100. We can see in Isaiah too that a garden symbolizes intelligence and Eden love:
Jehovah will comfort Zion, he will comfort all its wastelands, and he will make its wilderness like Eden and its desert like a garden of Jehovah. Joy and gladness will be found in it; acclamation and the voice of song. (Isaiah 51:3)
The prophet uses wilderness, joy, and acclamation to express the heavenly (or loving) aspects of faith; desert, gladness, and the voice of song express further spiritual (or intellectual) aspects. The first set of words relates to Eden, the second to the garden. This particular prophet fairly consistently uses two words for a single idea, one word symbolizing heavenly things, and the other, spiritual things. 1
For more on the meaning of the Garden of Eden, see the explanation of verse 10, below [§108].
Fotnoter:
1. Here Swedenborg explicitly describes a feature of his biblical exegesis that will frequently recur: the interpretation of the elements of sense pairs in Hebrew poetry (here, for example, wilderness and desert, joy and gladness, acclamation and the voice of song) as relating to the heavenly (or good) and the spiritual (or true), respectively. For the fullest exposition of this method of interpretation, see Sacred Scripture 81, 84-88 (repeated with variations in True Christianity 248, 250-253); see also Secrets of Heaven 793, 5502. The currently accepted analysis of these word pairs as a component of the poetical conventions of Hebrew verse entered Christian scholars' discussion of the Bible during Swedenborg's lifetime. See Hrushovski-Harshav 2007, 598-600, for further discussion. [SS, JSR, LHC]
