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:

581. The symbolism of the Nephilim as those who placed no value on anything holy or true because of delusions about their own importance and superiority can be seen from what appears above and just below. Specifically, it says that they merged doctrinal teachings with their appetites — the symbolic meaning of the two statements that the sons of God went in to the daughters of humankind and that they bore children to them.

People's delusions about themselves and their fantasies grow as they amass more and more contributing arguments, until finally those delusions become permanent. And when they drag religious teachings in, they develop the most rigid point of view, which causes them to completely discount the value of anything holy or true, making themselves into Nephilim.

That tribe of people, who lived before the Flood, is such as described above [§§562-563]; every spirit they meet, no matter who, they choke to death with the most horrendous delusions, which flood out from them like a poisonous, suffocating fog. They strangle those spirits so effectively that the spirits forget how to think, and seem to themselves to be half dead.

Had the Lord by his coming into the world not freed the world of spirits from such a venomous tribe as that, not a single spirit could have survived there. This would have meant the end of the human race, which the Lord governs through spirits. As a result, they now are kept in a hell below a kind of boulder, massive and shrouded in mist, under the heel of the left foot. ¹ They make no attempt to rise up out of the place, leaving the world of spirits free of their extremely hostile crowd. This crowd and the toxic effect of their persuasions will be spoken of in another place [§§1265-1272], the Lord in his divine mercy allowing.

These are the ones called Nephilim, who place no value on anything holy or true.

[2] Though the Word does call them Nephilim, it refers to their descendants as Anakim and Rephaim. ² The following passage in Moses shows that they are called Anakim:

Those who scouted out the land of Canaan said, "There we saw the Nephilim, the children of Anak from among the Nephilim, and in our eyes we were like locusts, and we were the same in their eyes." (Numbers 13:33)

Moses also shows that they were called Rephaim:

The Emim previously lived in the land of Moab, a people large and numerous and tall, like the Anakim. They themselves were accounted as Rephaim, like the Anakim, and the Moabites call them Emim. (Deuteronomy 2:10-11)

The Nephilim are not mentioned anywhere else, but the Rephaim are, and the prophets describe them in the same way. Isaiah says:

Hell was disquieted below for you, coming to meet you; it stirred up the Rephaim for you. (Isaiah 14:9)

This is about hell, where such people are. In the same author:

The dead will not live, the Rephaim will not rise, because you inflicted punishment on them and destroyed them and wiped out all memory of them. (Isaiah 26:14)

Here too the subject is their hell, from which they will no longer arise. Again in the same author:

Your dead will live, my corpse; they will rise again. Wake up and sing, you who live in the dirt, because your dew is the dew on the vegetation. But the land of the Rephaim you will cast out. (Isaiah 26:19)

The land of the Rephaim is hell, which is what this verse describes. In David:

Will you do a miracle for the dead? Will the Rephaim arise, will they acclaim you? (Psalms 88:10)

This likewise deals with their hell and the fact that they cannot rise up to poison the atmosphere in the world of spirits with their dreadful persuasions.

The Lord, however, provided that the human race would no longer steep itself in such appalling fantasies and delusions. The people who lived before the Flood had a nature and psyche that enabled them to absorb such twisted thinking. The reason is not yet known to anyone but will be divulged below [§927], by the Lord's divine mercy.

Footnotes: