1408. The events of this verse and later ones happened as written, but the historical facts are representative and the words are each symbolic.
This is true of all the narrative parts of the Word — not only the books of Moses but Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings as well. Nothing but history appears in any of them. Yet although the literal meaning is a history, the inner meaning holds the mysteries of heaven, which lie hidden there. These mysteries can never be seen, as long as we train our mind's eye on the historical details; they are not unveiled until we withdraw our minds from the literal meaning.
The Lord's Word is like a body with a living soul. Anything having to do with the soul remains invisible — to the point that we scarcely believe we even have a soul, let alone that it lives on after death — as long as the body monopolizes our thinking. As soon as concern for our person ebbs from our minds, though, qualities of the soul and of life reveal themselves. That is why everything connected with our body has to die before we can be born anew or regenerate. Not only that, the body itself also has to die, so that we can enter heaven and behold heavenly sights.
[2] The case with the Lord's Word is the same. Its "body" is the contents of the literal meaning, and as long as we fix our minds on those, we see nothing deeper. When they "die," though, [the deeper content] first stands out in plain sight.
Still, the features of the literal sense are like those things in us that belong to the body. Specifically, they are like facts that we glean from our sense impressions and retain in our memory. These are general containers that hold deeper levels inside. 1 You can see from this that containers are one thing, the vital concepts contained within them are another. The containers are earthly; their vital contents are spiritual and heavenly. So also with the historical passages of the Word, and with the individual words there as well. They are general containers that are earthly and even physical, and they hold spiritual and heavenly features. The latter never enter our field of vision except through the inner meaning.
[3] Anyone can see this merely from the consideration that the Word often speaks in accord with appearances and even in accord with illusions of the senses. It says, for instance, that the Lord feels anger, punishes people, curses them, kills them, and so on, when in fact the inner meaning says the opposite — that the Lord never feels anger or punishes people, let alone cursing or killing them. Yet it does not hurt people to believe in simplicity of heart that the Word is just what they take it to be in the letter, as long as they live lives of neighborly love. The reason it does no harm is that the Word teaches nothing but the need for each of us to live in charity with our neighbor and to love the Lord above all. People who do this have deeper dimensions inside, so any illusions they acquire from the literal meaning are easily dispelled.
Фусноте:
1. This explanation of the literal meaning by invocation of analogies to the body and to mental processes has parallels elsewhere in Swedenborg's works. In essence, he is describing the literal meaning as an external, earthly-level entity, which in his theology would typically be more generalized than an inner, spiritual entity. The implication is that each sense-based fact, or each literal expression of Scripture, contains myriads of spiritual ideas, and each of these spiritual ideas contains myriads of heavenly ideas. See §190 of his 1763 work Divine Love and Wisdom, where he compares this phenomenon of levels to the bundling of fine muscle fibers into larger fibers and of these into the muscles themselves. [LHC, SS]