3283. 'The daughter of Bethuel the Aramean from Paddan Aram, the sister of Laban the Aramean, to be his wife' means its essential nature and its state. This is clear from the representation of 'Bethuel' and 'Laban', and also from the meaning of 'Aram' and 'Paddan Aram', as the original elements from which Divine Truth represented by Rebekah derived its essential nature and its state. But what Bethuel and Laban each represents, and what Aram or Syria means, has been explained in the previous chapter. The reason why they are mentioned again here is that in what follows below the Lord's Natural is the subject.

[2] The Lord's Natural could not be made Divine until truth had been allied to His Rational and that truth had been made Divine - for the influx into the Natural had to be an influx from the Divine Good of the Rational by way of Divine Truth there. Indeed the entire life of the natural man so far as knowing and acting with understanding are concerned is due to such an influx. It is the rational in fact that coordinates everything in the natural, and in accordance with that coordination fittingly regards the things that are there. Indeed the rational is like a higher faculty of seeing which, when it looks at facts belonging to the natural man, is like someone looking down on to a plain below him. The light of that faculty of seeing is the light of truth, but the origin of that light rests with the good present in the rational. But more of this in what follows below.