40. The creeping animals that the waters breed symbolize facts that the outer self knows. Birds in general symbolize logical reasoning; they also symbolize matters that we truly understand, which belong to the inner self.
The following verses in Isaiah demonstrate the symbolism of the creeping animals of the waters — fish — as facts:
I came and there was no man. 1 In my censure I will dry up the sea; I will make the rivers a desert; their fish will stink from lack of water and die of thirst; I will dress the heavens in black. (Isaiah 50:2-3)
[2] Evidence still clearer appears in Ezekiel, where the Lord describes a new temple, 2 the general meaning of which is a new church and an adherent of the church or person reborn (since everyone who is reborn is a temple to the Lord).
The Lord Jehovah said to me, "That water, which will go out to the boundary toward the east and go toward the sea, will be channeled down into the sea, and the water [of the sea] will be cured. And it will come about that every living soul that creeps out in any place where the water of the rivers goes will survive; and the fish will be very numerous, because that water goes there and will be cured, and everything will live, wherever the river goes. And it will happen that the fishers will stand over it from En-gedi to En-eglaim; they will be there spreading their nets. Their fish will be of all kinds, like the fish of the great sea, very numerous." (Ezekiel 47:8-9, 10)
"Fishers from En-gedi to En-eglaim spreading their nets" symbolize people who are to teach the earthly plane of the human mind about the truths that make up faith. 3
[3] Passages in the prophets establish the fact that birds symbolize logical reasoning and concepts truly understood. In Isaiah, for example:
I am calling the winged creature from the sunrise, the man I planned on, from a faraway land. (Isaiah 46:11)
In Jeremiah:
I looked and there, not a human! And every bird of the heavens had fled. (Jeremiah 4:25)
In Ezekiel:
I will plant a cutting of the tall cedar, and it will lift its branch and make fruit and become a majestic cedar. And every bird of every wing will live under it; in the shade of its branches they will live. (Ezekiel 17: [22,])
And in Hosea, where the subject is a new church, or the regenerate person:
And I will strike a pact with them on that day — with the wild animal of the field, and with the bird in the heavens and the creature that moves on the ground. (Hosea 2:18)
The wild animal obviously does not mean a wild animal or the bird a bird, because the Lord is sealing a new pact with them.
Footnotes:
1. Here and elsewhere in this translation, where the word "man" appears it almost always reflects a Latin word (vir) that in its most common usages refers specifically to a male person. When Swedenborg uses this word in quotations from the Old Testament, it is usually a translation of one of two Hebrew words that again refer specifically to a male person (אִישׁ ['îš] and גֶּבֶר [geḇer]). In New Testament quotations it is usually a translation of the Greek word ἀνήρ (anér), which is likewise gender-specific. In addition to these words, the Latin, Hebrew, and Greek languages also have words that connote a human being without specifying his or her gender (in Latin, the word homo; in Hebrew, the words אָדָם ['āḏām] and אֱנוֹשׁ ['ĕnôš]; in Greek, the word ἄνθρωπος [ánthropos]). In §§476 and 915 Swedenborg ascribes significance to the distinction between these gender-specific and gender-inclusive terms, so the distinction has been preserved in this translation. [LHC]
2. Swedenborg is referring to Ezekiel's prophecy of the restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem after the destruction of the first Temple by the Babylonians in 586 b.c.e. The vision of the new temple is described at length in Ezekiel 40; 41. [RS]
3. Swedenborg probably has in mind Christ's well-known invitation to the disciples, "Follow me and I will make you fishers of men" (Matthew 4:19; Mark 1:17). Compare his statement from one of the last books of his theological period, the 1769 work Soul-Body Interaction 20, where he describes being asked what a spiritual fisher is: "I said that in the Word, a fisherman spiritually understood is someone who inquires into and teaches earthly truths and then does the same with spiritual truths, in a rational manner" (this and all other translations from Soul-Body Interaction in these notes are by George F. Dole). In support of this statement he then cites Ezekiel 47:9-20 as well as Matthew 4:19 and Mark 1:17. [SS, RS]
