1887. To call the Word inspired is to say that everything in it, both the narratives and the other parts, contains heavenly qualities (which relate to love and goodness) and spiritual qualities (which relate to faith and truth). In other words, the contents are divine.

What the Lord inspires comes down from him through the heaven of angels and so through the world of spirits all the way to humankind. Among human beings it presents itself in its literal form, but in its first origins it is radically different. In heaven there is no such thing as a plain, ordinary narrative; instead, everything there represents something divine, and no one there perceives it any other way. This can be recognized from the fact that what it holds is inexpressible [2 Corinthians 12:4]. Consequently, unless the narratives represent divine matters and are therefore heavenly, they cannot possibly be divinely inspired.

Only the inner meaning reveals what the Word is like in the heavens, because that is what the Lord's Word in the heavens is.

1409. The idea that the historical facts are representative but the words are each symbolic can be seen from previous remarks and illustrations in §§665, 920, and 1361 concerning representation and symbolism. Since the representative narrative begins here, let me give a further, brief explanation.

The people of the earliest church, which had a heavenly character, regarded every earthly, worldly, or bodily thing that ever presented itself to their senses as a dead object only. But each and every item in the world presents some image of the Lord's kingdom and so of heavenly and spiritual attributes. As a result, when they observed those objects, or encountered them by some other sense, their thoughts centered not on the objects but on aspects of heaven and of the spirit and came not from the objects but through them. So for them, dead objects were alive.

[2] The symbolic meanings of these items were received from their lips by the next generation, which gathered such meanings together and made doctrinal precepts out of them. Collectively, these formed the Word of the ancient church, after the Flood. Such precepts taught the people of the ancient church in a symbolic way, because they were both a means by which those people learned inward lessons, and the source of their thoughts about heavenly and spiritual matters.

This knowledge started to die out, however, so that people had no idea what such objects symbolized, and they began to make them sacred — though they were worldly and temporal things — and to worship them, without any thought of their symbolism. Then those same objects became representative. Such was the origin of the representative church, which commenced with Abram and was later established among Jacob's descendants.

From all this you can see that representation rose out of the symbolism of the ancient church and that the symbolism of the ancient church rose out of the heavenly ideas of the earliest church.

[3] The nature of representation can be seen from the Word's histories. There, all the deeds of these patriarchs — Abram, Isaac, and Jacob — and later of Moses, the Judges, and the monarchs of Judah and Israel, are nothing if not representative.

In the Word, as noted [§1402], Abram represents the Lord, and because he represents the Lord, he also represents the heavenly self; Isaac too represents the Lord, and therefore the spiritual self; and Jacob as well represents the Lord, and therefore an earthly self corresponding to the spiritual self.

[4] The situation with regard to representation, though, is that it implies nothing about the character of the person but only about the phenomenon that the person represents. All the monarchs of Judah and Israel represented the Lord's sovereignty, no matter what they were like, and all the priests represented the Lord's priesthood, no matter what they in turn were like. So bad ones and good ones alike were able to represent the Lord and the heavenly and spiritual qualities of his realm. As stated and proved already [§§665, 1361], the representative meaning is completely separate from the person.

This, then, is why all the historical sections of the Word are representative. Since they are representative, it follows that all the words there are symbolic. That is, they mean something different in an inner sense than in the literal sense.