Featured quotations from Emanuel Swedenborg's Secrets of Heaven:

3482 

Although the language of Scripture seems to us so plainspoken and sometimes unpolished, it is the angelic language itself in its outermost form. When angelic language, which is spiritual, descends into human words, this is the only kind of diction in which it can express itself, because all of its content represents something, and every word symbolizes something. The ancients had no other language, interacting as they did with spirits and angels. It was full of representation and every element of it held spiritual meaning. Their books were written in the same language, because to speak and write this way was the pursuit of their wisdom.

3301:9  

The youths who said, “Go on up, you baldhead! Go on up, you baldhead!” to Elisha and were mauled by bears from the forest (2 Kings 2:23, 24) represented people who blaspheme the Word as a work devoid of truth. Elisha represented the Lord as the Word. . . .

From this you can also see how much power representations had at that time.

3061:2 

The Lord has existed from eternity, as the Word makes plain . . . , although he was later born in time. After all, he spoke through Moses and the prophets and appeared to many people, and it says there that he was Jehovah. This deep secret, though, cannot be revealed to anyone who does not have divine perception. As a result, it can be revealed to hardly anyone but members of the earliest church, which was heavenly and had divine perception. From them I have heard that Jehovah himself was the Lord in his divine humanity, at the times when he went down into heaven and flowed through heaven. The reason he revealed himself this way is that heaven resembles an individual human being with all the body parts, which is also why it is called the universal human. . . . Divinity itself in heaven, or in the universal human, was the divine human, who was Jehovah himself clothed in this humanity.