300. As regards the first arcanum, that 'Jehovah God' is used to mean the Lord and at the same time heaven, it should be recognized that in the Word, always for some hidden reason, the Lord is sometimes called simply Jehovah, sometimes Jehovah God, sometimes Jehovah and God interchangeably, sometimes the Lord Jehovah, sometimes the God of Israel, and sometimes simply God. In Genesis 1, for example, where again an utterance is made in the plural, 'Let Us make man in Our image', God is the only name used. Not until the next chapter, where the celestial man is the subject, is He called Jehovah God-Jehovah, because He alone has Being and is Living, and so from His essence; God, because of His ability to accomplish all things, and so from His power, as is clear in the Word where the two names are used separately, Isaiah 49:4-5; 55:7; Psalms 18:2, 28, 30-31; Psalms 38:15. Consequently any angel or spirit who spoke to a person, or who people thought had the ability to accomplish something, they called God, as is clear in David,

God stands in the assembly of God, in the midst of the Gods will He judge. Psalms 82:1.

And elsewhere in David,

Who in the sky will be compared to Jehovah? Who will be likened to Jehovah among the sons of gods? Psalms 89:6.

And elsewhere in the same,

Confess the God of Gods; confess the Lord of lords. Psalms 136:2-3

It is from power that even men are called 'gods', as in Psalms 82:6; John 10:34-35. And Moses is spoken of as 'a god to Pharaoh', Exodus 7:1. And this also is why [in Hebrew] the word for God, Elohim, is plural. But because angels have no power whatsoever from themselves, as they themselves also confess, but from the Lord only, and as there is but one God, Jehovah God is therefore used in the Word to mean the Lord alone. Yet when anything is accomplished through the ministry of angels He is spoken of in the plural, as in Genesis 1. In the present chapter too, since a celestial man, as man, did not bear comparison with the Lord, but with angels, it is therefore said that 'the man has become as one of Us in knowing good and evil', that is, become someone wise and having intelligence.

813. That these words mean the point at which the Most Ancient Church finally came to an end, and that 'a hundred and fifty' means that which is both a finishing point and a starting point, cannot be confirmed so easily from the Word as the more simple numbers can which occur frequently. Nevertheless the matter is clear from the number fifteen, dealt with above at verse 20. Fifteen means so few as to be hardly any. This meaning applies all the more to the number 'a hundred and fifty', which is the product of fifteen multiplied by ten, which means remnants. Multiplying fractions, such as a half, a quarter, or a tenth, produces smaller fractions still, till at length there is practically nothing, and then the end or finishing point has been reached. The same number occurs in Chapter 8:3 below where it is said that the waters retreated at the end of a hundred and fifty days. There the meaning is similar. Numbers in the Word have to be understood abstractedly - quite apart from the sense of the letter, for as stated and shown already, they have been included merely to produce the flow of historical events that belongs to the sense of the letter. For example, when seven occurs it means that which is holy - quite abstractedly from periods of time or measurements which it is normally used to quantify. Indeed angels, who perceive the internal sense of the Word, know nothing whatever about periods of time or measurements, let alone what a specific number denotes. Yet they understand the Word completely when it is being read by man. Consequently when a number occurs anywhere at all they cannot possibly have the idea of any numerical value, only of the real thing meant by the number. Likewise in the present context they understand by this number the point at which the Most Ancient Church finally came to an end, and in verse 3 of the next chapter the starting point of the Ancient or new Church.