400. Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and delivered Enoch, means that this schism or heresy spontaneously produced another. This is the obvious conclusion from all that precedes. It also makes sense in light of verse 1, which says that the human and his wife, Eve, gave birth to Cain; later developments are similar conceptions and births, whether it is the church or heresies that reproduce themselves. For these offshoots the people [of the earliest church] established a genealogy, ¹ because they resemble family trees: from a single heresy, once seized upon, many others are born.

Footnotes:

339. In the three previous chapters I have offered proof enough that the human and his wife symbolize the earliest church, so that there can be no doubt of it [§§252-253, 277, 288-289]. Since the human and his wife are the earliest church, it makes sense that what was conceived and given birth to by them could not be anything else [than what was conceived and born in the church].

The earliest people were very familiar with assigning names that had symbolic meaning and in this way creating a genealogy. After all, the church's attributes bear the same relationship to each other: one thing is conceived and born from another and relates to it like a new generation. Consequently it is common for the Word to refer to the church's attributes as times of conception and birth, as offspring, babies, children, daughters, sons, youths, and so on. The prophetic parts are full of such references. ¹

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