927. I will never again curse the ground on the human being's account means that humanity would no longer turn its back in the way people among the earliest church's descendants had done. This can be seen from earlier statements about the posterity of the earliest church. For the inner-level symbolism of cursing as turning away, see above (§§223, 245).

[2] The situation here and in what follows can also be seen from previous descriptions comparing the earliest church's later generations, which perished, with the new church called Noah. (That situation includes the fact that people no longer turned their backs, as members of the earliest church had done, and that they were no longer able to destroy themselves.) As noted in those places [§§310:1, 398, 640, 875:4], the will and intellect of people in the earliest church constituted a single mind. For them, in other words, love was planted in the volitional side, and at the same time so was faith, which filled the second part of the mind, or the intellectual side. Their descendants consequently inherited a will and an intellect that formed a single unit. So when self-love and the mad desires that it spawns started to take over their volitional side, displacing love for the Lord and charity toward their neighbor, it totally corrupted not only the volitional side, or the will, but at the same time the intellectual part, or the intellect. The corruption intensified when the final generation merged falsity with their cravings and by this means became Nephilim. ¹ Having become Nephilim, they could not be salvaged, because their mind on both its sides — that is, their whole mind — was destroyed.

[3] But since the Lord foresaw this, he also provided that humankind should be rehabilitated. The means would be an ability to reform and regenerate the second or intellectual part of their mind and to receive in it the seed of a new will. The new will is conscience, through which the Lord puts into action the good urges of love or charity and the true ideas of faith.

In this way, by the Lord's divine mercy, humankind was restored.

These are the things symbolized in the current verse by I will never again curse the ground on the human being's account, because what human hearts fabricate is evil from their youth. And I will not strike every living thing again as I have done.

Footnotes:

554. Genesis 6

1. And so it was that humankind began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them.

2. And the sons of God saw the daughters of humankind, that they were good, and they took wives for themselves from among all whom they chose.

3. And Jehovah said, "My spirit will not denounce humankind forever, because they are flesh. And their days will be one hundred twenty years."

4. The Nephilim ¹ were in the land in those days and for a very long time after ² the sons of God went in to the daughters of humankind, who bore children to them. These were mighty men, who for ages had been men with a name.

5. And Jehovah saw that the evil of the people in the land multiplied; and what the thoughts of their heart fabricated was nothing but evil every day.

6. And Jehovah was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and he grieved to himself at heart.

7. And Jehovah said, "I will obliterate the human whom I created from the face of the ground, from human to beast to creeping animal to the bird in the heavens, because I regret that I made these things."

8. But Noah found favor in Jehovah's eyes.

554. Summary

THIS is talking about the condition of the pre-Flood people.

Footnotes:

640. The symbolism of gopher wood as such a person's ardent cravings and of the compartments as that person's two sides — the volitional side and the intellectual side — has so far escaped human awareness. No one, moreover, will be able to see how those meanings are symbolized without first hearing how matters stood in the church called Noah.

As I have quite often said [§§32:2, 200, 202, 310, 337, 393, 459, 597], love made it possible for the people of the earliest church to recognize whether something they were hearing formed a part of faith. To put it another way, a will to do good gave them a comprehension of truth. But their descendants inherited also a tendency for desire (which belongs to the will) to gain the upper hand in them. They took the lessons they had learned about faith and drowned them in desire, and the result was that they became Nephilim.

Since the Lord foresaw, then, that if the human race continued in this tendency they would succumb to eternal ruin, he provided that the will should be split off from the intellect. We would not be shaped by a will to do good, as we had been previously; instead through an understanding of truth we would receive a gift for charity, which would resemble a will to do good. Such is the character that was taken on by the new church called Noah, and in consequence they possessed a nature wholly different from that of the earliest church.

Other churches besides this one also existed during the same period — one called Enosh, for example, as described above at Genesis 4:25-26. ¹ There were others too that left behind no such reference or description. Only the church Noah is depicted here, because its nature was so unlike the earliest church's and diverged so radically from it.

Footnotes: