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

 

Ezekiel 40:5

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5 And behold a wall on the outside of the house round about, and in the man's hand a measuring reed of six cubits long by the cubit and an hand breadth: so he measured the breadth of the building, one reed; and the height, one reed.