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

 

Jeremiah 34:14

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14 At the end of seven years let ye go every man his brother an Hebrew, which hath been sold unto thee; and when he hath served thee six years, thou shalt let him go free from thee: but your fathers hearkened not unto me, neither inclined their ear.