what spiritual or heavenly life was, or what life after death was. As a result, many of them in the Lord's time ² denied the resurrection, as Matthew 22:23-34; Mark 12:18-28; and Luke 20:27-41 show.

[2] When we are such that we do not believe we live on after death, we also fail to believe that any inner dimension exists, whether spiritual or heavenly.

People who spend their lives on mere self-gratification — especially those mired in sordid greed — are like this too, because they devote their lives exclusively to their person and to worldly advantages. Nonetheless, they engage in worship, one group attending synagogue, another going to church; and they observe traditional rites, some of them doing so very strictly. But since they do not believe in life after death, their worship cannot help being shallow, without any inner content, like a nutshell without the meat, or like a tree without fruit and even without leaves.

This is what the outward devotions symbolized by Canaan are like.

All the other types of inward worship discussed above were types of worship that did contain inner levels.

Footnotes: