359. Of the tribe of Zebulun twelve thousand were sealed. (7:8) This symbolizes the conjugal love of goodness and truth in those people who will be part of the New Heaven and of the Lord's New Church.

In the highest sense Zebulun symbolizes the union of the Divine itself and the Divine humanity in the Lord; in the spiritual sense, the marriage of goodness and truth in those people who are in heaven and in the church; and in the natural sense, married love itself. Thus Zebulun here symbolizes the conjugal love of goodness and truth. His name also comes from a word meaning cohabitation ([30:19-20]), and cohabitation is a word used of married partners, whose minds are joined into one; for that conjunction is a spiritual cohabitation.

The conjugal love of goodness and truth that Zebulun symbolizes here is the conjugal love of the Lord and the church. For the Lord is love's goodness itself, and He grants that the church be the truth springing from that love; and a cohabitation results when the person of the church receives in truths goodness from the Lord. The person then has formed in him a marriage of goodness and truth, which is the essential church, and he becomes a heaven.

It is because of this that God's kingdom - which is to say, heaven and the church - is so often likened in the Word to a marriage.