From Swedenborg's Works

 

Secrets of Heaven #736

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736. To describe Noah, or in other words, the people of this new church, they were the kind who had an uncomplicated belief in the things they had received from the earliest church. These were the doctrinal tenets that the people called Enoch had collected and organized into a kind of systematic theology [§§519-521].

Their character was entirely different from that of the pre-Flood people who died in the Flood and who were called Nephilim. 1 These were the people who had merged the teachings of faith with their foul desires and so had seized on horrendous delusions that they would not back away from, no matter how hard others tried to teach them and to show them the falsity of their notions.

People with the same two types of mentality or personality exist today too. The former can regenerate easily, the latter only with difficulty.

Footnotes:

1. On the "Nephilim," see §§581-583 and note 1 in §554. [LHC]

  
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The Bible

 

Exodus 23:10-11

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10 And six years thou shalt sow thy land, and shalt gather in the fruits thereof:

11 But the seventh year thou shalt let it rest and lie still; that the poor of thy people may eat: and what they leave the beasts of the field shall eat. In like manner thou shalt deal with thy vineyard, and with thy oliveyard.