Plants in the Bible generally represent facts, knowledge that can be gleaned from the world. Plants that can serve animals as food represent facts that have the potential to be put to use, ones that can lead to something good. A pasture, then, is an area that offers a great deal of this sort of useful, life-building knowledge. "Pasture" is often used as a verb in the Bible as well; to pasture animals means teaching people facts that can help them do what is good in life.

4939. Once when I had been raised up to heaven it seemed to me as though my head was there, but that my body was below it, and my feet even further below. From this I had a perception of how the higher and lower things present in the human being correspond to the same in the Grand Man, and how one flows into another; that is to say, how the celestial, which is the good of love and the first degree of order, flows into the spiritual, which is truth springing from that good and the second degree of order, and then into the natural, which is the third degree of order. From this it is evident that natural things are like the feet on which the higher things support themselves. What is more, things in the spiritual world and those in heaven are ringed about by the natural world. Consequently the whole natural system is a theatre representative of the Lord's kingdom, every individual part of it being representative, 2758, 3483. The natural system is kept in being by an influx conforming to that order, and without this influx it could not remain in being for even a single moment.