Jerusalem, on Mount Zion, signifies the doctrine of love to the Lord, and how it governs your life. Jerusalem first comes to our attention in 2 Samuel 5, when King David takes the city from the Jebusites and makes it his capital. In the next chapter he brings the Ark of the Covenant there, and later it is where Solomon builds the temple, and his own palace. From then on Jerusalem is the center of worship of the Israelitish church. It is the place where the Lord was presented in the temple as a baby, where He tarried to talk to the priests at age twelve, where He cleansed the temple, had the last supper, was crucified and then rose. It is a central place in both the old and new Testaments. The city was built on Mount Zion, the highest point of the mountains of Judea. A city, in the Word, represents doctrine, the organized knowledge of the truths of the church. Mountains represent love of the Lord and the consequent worship. If you put those things together, Jerusalem on Mount Zion signifies the doctrine of love to the Lord, and how it governs your life. This is why David was led to make Jerusalem the most important city of the land, and why all worship was conducted there. And this is also why Jeroboam was condemned for introducing idol worship in Samaria. In the Book of Revelation, John's vision of the city New Jerusalem descending from God is a prophecy of a new dispensation of doctrine coming from the Lord.

(Referencat: Arcana Coelestia 4539, 8938; The Apocalypse Explained 365 [35-38])

6465. 'And was gathered to his peoples' means that [spiritual good] was within the forms of good and the truths of the natural which sprang from itself. This is clear from what is said above in 6451, where similar words occur; see what has been brought forward there about the rise and the life of spiritual good, which is 'Israel', within the forms of good and the truths of the lower natural, which are 'his sons' and 'the twelve tribes'. To take further the idea of the rise of interior things within exterior ones, it should be recognized that all things, not only those with the human being but also those in the entire natural order, come into existence through a series of formations, so that posterior things are brought into existence by means of formations from prior things. Consequently each formation comes into existence as that which is separate from any other; yet the posterior is dependent on what is prior to it, so dependent that it cannot remain in existence without what is prior. For what is posterior is held in connection with and has its form preserved by what is prior. From this it may also be seen that what is posterior contains within itself all things that are prior to it in their proper order. It is like modes ¹ and the forces proceeding from those modes as underlying substances. This is how it is with a person's interiors and exteriors, and also how it is with the things that make up the life he has.

[2] Unless one conceives interior things and exterior things in a person as entities formed in the way just described, one cannot begin to have any idea of the external man and the internal man or of the flowing of the one into the other, let alone of the rise and the life of the interior man or the spirit, and of what that man is like when the external, the bodily part, is separated through death. If a person conceives exterior things and interior ones as a continuous progression into what is purer and purer, so that through that continuity they are inseparable, and are not therefore made distinct through a series of formations of posterior things from prior ones, that person cannot help supposing that when the external dies the internal dies too. For he thinks that they are inseparable, and because they are inseparable, continuing one into the other, that when one dies, so does the other; for one takes the other with it. These matters have been mentioned so that people may know that the internal and the external are distinct and separate from each other, and that interior things and exterior ones follow one another in consecutive order, also that all interior things exist together within exterior ones, or what amounts to the same, that all prior things exist within posterior ones, which is the subject in the internal sense of the verses under consideration here.

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