The twelfth volume of Emanuel Swedenborg's Secrets of Heaven (Arcana Coelestia) covers Exodus chapters 16 through 21-from the wilderness of Sin to the foot of Mount Sinai-and opens these ancient scenes into living allegories of spiritual growth and divine inflow.
As the Israelites cry for bread and water, Swedenborg perceives the soul's own desolation and its longing for nourishment from heaven. Every miracle in the wilderness, every law engraved on stone, is a parable of consciousness and transformation. He invites the reader to see the text not as distant history but as an unfolding map of inner experience-one that traces how divine truth and divine goodness shape the journey from selfhood to love.
Repentance, for Swedenborg, is not penitence but a science of renewal-the first infusion of spiritual light into the human will.
This "food from heaven" becomes a recurring emblem for regeneration itself: divine sustenance descends daily, as mercy is renewed each morning.
Even the Ten Commandments, Swedenborg insists, are not merely rules but correspondences of inner states-stages of rebirth through which the individual becomes a spiritual person. Beyond Sinai, he turns to the so-called judgments of Exodus-laws about servants, injuries, and oxen-and finds there a mirror of the spiritual world itself. Each ordinance reflects a cosmic order, binding together the human mind, the natural world, and heaven.
In this way, Secrets of Heaven Volume 12 carries the reader from the literal wilderness into the landscape of the soul. It shows that life after death, the inner meaning of the Bible, and the struggles of conscience all belong to one unified revelation. Part of the Portable New Century Edition from the Swedenborg Foundation, this volume continues a project that has reintroduced Arcana Coelestia to modern readers-compact, approachable, and faithful to the luminous insights of Swedenborg's thought.
