Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries

Volume 19

Series Editor: David G. Firth

Consulting Editor: Tremper Longman III

The Song of Songs

An Introduction and Commentary

Iain M. Duguid

© 2015 by Iain M. Duguid

Iain M. Duguid has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

All rights reserved. This eBook is licenced to the individual who purchased it and may not be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, except for the sole, and exclusive use of the licensee, without prior permission of the publisher or the Copyright Licensing Agency.

Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

First published 2015

ISBN: 9781783592982

Series design: Sally Ormesher

Illustration: Kev Jones

INTER-VARSITY PRESS

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Email: ivp@ivpbooks.com

Website: www.ivpbooks.com

Inter-Varsity Press publishes Christian books that are true to the Bible and that communicate the gospel, develop discipleship and strengthen the church for its mission in the world.

Inter-Varsity Press is closely linked with the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship, a student movement connecting Christian Unions in universities and colleges throughout Great Britain, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. Website: www.uccf.org.uk

To Barb,

You captivated me with one glance from your eyes,
in the rainstorm when we first met.

GENERAL PREFACE

The decision completely to revise the Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries is an indication of the important role that the series has played since its opening volumes were released in the mid-1960s. They represented at that time, and have continued to represent, commentary writing that was committed to both the importance of the text of the Bible as Scripture and a desire to engage with as full a range of interpretative issues as possible without being lost in the minutiae of scholarly debate. The commentaries aimed to explain the biblical text to a generation of readers confronting models of critical scholarship and new discoveries from the Ancient Near East, while remembering that the Old Testament is not simply another text from the ancient world. Although no uniform process of exegesis was required, all the original contributors were united in their conviction that the Old Testament remains the Word of God for us today. That the original volumes fulfilled this role is evident from the way in which they continue to be used in so many parts of the world.

A crucial element of the original series was that it should offer an up-to-date reading of the text, and it is precisely for this reason that new volumes are required. The questions confronting readers in the first half of the twenty-first century are not necessarily those from the second half of the twentieth. Discoveries from the Ancient Near East continue to shed new light on the Old Testament, whilst emphases in exegesis have changed markedly. Whilst remaining true to the goals of the initial volumes, the need for contemporary study of the text requires that the series as a whole be updated. This updating is not simply a matter of commissioning new volumes to replace the old. We have also taken the opportunity to update the format of the series to reflect a key emphasis from linguistics, which is that texts communicate in larger blocks rather than in shorter segments such as individual verses. Because of this, the treatment of each section of the text includes three segments. First, a short note on Context is offered, placing the passage under consideration in its literary setting within the book, as well as noting any historical issues crucial to interpretation. The Comment segment then follows the traditional structure of the commentary, offering exegesis of the various components of a passage. Finally, a brief comment is made on Meaning, by which is meant the message that the passage seeks to communicate within the book, highlighting its key theological themes. This section brings together the detail of the Comment to show how the passage under consideration seeks to communicate as a whole.

Our prayer is that these new volumes will continue the rich heritage of the Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries and that they will continue to witness to the God who is made known in the text.

David G. Firth, Series Editor

Tremper Longman III, Consulting Editor

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

I first started to teach the Song of Songs at Westminster Seminary in California back in 2000 as part of a course on Psalms and Wisdom Literature. I found it intimidating and overwhelming, so I gave it as small a part of the course as I felt was reasonable. However, the more I started to study the book, the more my interest in it grew, along with a conviction that it was not generally being preached adequately (or at all) in the evangelical and Reformed circles in which I move. That was understandable. If tackling such a complex book seemed an overwhelmingly daunting task for a seminary professor, armed with a PhD in Old Testament, how challenging must it be for preachers without such training? I resolved to get to grips with the Song and eventually to preach through it myself.

Following the invitation to write this volume for the Tyndale series and thanks to a sabbatical break from teaching at Grove City College, I was able to fulfil that goal during the Fall of 2012 and the Spring of 2013 at Christ Presbyterian Church in Grove City, PA. Our regular attendance of students was significantly boosted by the topic! The research that went into preparing those sermons forms the basis for this volume, while the sermons themselves will eventually be published as part of the Reformed Expository Commentary series.

I would therefore like to thank TOTC Series Editor Dr David Firth and Dr Philip Duce at Inter-Varsity Press for the invitation to contribute to this series, and for their patience as I missed several deadlines along the way. David, in particular, contributed many thoughtful observations that improved the manuscript significantly. I am indebted as well to my wonderful, eagle-eyed student assistant, Clint Estes, who read early drafts and pointed out many errors I might otherwise have missed.

I would also like to thank Grove City College for granting me the aforementioned sabbatical to work on this book and for providing such a wonderful collegial atmosphere with my colleagues in the Department of Biblical and Religious Studies. The congregation of Christ ARP provided an enthusiastic and supportive audience for the good news of the gospel, from whatever portion of Scripture. I am grateful too to my fellow pastors and elders there: Matt Harmon, Jonathan Kuciemba, Scott Miller and Lee Wishing – a pastor couldn’t wish for better comrades-in-arms. Revd Jim Wittke and the good people of Kirkridge ARP in Maryland kindly provided another context for me to try out an earlier version of this material, as did the faculty and students of Mid-America Reformed Seminary.

Last, but by no means least, my thanks and love go out to my family. My children, Wayne, Jamie, Sam, Hannah, Rob and Rosie, have grown up while I have been working on the Song. Sam was married last year, and he and his wonderful wife, Peggy, graciously allowed me to preach from the Song at their wedding. My greatest debt is owed to my wife, Barb, who has taught me so much about the love described in the Song: both showing me the wonderful love of a dedicated spouse and pointing me repeatedly to the even more wonderful love of our beautiful Saviour. Thank you all once again.

Iain Duguid

Grove City College

CHIEF ABBREVIATIONS

AB | Anchor Bible
AJSLL | American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literature
AOTC | Apollos Old Testament Commentary
ATR | Anglican Theological Review
AUSS | Andrews University Seminary Studies
BBR | Bulletin for Biblical Research
BDB | Brown Driver Briggs Hebrew-English Lexicon
BETS | Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society
BKAT | Biblischer Kommentar: Altes Testament
BR | Bible Review
BTB | Biblical Theology Bulletin
BZAW | Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft
CT | Christianity Today
FB | Focus on the Bible
HALOT | Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament
ITC | International Theological Commentary
JBL | Journal of Biblical Literature
JSOT | Journal for the Study of the Old Testament
JSOTsup | Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplementary series
NCBC | New Century Bible Commentary
NICOT | New International Commentary on the Old Testament
NIVAC | NIV Application Commentary
NJPS | New Jewish Publication Society Translation
OTL | Old Testament Library
REC | Reformed Expository Commentary
SBL | Society of Biblical Literature
SR | Studies in Religion
TOTC | Tyndale Old Testament Commentary
VTSup | Vetus Testamentum Supplement
WBC | Word Biblical Commentary
WTJ | Westminster Theological Journal
ZAW | Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft

Bible versions

ESV | English Standard Version, published by HarperCollins Publishers © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
HCSB | The Holman Christian Standard Bible © copyright 1999 [2004] by Holman Bible Publishers. Used by permission.
KJV | King James Version.
NASV | New American Standard Version. Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.
NIV | New International Version®. NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
NKJV | New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission.
RSV | Revised Standard Version. Copyrighted 1946, 1952, © 1971, 1973, by the Division of Christian Education, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, and used by permission.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Commentaries

Brooks, R. (1999), Song of Songs, FB (Fearn: Christian Focus).

Carr, G. L. (1984), The Song of Solomon, TOTC (Leicester: IVP).

Davis, E. F. (2000), Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs, Westminster Bible Companion (Louisville: Westminster John Knox).

Dillow, J. C. (1982), Solomon on Sex: The Biblical Guide to Married Love (Nashville: Thomas Nelson).

Duguid, I. M. (forthcoming, 2016), Song of Songs, REC (Phillipsburg: P&R).

Durham, J. (1982), The Song of Solomon, Geneva (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth; original 1669).

Exum, J. C. (2005), Song of Songs: A Commentary, OTL (Louisville: Westminster John Knox).

Fredericks, D. C. and D. J. Estes, (2010), Ecclesiastes & the Song of Songs, AOTC (Nottingham: Apollos).

Garrett, D. A. and P. R. House (2004), Song of Songs/Lamentations, WBC (Nashville: Thomas Nelson).

Gerleman, G. (1965), Ruth: Das Hohelied, BKAT 18 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener).

Glickman, C. (2004), Solomon’s Song of Love: Let the Song of Songs Inspire Your Own Romantic Story (Brentwood: Howard).

Gordis, R. (1974), The Song of Songs and Lamentations: A Study, Modern Translation and Commentary (Brooklyn: Ktav).

Hess, R. S. (2005), Song of Songs, Baker Commentary on the Old Testament Wisdom and Psalms (Grand Rapids: Baker).

Keel, O. (1994), The Song of Songs: A Continental Commentary, trans. F. J. Gaiser (Minneapolis: Fortress).

Longman III, T. (2001), Song of Songs, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans).

Mitchell, C. W. (2003), The Song of Songs (St Louis: Concordia).

Murphy, R. E. (1990), The Song of Songs, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press).

Nelson, T. (1998), The Book of Romance: What Solomon Says about Love, Sex, and Intimacy (Nashville: Thomas Nelson).

O’Donnell, D. S. (2012), The Song of Solomon: An Invitation to Intimacy, Preach the Word (Wheaton: Crossway).

Pope, M. H. (1977), Song of Songs, AB (New York: Doubleday).

Provan, I. (2001), Ecclesiastes/Song of Songs, NIVAC (Grand Rapids: Zondervan).

Snaith, J. G. (1993), Song of Songs, NCBC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans).

Other commentaries, books and monographs

Assis, E. (2009), Flashes of Fire: A Literary Analysis of the Song of Songs (New York: T. & T. Clark).

Augustine (2007), ‘On the Good Marriage’, in P. Schaff (ed.), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 1, vol. 3 (New York: Cosimo).

Barbiero, G. (2011), Song of Songs: A Close Reading, trans. M. Tait, VTSup 144 (Leiden: E.J. Brill).

Brown, P. (1988), The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press).

Calvin, J. (2003), Commentary on the Book of Psalms, vol. 3, trans. J. Anderson (Grand Rapids: Baker; original edn 1846).

—— (1960), The Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. F. L. Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster).

Clarke, R. S. (2006), Song of Songs: A Biblical Theology, unpublished MTh thesis, Oak Hill College, London, http://beginningwithmoses.org/bt-articles/218/song-of-songs-a-biblical-theology (accessed 9 January 2014).

Dobbs-Allsop, F. W. (2005), ‘Late Linguistic Features in the Song of Songs’, in A. C. Hagedorn (ed.), Perspectives on the Song of Songs, BZAW 346 (Berlin: de Gruyter), 27–77.

Donne, J. (1977), ‘Holy Sonnets, 14’, in The Complete English Poems (London: Penguin), 315.

Duguid, I. M. (2005), Esther & Ruth, REC (Phillipsburg: P&R).

—— (2013), Is Jesus in the Old Testament? (Phillipsburg: P&R).

Farmer, K. A. (1991), Who Knows What Is Good? A Commentary on the Books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, ITC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans).

Fisch, H. (1988), Poetry with a Purpose: Biblical Poetics and Interpretations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).

Fox, M. V. (1985), The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press).

Fredericks, D. C. (1988), Qoheleth’s Language (Lewiston: Mellen).

Gesenius, W. (1983), Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar as Edited and Enlarged by the Late E. Kautsch, trans. A. E. Cowley (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Horine, S. C. (2001), Interpretive Images in the Song of Songs: From Wedding Chariots to Bridal Chambers (New York: Peter Lang).

Johnston, P. S. (2002), Shades of Sheol: Death and Afterlife in the Old Testament (Leicester: Apollos).

Joüon, P. and T. Muraoka (1993), A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute).

LaCocque, A. (1998), Romance She Wrote: A Hermeneutical Essay on the Song of Songs (Harrisburg: Trinity).

LaCocque, A. and P. Ricoeur (1998), Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Landy, F. (1983), Paradoxes of Paradise: Identity and Difference in the Song of Songs (Sheffield: Almond).

Lewis, C. S. (1958), Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich).

Maclean, M. (2012), Royal Company: A Devotional on the Song of Solomon (Fearn: Christian Focus).

Mahaney, C. J. (2005), ‘Sex, Romance and the Glory of God: What Every Christian Husband Needs to Know’, in J. Piper and J. Taylor (eds.), Sex and the Supremacy of Christ (Wheaton: Crossway).

McGuckin, J. A. (2004), ‘The Life of Origen’, in J. A. McGuckin (ed.), The Westminster Handbook to Origen (Louisville: Westminster John Knox).

Moore, C. A. (1971), Esther, AB (New York: Doubleday).

Munro, J. M. (1995), Spikenard and Saffron: A Study in the Poetic Language of the Song of Songs (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press).

Noegel, S. B. and G. A. Rendsburg (2009), Solomon’s Vineyard: Literary and Linguistic Studies in the Song of Songs, SBL Ancient Israel and Its Literature 1 (Atlanta: SBL).

Roberts, D. P. (2007), Let Me See Your Form: Seeking Poetic Structure in the Song of Songs, Studies in Judaism (Lanham: University Press of America).

Rowley, H. H. (1952), ‘The Interpretation of the Song of Songs’, in The Servant of the Lord and Other Essays on the Old Testament (London: Lutterworth), 189–234.

Rutherford, S. (1803), Christ Dying and Drawing Sinners to Himself (Glasgow: Samuel and Archibald Gardner).

Ryken, L. (1986), Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Grand Rapids: Zondervan).

Sayers, D. L. (1958), ‘The Vindictive Story of the Footsteps that Ran’, in A Treasury of Sayers Stories (London: Gollancz), 245–257.

Schwab, G. M. (2002), The Song of Songs’ Cautionary Message Concerning Human Love, Studies Concerning Biblical Literature (New York: Peter Lang).

Thomas, D. (1993), God Strengthens: Ezekiel Simply Explained (Darlington: Evangelical Press).

Trible, P. (1978), God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress).

Van der Toorn, K. (1995), ‘The Significance of the Veil in the Ancient Near East’, in. D. P. Wright (ed.), Pomegranates and Golden Bells: Festschrift for J. Milgrom (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns), 327–339.

Walsh, C. E. (2000), Exquisite Desire: Religion, the Erotic, and the Song of Songs (Minneapolis: Fortress).

Waltke, B. W. with C. Fredericks (2001), Genesis: A Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan).

Yeats, W. B. (1996), ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’, in R. J. Finneran (ed.), The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Simon & Schuster).

Young, E. J. (1949), Introduction to the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans).

Young, I. (1993), Diversity in Pre-exilic Hebrew, Forschungen zum Alten Testament 5 (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck).

Journal articles

Campbell, I. D. (2000), ‘The Song of David’s Son: Interpreting the Song of Solomon in the Light of the Davidic Covenant’, WTJ 62.1, 17–32.

Davidson, R. M. (1989), ‘Theology of Sexuality in the Song of Songs: Return to Eden’, AUSS 27.1, 1–19.

Davis, E. F. (1998), ‘Romance of the Land in the Song of Songs’, ATR 80, 533–546.

Dorsey, D. A. (1990), ‘Literary Structuring in the Song of Songs’, JSOT 46, 81–96.

Driver, G. R. (1936), ‘Supposed Arabisms in the Old Testament’, JBL 55, 101–120.

Exum, J. C. (1973), ‘A Literary and Structural Analysis of the Song of Songs’, ZAW 85, 47–79.

Fountain, T. E. (1966), ‘A Parabolic View of the Song of Solomon’, BETS 9.2, 97–101.

Hallo, W. W. (1985), ‘ “As the Seal upon Thy Heart”: Glyptic Roles in the Biblical World’, BR 1, 20–27.

Hamilton Jr, J. M. (2006), ‘The Messianic Music of the Song of Songs: A Non-Allegorical Interpretation’, WTJ 68, 331–345.

Kline, M. G. (1959), ‘The Song of Songs’, CT 3 (27 April 1959), 22–23, 39.

Murphy, R. E. (1979), ‘Interpreting the Song of Songs’, BTB 9.3, 99–105.

Rabin, C. (1973), ‘The Song of Songs and Tamil Poetry’, SR 3.3, 205–219.

INTRODUCTION

1. Title, authorship and date

The book begins with a title, most commonly translated: ‘The Song of Songs which is Solomon’s’ (1:1; KJV; ESV; NASV). It is generally agreed that the heading ‘Song of Songs’ should be understood as a superlative, identifying this as the ‘best of songs’, just as the ‘Holy of Holies’ was the most sacred part of the tabernacle and temple (Exod. 26:33; 1 Kgs 8:6) and the ‘Lord of lords’ is the supreme ruler of the universe (Ps. 136:3). However, the phrase ‘which is Solomon’s’ leaves open the question of how exactly the book means to define its relationship to Solomon. Many scholars understandably treat this as a lamed of authorship, such as we find in the book of Psalms, as well as in Habakkuk 3; that would mean that Solomon is here being explicitly identified as the author of the Song. However, the Hebrew preposition lamed has a wide variety of uses in the Bible and could indicate a different and more complex kind of relationship to David’s son. In fact, as discussed in more detail in the comments on 1:1, the exact form of the superscription deviates from the normal ascriptions of authorship in the Psalms. It may therefore be taken as indicating a more general relationship between the content of the Song and the biblical character.

In addition, Solomon’s name is invoked, described or addressed a further five times in the book (1:5; 3:9, 11; 8:11; 8:12), which has led many interpreters to identify Solomon not only as the author, but also as the subject of the book, the ideal lover. In principle, this is a separate question from authorship: Solomon could be the author and main character; he could be the author and not the main character, the main character and not the author, or neither the author nor the main character. However, in practice it means that questions of authorship and interpretation are intertwined in the Song.

If Solomon is identified as both author and main character, which makes the Song his own story, the question arises of how to harmonize the main character in the Song with the Solomon known from the rest of the Bible as the collector of a thousand wives and concubines (see 1 Kgs 10 and 11). Even if that reputation would associate him with the concept of ‘love’, he hardly seems the best model of the kind of exclusive, lifelong, one-man-and-one-woman marriage relationship that the Song depicts. Following a tradition at least as old as the Midrash Rabbah (mid-to-late first millennium AD), some interpreters assume that Solomon wrote the book while he was young, before he married all of his other wives (e.g. Dillow 1982: 7). That would presumably make the woman in the Song the daughter of Pharaoh mentioned in 1 Kings 3:1; however, she hardly fits the description of the woman in Song 1:6, who has been outside working in the vineyards, or in 1:8, where she is keeping goats, or in 8:8–9, whose marital destiny seems to rest in the hands of her brothers. Even if Pharaoh’s daughter were preceded by some other wife not mentioned in the Bible, surely Solomon’s subsequent lifestyle would have completely undercut the Song’s teaching. What would we say about a man who gave a wonderful testimony about his true love for his bride – but then swiftly and comprehensively betrayed her through serial polygamy? Would we keep that testimony to the beauty of single-hearted devotion prominently posted on our church website, even if everything he had said about love and marriage were true and profound?

If Solomon did not write it when he was young, did he perhaps pen the book later in life as an act of repentance (O’Donnell 2012: 23, following Rashi)? This may be plausible if the idealized couple in the Song represent a contrast to Solomon in their love for each other, but could hardly work if Solomon is the hero of the story. Once again, what would we say if an older man gave his testimony about the wonderful romance he claimed to have shared with his one and only true love, but omitted any mention of his own long history of serial adultery? That would hardly qualify as an act of repentance.

Of course, as Craig Glickman rightly points out (2004: 173–175), sometimes those who know most about failure are the best teachers and guides to others. Who better to teach us about faithful perseverance under pressure than Peter, who once denied his Master (1 Pet. 5:8–9; cf. Matt. 26:69–75)? Who better to instruct us about salvation by grace alone than Paul, the former Pharisee of the Pharisees (Phil. 3:3–11)? If Solomon was indeed the author of the Song, who better to show us what true love looks like in marriage than a man whose own life was a walking marital disaster? As a result of his own deep personal failure, he would have been equipped not merely to give us various practical hints and tips for our own marriage relationships, but to point us beyond even the best of human marriages to our desperate need of a better husband whose love alone is perfect. Once again, though, this interpretation only works if Solomon is describing something other than his own personal experience, for it would be deeply hypocritical for Solomon to paint his own story in such glowing colours when in reality it was so different.

Another long-standing argument against Solomonic authorship of the Song lies in the language of the book, which diverges from so-called ‘classical biblical Hebrew’ in a number of significant ways (see Fox 1985: 186–191). For example, with the sole exception of the superscription, the poet consistently uses the šĕ prefix form of the relative pronoun, rather than the classical form ’ăšer. It is often noted that the language of the book contains a number of Aramaisms, some Persian loanwords (such as pardîs [‘park’; 4:13]) and even some that apparently come from Greek, such as ’appiriyôn (‘palanquin’; 3:9). There are also a variety of grammatical forms that seem closer to Mishnaic Hebrew than classical Hebrew. These features are often regarded as a conclusive sign of late provenance (e.g. Dobbs-Allsop 2005: 27–77).

This developmental model of the history of biblical Hebrew has been challenged in various ways. Ian Young (1993) has argued to the contrary that prior to the exile there were at least two dialects of Hebrew functioning: classical Hebrew and colloquial Hebrew. The latter incorporated many Aramaic loanwords from a very early date, while the former, being a prestige language, was carefully kept clear of slang and annoying intrusions from the related language of global trade. It has also been suggested that there were regional variations in dialect in biblical Hebrew, so that ‘northern Hebrew’ might have been distinct from ‘southern Hebrew’ (Noegel & Rendsburg, 2009; cf. Fredericks, 1988). In addition, it is difficult to establish definitively the source of obscure loanwords.

However, even if the linguistic situation in Israel prior to the exile was significantly more complex than has sometimes been depicted, that hardly helps to argue the case for Solomonic authorship. Why would the crown prince whose entire life was lived at the court in Jerusalem speak with either a regional or ‘common’ dialect? If anyone might be expected to speak and write in ‘proper’ Hebrew, it would surely be Solomon. It is worth remembering, of course, that linguistic arguments by themselves are hardly decisive. One might still argue for ‘essentially Solomonic authorship’ of a poem that was then rewritten and stylistically updated some centuries later. Yet in this case, the person responsible for such a comprehensive rewriting of the poem would probably deserve the title of ‘author’, rather than merely ‘editor’.

An early date has also been argued on the basis of the parallels between the Song and ancient Egyptian love poetry, which flourished in Egypt in the late second millennium (Gerleman 1965: 76–77). Such influences on love poetry are exactly what would be expected, it is asserted, during the reign of a monarch who had himself taken an Egyptian bride. Could such poetic forms be preserved unchanged for over a millennium in Israel? Would the poetry not have been influenced more by Greek forms if it were substantively post-exilic? Again, though, we have very little information about what forms of love poetry may have been present within Israelite and Judean culture at various points throughout their history, and certainly not enough data to make definitive judgments.

The same could be said for other arguments for early or late dates based on the content of the Song. For example, it has been argued that the range of spices and exotic perfumes with which the poet seems familiar fits best with the Solomonic era of widespread trade and prosperity (Rabin 1973: 205–219). Likewise, it is noted that the poet uses images such as alabaster pillars and the chariots of pharaoh in a way that suggests that he was personally familiar with these objects (Garrett 2004: 19). Yet there were several other periods in the history of Israel and Judah when there was widespread trade with Egypt and beyond, for example, during the time of King Hezekiah, at the end of the eighth century BC (Keel 1994: 4). It is hard to build a conclusive argument for the date of the book from such limited data.

Additional support for an early date has been sought in the reference to Tirzah in 6:4. Tirzah was a leading city in the northern part of Israel during the Solomonic period, and it became the first capital of the northern kingdom, after the division of Israel under Rehoboam (1 Kgs 14:17). It retained this position of pre-eminence until Omri built Samaria in the early ninth century BC (1 Kgs 16:23–24), after which it faded into the background. It has been argued that the pairing of Jerusalem and Tirzah suggests that they are broadly comparable in magnificence at the time of writing, something that was certainly not the case after the exile. In addition, Garrett argues that a southern poet writing for the court in Jerusalem would hardly have bracketed the two capitals together in this way during the period of the divided kingdom, let alone after the exile (2004: 20). Yet part of the reason for the choice of Tirzah in this verse is the play on the name’s meaning (‘desirable’; see commentary). Michael Fox maintains that Tirzah would have retained its almost legendary connotations as the old capital of the north, particularly if a much later (post-exilic) date of authorship is entertained, by which time the rivalry between the two cities was no longer a live issue (1985: 151).

In the absence of conclusive evidence, it is probably best to leave the question of the date of the book open, although a date after the exile may be regarded as more likely. Obviously, if the book is later than the tenth century BC, Solomonic authorship is ruled out. Even if the book is early, though, Solomonic authorship is not the necessary, or even perhaps the most likely, interpretation of the opening verse, as we shall argue more fully below. While Solomonic authorship is possible, it seems more plausible that the authorship of this book, like that of many other biblical books, is unknown.

Some commentators have suggested that the unknown author of the Song was a woman, on the grounds that the female voice is dominant (Landy 1983: 68–69; LaCocque 1998: 41–43). The woman speaks significantly more than the man does, and her words begin and end the Song. She also uses the pronoun ‘I’ and ‘myself’, along with the phrases ‘my soul’ and ‘my heart’, far more frequently than he does: he hardly talks about himself and engages in little of the self-reflection that she does. Women authors of poems are well known in Scripture, including Miriam (Exod. 15:20–21), Deborah (Judg. 5), Hannah (1 Sam. 2) and Mary (Luke 1:46–55), so there is no reason to rule out such an identification. Yet at the same time, skilled authors excel at creating believable characters of both genders, and there is no doubt that the writer of the Song was a very skilled author indeed. So, while it is plausible that the author was a woman, there is no conclusive reason to rule out a male author.

2. Interpretation

a. A love song

Part of the difficulty of understanding the Song of Songs comes precisely from the fact that it is a song. Poetry is the art of condensation: expressing the maximum meaning in the minimum number of words. As a result, poetry is often more evocative than explicative. It doesn’t take the time to unpack its figures of speech or to explain analogies. Poetry tends to be open-ended, designed to leave the reader pondering its implications, rather than tying up every loose end with a watertight argument. Unlike the book of Job, there is no narrative framework in the Song to explain the setting or to identify the characters of the poem. In contrast, the Song explodes straight into action with the woman’s passionate declaration, ‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!’ (1:2), without the slightest explanation of who the speaker is or the identity of her lover. The answers to these questions emerge, insofar as they emerge at all, only through the hints and incidental details in the text. This is part of the skill of poetry: in the same way that the Psalms speak to a multitude of human conditions because the threats facing the psalmist are expressed through multivalent metaphors and images, so too the impressionistic nature of the Song opens up its message of love to a variety of people living in a variety of different situations.

On one level, of course, the subject of the Song is easy to identify: it is a song about love. But whose love? Is it an originally secular song about the love of two human beings that acquired a religious cast simply by being included in the Bible? Was it composed as an allegory of love that really has nothing to do with human love at all, but was intended from the beginning to illustrate God’s love for his people? Or is it something in between, a poem that speaks to love in all of its dimensions?

b. Allegorical interpretation

Historically speaking, an allegorical approach that sees the Song of Songs as depicting the love of God for his people has been the most popular among preachers and religious readers.1 In Jewish circles, the Talmud saw the Song as depicting the relationship of Yahweh and Israel. In this, Jewish readers were following the lead of 2 Esdras and 4 Ezra, from as early as 100 AD (Hess 2005: 22). The Church Fathers adopted a similar approach, but adapted it so that the book now spoke of Christ and his bride, the church. Thus, according to Cyril of Alexandria (fifth century AD), when the woman describes her lover lying between her two breasts like a sachet of myrrh, what she was really talking about was Jesus standing between the Old and New Testaments (Rowley 1952: 196). Following this allegorical method of interpretation, Bernard of Clairvaux preached no fewer than eighty-six sermons on the first three chapters of the Song of Songs.

This allegorical approach to the Song remained popular throughout the Middle Ages and the Reformation era, and is preserved in the chapter headings of the King James Version. It is the approach of classic works like the Puritan James Durham’s Clavis Cantici: or, an Exposition of the Song of Solomon. Nor has such an interpretive strategy lost its attraction for preachers as we move into the modern era. The promotional material for a recent book by Malcolm Maclean (2012) claimed, ‘In this devotional work we too will learn what it is like to have daily contact with Jesus, the lover of our souls as pictured in Songs of Solomon.’

In a similar vein, Richard Brooks confidently declares,

The two leading characters in the song, the bridegroom and the bride, are the Lord Jesus Christ and the church/individual believers. Regarding others who feature along the way, the virgins are interpreted as more mature believers, of like spiritual mind with the Shulammite in their devotion to Christ; the daughters of Jerusalem are believers who are young in the faith; and the watchmen are ministers of the gospel, those who have the care of souls.

(Brooks 1999: 9)

It is not hard to see why this approach has been attractive to preachers. Without having to descend to the embarrassing matter of talking about sex from the pulpit, their hearers (even monks who have taken a vow of celibacy, like Bernard of Clairvaux’s audience!) can be encouraged and directed in their spiritual lives with all kinds of edifying observations about spirituality, prayer, Bible reading and the importance of loving Jesus.

c. Natural interpretation

Other interpreters have argued that such a spiritualized reading of the Song of Songs is a profound mistake and that the book is intended instead to be a celebration of human love and sex. The argument in favour of such a reading is simple. To begin with, that more literal understanding is typically how people who stumble across it without religious instruction tend to read it. In one of Dorothy Sayers’ detective novels, Lord Peter Wimsey says, ‘In my youth, they used to make me read the Bible. Trouble was, the only books I took to naturally were the ones they weren’t over and above keen on. But I got to know the Song of Songs pretty well by heart’ (Sayers 1958: 257). He didn’t memorize the Song of Songs because he thought it spoke about Christ, but rather because he thought it spoke about sex – and as an adolescent in a British upper-class culture that never spoke of such things, of course he found it fascinating!

This interpretation too has a long history. Rabbi Aqiba pronounced a curse on those who sang portions of the Song at banquets, declaring, ‘He who trills his voice in the chanting of the Song of Songs and treats it as a secular song has no share in the world to come.’ The existence of such an anathema presupposes that some in his community were committing the offence. Likewise, the Westminster divines were concerned about people in their day interpreting the Song as ‘an hot carnall pamphlet formed by some loose Apollo or cupid’ (Rowley 1952: 233, n. 3). In the past, such ideas were largely limited to the musings of adolescent boys and subversive elements of the faith community, but this view has now become a staple not only of critical commentaries, but even within the evangelical world. Tremper Longman deems the book ‘an anthology of love poems, a kind of erotic psalter’ (2001: 43). Less provocatively, Daniel Estes writes, ‘As its primary purpose, the Song of Songs is written to celebrate erotic love within the bounds of marriage as God’s good gift ... [and] to teach about the nature of intimacy’ (2010: 300).

d. Typological interpretation?

Some scholars have sought to separate out a typological approach as a third way, similar to allegory but distinct from it. In true allegory, the literal meaning is of no significance; however, in typology, the literal meaning is recognized as valid in its own right, but the interpreter then goes on to link that meaning with an event or teaching in the New Testament that is here foreshadowed. Thus, Iain Campbell argues for a distinctly typological (rather than allegorical) reading of the Song of Songs, focusing particularly on the significance of the fact that the Song is Solomon’s. While wishing to avoid the excesses of allegory, he argues,

If the Song’s meaning is exhausted as a celebration of human love, it is difficult to attach any theological significance to it, particularly given the absence of God’s name from the composition. To have a book devoted to the joys of physical love in a collection of spiritually oriented and theologically significant writings would appear to make the Song superfluous.

(Campbell 2000: 21)

Campbell has raised some important issues to which we shall return. Nevertheless, in my taxonomy of approaches I have come to the conclusion that it is more helpful to retain two broad categories, which we may call the ‘spiritual’ approach and the ‘natural’ approach. The ‘spiritual’ approach encompasses all of the allegorical and typological interpretations; what binds them together is the common conviction that the primary meaning of the text is in terms of the spiritual relationship between God and his people as a whole, or God and believers as individuals. The ‘natural’ approach, on the other hand, includes all of those interpretations that see the primary signification of the text as describing human relationships.

e. A twofold division

This twofold division into spiritual and natural interpretation enables us to recognize that both of these broad categories cover a wide spectrum of approaches to the book that range from responsible attempts at biblical interpretation to the kind of free association of ideas that people often link with allegory. In other words, ‘allegory’ is not just a facet of the ‘spiritual’ approach, but of the ‘natural’ approach as well. The contemporary Christian relationship manuals that take the Song of Songs as the departure point for their lessons on courtship and marriage are simply the modern equivalent of the ancient allegorists. Both use the Scriptures to lend a veil of authority to their (often helpful) teachings, but neither is well grounded in a proper understanding of the text itself.

Some examples may illustrate this point. From the ‘spiritual’ side, Richard Brooks makes the following comment about Song of Songs 6:11 (‘I went down into the garden of nuts to see the fruits of the valley, and to see whether the vine flourished, and the pomegranates budded’, KJV):

Why is the church described now as a ‘garden of nuts’ (NIV: grove of nut-trees)? The garden is already a familiar picture in the Song where the church is concerned (for example, 4:12). The nut in question is probably the walnut, having a hard shell with a sweet kernel. This would be suitable as a figurative expression of the church in its relationship both to Christ and the world, going through many tribulations in entering the kingdom of God (Acts 14:22). The life of the believer is hidden with Christ in God (Col. 3:3). As the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds his people (Ps. 125:2).

(Brooks 1999:161)

Notice that the text of the Song doesn’t say that the church is like a nut, or even that Israel is like a nut; merely that the lover went down to a garden of nuts to see whether there was any evidence of new growth and fruitfulness. There seems no obvious reason why that thought should be connected with hard shells and sweet kernels, or with believers being ‘hidden with Christ in God’. In fact, I can think of some churches that might aptly be described as ‘a garden of nuts’, while using the image in an entirely different sense!

Yet this kind of free association of ideas is not limited by any means to the ‘spiritual interpretation’ approach. On the ‘natural interpretation’ side, Tommy Nelson says this about 5:10–12 (‘My beloved is white and ruddy, chief among ten thousand. His head is like the finest gold; his locks are wavy, and black as a raven. His eyes are like doves by the rivers of waters, washed with milk, and fitly set’, NKJV):

He was pure in his motives and behaviors toward her. Repeatedly she referred to him as white ... his head (in this case his mind) was filled with wisdom more valuable than gold. He was respected even though he was youthful. His hair was black with no evidence of the weakness of age. Sin is often pictured in the Bible as the weakness of aging (See Hos. 7:9). He was gentle; his eyes were soft and tender toward her. He was sober. The whites of his eyes were white, not reddened by alcohol or debauched living.

(Nelson 1998: 125)

These may all be excellent attributes to affirm in a husband – there is much practical advice in Nelson’s book, just as there is much spiritual truth in Brooks – but none of the connections that Nelson makes grows out of a solid understanding of the text. The word for ‘white’ (ṣaḥ) used in describing the beloved here may better be translated ‘radiant’ (NIV; ESV), and is not used elsewhere in the Old Testament to describe purity; the Hebrews would never have equated the head with the mind, and the fact that the whites of the man’s eyes were, well, ‘white’ has nothing to do with his avoidance of debauched living.

Now the kind of free association that Richard Brooks and Tommy Nelson are engaged in is, of course, precisely the problem with allegorical interpretation. Given enough imagination, radically different messages can be drawn out of the same passage: the Song can relate to Yahweh and Israel, God and the church, wisdom and the individual soul, or an ordinary husband and a wife. Instead of the text controlling the interpretation, the text becomes a flexible vessel in the hands of the interpreter, a container into which meaning may be memorably imported.2 Positively, of course, this uncontrolled subjectivism – whether of the spiritual or natural variety – generally flows from a conviction of the importance and the pastoral relevance of Scripture. As a result, when faced with a text that is hard to understand, the interpreter defaults to making it support doctrines and truths that he or she believes to be true and important. Like a mirror, allegorical exegesis tells us much more about the interpreter than it does about the biblical text. The difference in interpretation of the Song between Brooks and Nelson flows more out of a different evaluation of what is relevant to their respective hearers than from any essential difference in method. The modern prevalence of therapeutic interpretations of the Song of Songs in preference to older Christ-centred allegories may thus tell us something significant about the functional priorities of the church in our day and age, but it doesn’t help us to understand the text.

The fundamental twofold division of views on the interpretation of the Song can therefore help to identify a danger to which any interpreter may be prone: the desire for relevant application of the biblical text can make allegorists of us all. Claiming an attachment to the ‘literal’ or ‘natural’ sense of the text does not automatically free an interpreter from the temptation to wild speculation, as anyone who has ever read end-times prophetic fiction will understand. The danger of misreading the Song is present whichever view is adopted, and the only way to avoid that danger is by careful, patient and disciplined study of the text in its original context, against a proper biblical and Ancient Near Eastern background.

f. Key interpretive questions

Recognizing that people who genuinely want to do justice to what the text says come to radically different conclusions, what are the key interpretive questions that we need to ask the text in order to understand its proper import? We may start by eliminating some commonly used approaches to the question that lead in wrong directions.

For example, it has often been asserted that because the book is part of the biblical canon, it must, by definition, be about God. That seems to be Campbell’s argument in the passage cited earlier (Campbell 2000: 21). According to him, a book that was simply devoted to the joys of human love would be superfluous in Scripture. In one sense, of course, that is true: the Bible is a book about God, a book of spiritual truth, so Song of Songs must have something to teach us about God. Yet not every part of the Bible teaches us about God in the same way. The book of Esther, for example, is not an allegory: it is a history – a history in which God’s name is never mentioned, even when the main characters have to work very hard to avoid doing so. In this case, the book deliberately teaches us about God without mentioning his name in order to demonstrate that God is as sovereign and involved in this world when he works through the providential working of the ‘coincidences’ in our lives as he is when he thunders from Mount Sinai or parts the Red Sea (Duguid 2005: 7).

Likewise, when the book of Proverbs says, ‘Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life’ (13:12), it encompasses every deferred hope with which human beings struggle. It speaks to the deferred hope of the lonely for friends, of the single for a spouse, of the childless for children, of the sick for health, of the unemployed for jobs. Because it is in the Bible, it surely invites us to put all of our deferred hopes in the context of God’s promises of every desire fulfilled in the New Jerusalem, which, like the original Garden of Eden, contains the Tree of Life (Gen. 2:9; Rev. 22:2). Yet at the same time, the proverb is not ashamed to acknowledge our present this-worldly fears and disappointed longings as well. The Bible is not less holy when it speaks to us as human beings than when it speaks to us about God.

As Calvin noted, ‘Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts – the knowledge of God and of ourselves’ (1960: 35). True and sound wisdom is not simply about knowing God. If we are truly to serve God, we also need to know ourselves and the world in which God has placed us. Biblical wisdom may begin with the fear of the Lord (Prov. 1:7), but it must work itself out in the context of the specific contours of the world in which we live, as the rest of the book of Proverbs demonstrates. Biblical wisdom teaches us how to interact with fools as well as with God (Prov. 26:4–5); it counsels us to consider when a soft answer to our neighbour is appropriate and when we need to speak out (Prov. 15:1), and so on. There is nothing inappropriate per se in a book of the Bible whose primary focus is on knowing ourselves and those with whom we live, so that we can live with our spouses ‘in an understanding way’, as Peter puts it (1 Pet. 3:7).

On the other hand, some have suggested that, since the Song of Songs contains explicit erotic language and describes a sexual relationship, it must certainly be describing human relationships, for to use such speech of God would be irreverent.3 This argument is equally flawed. Many believers from previous eras have not been at all uncomfortable in using erotic imagery to speak of the relationship of the believer and God. The language of longing for God in the medieval mystics or the Scottish Presbyterian, Samuel Rutherford, can be quite surprising to modern readers. Rutherford, for example, writes, ‘You shall lay soul and head down in the bosom, and between the breasts of Jesus Christ; that bed must be soft and delicious, it is perfumed with uncreated glory’ (1803: 14). It may be hard to imagine a contemporary preacher using such language, but older believers found in such language alone a suitable vehicle to express the intensity of their passion for their Lord. In fact, that was one of the reasons why they treasured the Song of Songs and deliberately picked up its language as an expression of their devotion.

Indeed, it is worth noting that the most explicitly erotic language in the Old Testament is found precisely in an extended metaphor: in Ezekiel 16, the relationship between Israel and her lovers is portrayed in language that would make most of us blush, even in its toned-down English translation, and which caused Charles Spurgeon to comment, ‘A minister can scarcely read it in public’ (cited in Thomas 1993: 108). The prophet describes the history of Israel’s relationship with the Lord and with the nations around her by means of the common biblical metaphor of marriage, in frankly sexual terms that are much more explicit than anything found on the pages of the Song of Songs. Indeed, some have argued precisely on the grounds of the explicitness of the language that the Song must be an allegory since, as John Wesley put it, ‘The description of this bridegroom and bride is such as could not with decency be used or meant concerning Solomon and Pharaoh’s daughter’ (Longman 2001: 34).

In fact, the supposedly explicit erotic nature of the language of the Song has been vastly overstated. To be sure, many commentators have found erotic euphemisms behind almost every image of the book, but many of these are as fanciful as the thoughts of any medieval allegorist. To find erotic referents in the shape of a henna bush or the fact that the hair on the bridegroom’s head is wet with dew is far from self-evident. Even if there are subtle poetic euphemisms at play here, the obvious point that these are so subtle as to be easily missed by most readers seems overlooked in the eagerness of some commentators to unpack any possible sexual innuendo in precise anatomical detail. In the process, the subtlety of the poet’s art seems lost, and the impression is given that the book’s racy contents are only suitable for the ears of a mature audience. In reality, however, the poet’s rich use of metaphors means that there is no reason why its contents cannot speak appropriately to a much wider audience, provided that the teacher or preacher is willing to follow the Song’s lead and allow certain things to remain veiled and alluded to rather than put on public display.

The key question that should be asked about the Song is not whether it is appropriate to have a book of the Bible that speaks primarily about sex and marriage, nor whether such imagery may with propriety be used about God. Rather, it is whether the central relationship of the Song is intended by God as a typological picture of the relationship of Christ and his church, as, for example, the New Testament reads Psalm 45 (see Heb. 1:8–9), or if the background of the Song of Songs is more properly to be found in the world of wisdom literature. In the latter case, we should read it against the backdrop of passages like Proverbs 5, where the father says to the son,

Let your fountain be blessed,
and rejoice in the wife of your youth,
a lovely deer, a graceful doe.

Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight;
be intoxicated always in her love.

Why should you be intoxicated, my son, with a forbidden woman
and embrace the bosom of an adulteress?

(5:18–20)

Clearly, both interpretations are possible and each has some biblical warrant. As the book of Ephesians teaches us, marriage is the primary picture of the relationship of Christ and his church, while the book of Hebrews certainly sees in the royal wedding of Psalm 45 a foreshadowing of the wedding feast of the Lamb. Yet at the same time, the New Testament does not regularly pick up the language of the Song of Songs to describe that relationship, a fact that might be surprising given its popularity in later centuries.4

The relationship of Solomon to the book that bears his name is obviously central to this question. Is King Solomon the chief character and male lover of the book, so that the relationship described is that between him and the Shulammite? Or does his character play a different role within the book, as a kind of anti-hero? If Solomon is the chief character, either a spiritual or a natural interpretation remains viable. Spiritual interpretations invariably assume that Solomon is the chief character (and usually author), as Campbell’s article makes clear. If the man in the relationship represents God, who better to fulfil that role than the Solomonic king (Campbell 2000: 21–22)? However, many natural interpretations, especially of the more popular variety, also assume that Solomon is author and main character as well (e.g. Dillow 1982). If Solomon is not the main character in the book, and the poems concern a more anonymous idealized couple, then explicit typology seems ruled out. If any and every married couple is potentially a ‘type’ of Christ, then typology has been stretched beyond the normal bounds of the meaning of the word; the background of wisdom literature seems more compelling. As we shall see, that doesn’t mean that the Song of Songs cannot still speak to us about God, for, as with the rest of the Old Testament, wisdom literature also points to Christ and the gospel. Yet it does so in different ways from typology.

So, is Solomon the main character of the book? Several problems with the view that Solomon is both author and hero were mentioned above, in the section on authorship. But even if the author is someone else, presenting an idealized view of Solomon, problems remain. For example, if Solomon is the hero of the story, what is he doing out in the fields with his sheep in 1:7? While Israel’s kings were metaphorically shepherds of their people, they would never have literally been found out in the fields with their flocks. Nor would royal sons have been assigned such a risky calling: they had servants to take care of such things. The focus of this passage is not on any metaphorical aspect of shepherding, but rather the fact that if the woman visits him at noon, she will need to undertake a difficult journey.

Moreover, if the beloved is Solomon, how does the Shulammite’s unique love for her man illustrate the central theme in chapter 8 that true love cannot be bought for any price (see 8:11–12)? Solomon, we are told, has an expensive vineyard worth a thousand shekels that he rents out to keepers (the vineyard is a key metaphor for the lovers’ bodies throughout the Song; see 1:6). His vineyard is at a place called Baal Hamon, which means literally ‘Lord/husband of a crowd’ – an apt description of Solomon’s relationship to his thousand ‘vineyards’ (wives and concubines) in 1 Kings 11. The woman in the Song, though, gives her unique vineyard to her lover freely. She cannot be bought.

Yet if someone is about to marry one of the richest men in the world, it surely undercuts the force of such boasting about the purity of their motives. This is rather like Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice suddenly deciding that Mr Darcy isn’t so sullen and proud immediately after having seen his gorgeous estate in Derbyshire. A person who marries a wealthy husband may protest that money has nothing to do with attraction, but she is hardly in a position to validate that claim.

In fact, the Song of Songs is best understood as a wisdom piece about two idealized people, a man and a woman, whose exclusive and committed love is deep but, like all loves in this fallen world, far from perfect. Their idealized love story is contrasted with the alternative Solomonic model of ‘love’ that we see in 1 Kings 11, a model that views marriage primarily as a commercial and political transaction, a means to wealth, security or political advancement.

g. The three-character interpretation

At the same time, this is not to affirm the so-called ‘three-character’ interpretation of the Song, in which the Song depicts an ongoing love triangle between Solomon, the Shulammite girl and her shepherd lover. This view goes back to Ibn Ezra, the twelfth-century Jewish commentator, and has most recently been argued by Iain Provan (2001: 245–246). Like my view, this interpretation sees the portrayal of Solomon in the Song as negative. However, it constructs a dramatic storyline behind the Song in which the Shulammite has been carried off against her will from her rural home to become part of Solomon’s harem in Jerusalem. On this view, her heart still belongs to her true love, the shepherd, to whom she remains faithful in spite of the seductive attractions of life in Solomon’s harem, and with whom she sneaks away to maintain an ongoing relationship.

This interpretation seems problematic on several grounds. To begin with, it requires introducing sharp breaks into the dialogue of the Song, so that, for example, the woman moves from thinking about King Solomon in 1:12 to speaking of her shepherd lover in 1:13–14 (Provan 2001: 269). There is no evidence for such a shift in the focus of her attentions in the text. Even more troubling are the pastoral implications of this view: the woman is ex hypothesi fantasizing about, and perhaps actually, being unfaithful to her present husband with another man (Provan 2001: 271). Even though she did not freely consent to her union with Solomon, the woman is nonetheless still legally married to him according to this view, which seems to open the door to serious pastoral problems. For example, a woman might argue that even though she is married to Joe, she didn’t want to marry him in the first place and was pressed into it by her parents; now, though, she has rediscovered her high school sweetheart. Surely God doesn’t want her to stay in a loveless forced marriage, any more than the Shulammite did? Isn’t she free to follow ‘true love’?

I believe it is possible to see Solomon portrayed as a negative character in the book and to contrast the Song’s image of true love with the commercial model, as Provan does, without the Shulammite actually being married to Solomon in the poem. This provides a more natural reading of the text, in my view, and avoids potentially justifying acts of adultery on the basis of ‘true love’.

h. Combining natural and spiritual interpretation

To conclude, I believe that the ‘natural’ interpretation is the correct one, reading the Song against the backdrop of wisdom literature rather than of typology, and seeing it as providing profound spiritual insight into the marriage relationship. Yet I think we can go further than this and bridge the two interpretations.

As wisdom literature, the Song is designed to show us an idealized picture of married love, in the context of a fallen and broken world. As it does so, it intends to convict each of us of how far short of this perfection we fall, both as humans and as lovers, and thus to drive us repeatedly into the arms of our true heavenly husband, Jesus Christ. He is the only One whose love for his bride is complete and perfect, and whose perfect love is our only hope in life and death. This more ‘parabolic’5 approach to the text enables preachers to apply it to both literal and spiritual contexts: the Song speaks to us as whole people, in need of wisdom in our relationships with other human beings and in our relationship with God. Many of the problems that we face in our human relationships are analogous to the challenges of our spiritual relationship with God, while at the same time, the good news that we need as people with broken human relationships is found in the unbreakable relationship that God has forged with us in Christ. Or, to put it in more explicitly biblical terms, our broken human relationships tell us something about our broken relationship with God (1 John 4:20), but the remedy for our failed loves is to be found always and only in God’s unfailing love: ‘In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins’ (1 John 4:10).

3. Canonicity

The discussion of the inclusion of the Song into the canon is as old as the discussion of the proper interpretation of the Song. We must assume that it was in regard to a question about the Song’s inclusion that Rabbi Aqiba affirmed, ‘No man in Israel ever disputed about the Song of Songs [that he should say] it does not render the hands unclean, for all the ages are not worth the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel; for all the Writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies’ (m. Yadayim 3.5, cited in Hess 2005: 20). Aqiba’s statement seems to represent the majority view in the Jewish community at the end of the first century AD.

In Christian circles, the Song was included on the earliest lists of scriptural books recorded by Eusebius, which go back to the second century AD. It is often confidently asserted that this nearly unquestioned canonical status was due to the Song’s association with Solomon and its early allegorical interpretation, but there is little real evidence to elucidate the early process of canonization (Murphy 1990: 5). Certainly, there were other texts associated with Solomon that were not canonized (e.g. the Psalms of Solomon), and the debates about the inclusion of the Song and Ecclesiastes seem to have focused far more on their content than their putative authorship. Meanwhile, Josephus includes in his list of twenty-two ‘justly accredited’ books of the Old Testament four books of ‘hymns to God and precepts for the conduct of human life’ (Contra Apionen 1:8, cited in Murphy 1990: 6). These four books are not named, but are most likely the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song; what is more significant, though, is the recognition of the appropriateness of including in the canon texts whose primary function is to provide instruction for human conduct. To put it another way, any canon that contained the book of Proverbs would not necessarily have had to allegorize the Song to find its contents of scriptural value.

It is certainly true that later writers wrestled with the canonical value of a book that focused primarily on human sexual relationships. Theodore of Mopsuestia identified the Song as a passionate love poem between Solomon and his Egyptian princess, and on that basis suggested that such a poem had no place in Scripture. The break between John Calvin and his former student, Sebastian Castellio, likewise centred on the nature of the Song: according to Calvin, Castellio considered it ‘a lascivious and obscene poem, in which Solomon has described his love affair’ (Pope 1977: 127). Such works could hardly be regarded as Scripture: as Murphy points out, ‘The mores of Ancient Israel held no brief for “free love” ’ (1979: 102). Yet as a matter of historical process, it is more likely that the Song was allegorized because it was in the canon of Scripture than that it was initially included in the canon of Scripture because it was allegorized (Longman 2001: 58).

4. Themes and message

a. Love and sex in the beginning

In the Song, we have an idealized presentation of mutual love between a man and a woman, as it was designed to be at creation. Themes from the Garden of Eden abound in the Song: here we are confronted with love as it was intended to be in the beginning (Trible 1978: 144). We hear God pronouncing once again the divine marriage benediction that was first addressed to Adam and Eve in their primeval home: ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh’ (Gen. 2:24).

The book is pervaded by a springtime setting, the perfect season for love and fruitfulness. At the opening of the Song, we encounter the lovers longing for sexual union, for a full and comprehensive possession of each other. Their eagerness for such sexual union is not seen in any sense as an unspiritual or unsanctified desire. On the contrary, this was how it was intended to be in the beginning: one man and one woman being united and becoming one flesh. The Song intends to teach us that sex is good and pure within marriage, and is the appropriate object of longing and desire before marriage. There is certainly no celebration of virginity as being a higher, more spiritual state than marriage, and the desexualizing of the Song of Songs is as much a perversion of its message as is turning it into an erotic fantasy. The Song of Songs starts, after all, with the woman proclaiming, ‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!’, which makes it clear that she has more in mind than merely sharing a Bible study or a cup of tea with her husband-to-be! The uninhibited celebration of the idealized love of the man and the woman provides a model for us of how love was intended to be from the start.

b. Against hedonism: love and sex within a committed marriage

This message that sex is good and pure within marriage confronts two erroneous views on sex that dog our own age, and every age, in various combinations. In the first place, the Song confronts hedonism, the view that celebrates sexuality in any and every form of expression, heterosexual or homosexual, faithful or adulterous, as a means of satisfying an appetite, or even as a means of access to the divine. This attitude has pervasively influenced the society in which we live, so that ‘love’ becomes the justification for any form of sexual expression, and repression of sexual appetite is seen as a sure path to psychological dysfunction. On this view, when you are hungry, you eat, when you are thirsty, you drink, and when you are sexually aroused, you should have sex. However, as we shall see in the exposition, the Song of Songs places sexual expression firmly within the context of permanent, monogamous marriage: it is in that context, and that context alone, that sex is good and pure.

It might seem obvious that a canonical text would stress that conventional biblical view of sexuality, but it has become almost a given in contemporary scholarship that the book has no interest in marriage or traditional family values. Landy, for example, claims that the female author intended to ‘cock a snook at all Puritans’ (1983: 17), a claim that manages to misrepresent the Puritans as badly as it does the Song (see Ryken 1986: 39–54). Likewise, Phyllis Trible boldly states, ‘Never is this woman called a wife, nor is she required to bear children. In fact, to the issues of marriage and procreation the Song does not speak. Love for the sake of love is its message’ (1978: 162), while LaCocque suggests that ‘the entire song strums the chord of “free love”, neither recognized nor institutionalized’ (1998: 8).

This view, however, not only flies in the face of biblical morality, but also defies the evidence of the book itself. To be sure, the couple are not called husband and wife, but the centrepiece of the book is a wedding scene that concludes with the consummation of their relationship (3:6 – 5:2). It is in this poem that the man calls the woman ‘bride’ (kallâ) for the first time. The word occurs no fewer than six times in this poem (4:8, 9, 10, 11, 12; 5:1) and nowhere else in the Song, emphatically connecting the sexual experience described here with the appropriate legal status that goes with it. Nor can the word kallâ simply be regarded as a metaphor, as some commentators have sought to make it (so Fox 1985: 135; Murphy 1990: 160). In what context would an unmarried couple use such a term as a metaphor in any culture, ancient or modern? Elsewhere in the Bible, the word always indicates the new familial bond that is brought into existence through marriage; its use here in the Song marks a key turning point in the couple’s relationship (Hess 2005: 139). Marriage creates the legal and relational context in which it is right and appropriate for the locked garden to be unlocked and the sealed fountain to be unsealed.

Indeed, given the pervasive Edenic imagery of the Song, it is appropriate to compare this couple with Adam and Eve. There is likewise no formal marriage ceremony in Eden, yet few commentators have doubted the intent in the Genesis passage to depict an idealized ‘husband-wife’ relationship, as Jesus himself confirms (Matt. 19:3–6). Like the first couple, the man and the woman in the Song are involved in an exclusive, intimate, permanent relationship of love for each other: it is this, more than any human ceremony, that constitutes a true marriage, as most cultures throughout history have recognized (see comments on 3:6 – 5:2).

Moreover, there are many indications in the Song that what the woman has in mind is not merely a brief sexual liaison with the man, but rather an enduring relationship in which they will build a home and a family together. In a book that is simply bursting with images of fruitfulness, is it possible that a woman in an ancient culture had no thought of the joyful prospect of her own offspring? On the contrary, when she says, ‘our bed is verdant’ (1:16, NIV), and exults, ‘The beams of our house are cedar; our rafters are pine’ (1:17), it is far more likely that she is speaking metaphorically of the anticipation of numerous children and a lasting, solid marriage than simply about the joys of outdoor lovemaking (see Prov. 9:1; 14:1; Assis 2009: 63, pace Longman).

c. Do not awaken love until it pleases

The connection between sex and an enduring marriage relationship also explains why there is a repeated warning in the book: ‘Do not stir up or awaken love until it pleases’ (2:7; 3:5; 8:4). Love is a powerful emotion, not to be rushed into. Physical desire is not a sufficient reason for intimacy. There is a time for love, and until that time comes, there is a time for waiting, even when waiting is desperately hard (see the commentary on 2:8–17). If the locked garden is to be opened to the beloved only at the right time, then patience will certainly need to be exercised in the face of raging hormones.

To be sure, in a culture where puberty and marriage were closely related, the challenges were different from those in the modern world, in which the period of waiting for marriage has been vastly extended. Yet this message of the need for true love to wait appears prominently at the end of the book, where the brothers describe the care with which the community is to guard those not yet ready for love (8:8–9). This girl’s youth is here specifically described in sexual terms: she has not yet reached the status of an ‘almâ, that is, a young woman who has experienced puberty and is therefore ready for love and marriage (cf. Ezek. 16:8). The day of her formal engagement to be married, the day when she will be ‘spoken for’, is still ahead of her. Until that day, she needs to be a wall and a (closed) door, keeping out suitors and retaining her sexual purity. The family – and indeed the broader Christian community – has an important role to play in helping young people maintain pure relationships prior to marriage, honouring and protecting such restraint. The brothers may have their own ulterior motivations for seeking to control her sexuality (see commentary), but the woman’s response is not to throw off their restrictive shackles with anyone she meets. Far from ‘cocking a snook’ at such ‘Puritan’ values, the woman affirms herself to have been a well-defended wall, until the appropriate time came at last to embrace her unique man and find peace in his arms (8:10).

In the climax to the Song, love is fierce and jealous, enduring to the grave and perhaps even beyond (8:6–7). This kind of love is the exact opposite of ‘free love’ that transfers its affections easily to a more attractive partner on a whim. On the contrary, the woman’s love is single-minded and utterly committed to her man. It is the kind of love that longs for the public commitment and acknowledgment that marriage brings (as may be seen from the woman’s desire to bring the man home to her mother’s house, 3:4), and would be endlessly frustrated should marriage for some reason be unattainable.

d. Against asceticism: teaching a positive message about love and sex

The Song is not merely a celebration of such total, committed love, without didactic purpose. Wisdom literature often teaches indirectly, providing instruction for its readers by what it celebrates and criticizes (Young 1949: 327). For example, Proverbs 31 may be said to celebrate the ideal wife, and in the process it surely encourages women to emulate her behaviour and young men to look for such qualities in a wife (note the setting of the poem in 31:1). Indeed, to celebrate something is to instruct others about the things to which we ascribe value. A man who rejoices in his wife teaches his children to do likewise, without needing to say to them specifically, ‘Now children, observe how I am interacting with your mother. Go and do likewise!’ By the same token, someone who constantly dismisses and denigrates their spouse is communicating an equally powerful lesson.

In the same way, the Bible does not merely teach truth through its commands and prohibitions, the ‘thou shalts and thou shalt nots’ of the law; it also instructs us through whatever it celebrates and delights in. The goal of Deuteronomy 6:6–7, which commands us to remember and teach God’s words to our children, is the same as that of Psalm 19:7–8, which delights in the perfection of the law. Both seek to instruct their hearers to place God’s Word at the centre of their lives. Yet one is a command, while the other is a celebration.

This is one way in which the Song speaks powerfully to the church. Much of our speaking about sex in the church is in the form of negative commandments. When asked about sex outside of marriage, we quote Exodus 20:14: ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ When approached about homosexuality, we reply with Leviticus 18:22: ‘You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.’ It is not wrong for us to do so; these commandments are part of God’s Word, his wisdom for living. Yet we much more rarely respond with the positive celebrations of sex within marriage in Scripture, such as we find in the Song, or in Proverbs 5. As a result, we often leave people with the impression that the Bible is against sex in general, rather than being utterly for the kind of sex for which God designed our bodies, with their intricate system of nerves and blood vessels whose sole purpose is to enhance the intense, passionate joy of sex within the committed context of marriage.

For that reason, it is unfortunate that the focus of Christian sex education is so often on abstinence. Abstinence focuses attention on what we are not doing. When we abstain from something, we often feel deprived. Yet a Christian view of sex, as depicted in the Song’s counsel to the young women of Jerusalem, is not about abstaining; it is about waiting for the right time and context for an experience that is so overwhelmingly beautiful and powerful that only marriage can properly contain it.

This also speaks to the way in which the church addresses those who are struggling with same-sex attraction. It is not enough for us to say that the Bible declares that homosexual sex is wrong, though it does. By itself, the law only condemns, leaving us feeling guilty and dirty, and sometimes driving us away from God rather than towards him. In contrast, the Song paints a glorious picture of a marriage relationship between a man and a woman, a relationship that is so rich and deep that we should all long for a relationship just like that. Even if we feel that such a relationship could never be ours, we should wish with every fibre of our being that it might be. Even more amazingly, the Bible speaks of God desiring to have a relationship with us through Christ that outshines even that kind of glorious, passionate human friendship, a relationship that was won through the sacrifice of Jesus to pay for our sin! A fictional story of such a sacrificial love would surely stir our hearts to weeping and joy; what then should we say when we hear about such a magnificent love that is actually true, and is ours in Christ? Such wondrous love demands a response of similar love from our souls!

As a result of the Fall, all of us have disordered desires, whether same-sex attraction, or heterosexual lust, or a complete suppression of any sexual desire, as if it were something dirty and wicked. We are all broken, in a variety of different ways, and the answer that the Song gives to our sexual brokenness is not simply: ‘Don’t be like that!’ Rather, it show us with incredible beauty what a picture of sexual wholeness would actually look like: one man and one woman deeply and permanently bonded together in a uniquely loving relationship. In the process, it also points us beyond even the best of human relationships to the true healing for our hearts that can be found only in the Lover of our souls.

In this way, the Song also confronts the error of asceticism, which has often been a problem in church history. Asceticism advocates the denial of all of the bodily appetites, including sexuality, in order to free the soul to pursue that which is truly spiritual. Even when the church has not gone as far as the Church Father Origen supposedly did by castrating himself,6 it has still often had a less than enthusiastic view of sex (see Brown, 1988). For Augustine, although sex within marriage was not evil, it was a ‘Plan B’ approach to the Christian life. He encouraged really serious Christians to pursue the higher model of celibacy, or even celibate marriage, whereby the partners renounced sexual intercourse but remained together for spiritual fellowship (2007: 413). This perspective remained dominant throughout the Middle Ages, when it was thought that true spirituality could be cultivated only behind the walls of a monastery, away from the dangerous and distracting ‘pleasures of the flesh’.

All of this clashes head-on with the delight that the Song of Songs expresses in our physicality. It is precisely the body, both male and female, that attracts the most lavish praise in the Song of Songs. God invented our bodies and delights in them, and would have us do the same. Although God may call some to a life of singleness, the path of celibacy is not a higher calling for God’s people than that of monogamous marriage (1 Cor. 7:1–7). To be sure, there is much more to the one-flesh unity of marriage than sexual union; indeed, for all of the Song’s glorious description of the lovers’ bodies, it is their faces and eyes that garner most attention (e.g. 4:1–7; Exum 2005: 161). Yet their relationship is certainly not intended to be less than sexual: after the eyes meet and communicate, there is an appropriate movement of the gaze downwards to the breasts and beyond. This proper sexual passion for our spouses is itself the best guard against the temptations of sinful passion outside of marriage.

e. Marriage combined with passion

In fact, what is striking in the Song of Songs is precisely the passion that the married lovers have for each other. In the Middle Ages, such passion was itself viewed as wicked and therefore inevitably associated with adulterous and extramarital affairs (Garrett 2004: 102). People married for all kinds of reasons, as in the ancient world, but not commonly for love: love was the reason for which one had lovers. In that regard, little has changed in the perspective of the modern world: movies and novels invariably associate passion with illicit sexuality rather than with marriage. Our society’s image for marriage is built around the model of Tevye and Golde, from Fiddler on the Roof. In that movie, reflecting on twenty-five years of marriage, Tevye asks his wife, Golde, if she loves him. In response, she reminds him that she has washed his clothes, cooked his meals, cleaned his house, shared his bed, given him children and milked his cow: after twenty-five years, why should they talk about love now? But when he presses the point, ‘Do you love me?’, she finally concedes, ‘I suppose I do.’ This is most people’s image of married love: a good marriage is not so much a matter of shared passion as of shared chores.

In contrast, in the Song of Songs the married partners are filled with passionate delight in each other: in fact, it is this passion rather than explicit sexuality that is most prominent in the Song. As Duane Garrett puts it, ‘The Song achieves something that medieval Christian culture could not fathom, and modern and postmodern culture cannot artfully attain: a man and woman who maintain passionate desire for each other in the context of conventional morality’ (2004: 102). The Song celebrates heterosexual monogamous marriage as the ideal, and shows us the tenderness, excitement and intimacy that rightly belong to that relationship.

f. Marriage is not enough

Yet even while the Song celebrates married love, it doesn’t neglect the trials that beset love in a fallen world (Davidson 1989: 6). There is a repeated pattern of progress from separation to union, yet that union is never secure and unchallenged, even at the end of the Song (Barbiero 2011: 24). This theme of separation emerges most clearly in the night scenes, with their focus on dangerous searching. However, the theme of obstacles that threaten love is already present in the invitation scenes at the beginning of the book. The woman fears that the sunburned darkness of her skin will quench love (1:5–6), and she speaks of the little foxes that can destroy the blossoms of the vineyard while they are in bloom (2:15). These dangers and trials of love lead to the repeated adjuration not to stir up love too soon: ‘Love is conceptualized as an uncontrollable power that is best left asleep. Leviathan is a good analogy – who would dare stir it up? Leave it alone’ (Schwab 2002: 45). The course of true love never did run smooth, at least in the broken and dysfunctional world that we now inhabit, and its awesome power needs to be handled with appropriate respect and caution.

Even at the end of the Song, there is no ‘And so they lived happily ever after’. According to Fisch, at the end of the poem, ‘We have the urgency, the sense of a compelling need, as of a task still to be fulfilled, a race still to be run’ (1988: 103). Jill Munro suggests that the effect of this literary device is ‘to assure us that the song will never end. The lovers will evermore be engaged in love’s game of hide and seek’ (1995: 89). But is this a positive feature – a game – or the inevitable frustration that is bound up with every human relationship here on earth? There is no ultimate rest to be found here under the sun: no relationship is ever complete, no task perfectly fulfilled. The shadow of death hangs over the final chapter of the Song, as it does over life, providing the primary metaphor for the Song’s climax in 8:6–7.

All human love is necessarily ephemeral, like the springtime setting that pervades the book. One day, the lovers’ perfect bodies will grow wrinkled and bent over, and ultimately they too will return to the dust from which they were taken. As the book of Ecclesiastes reminds us, the springtime season of joy that the lovers find themselves inhabiting is to be enjoyed as the good gift of God, but without forgetting the fact that the spring will some day inevitably turn to autumn and then to winter. Love and death are equally powerful realities in this world (Song 8:6). It is especially significant that that reminder comes at the very climax of the book, for it reminds us that every pleasure has its pain, every rose its thorn. We should delight in God’s gifts of love and joy in the present moment, but we should also remember that they are not forever. In a world in which death writes the epitaph of every human relationship, the love of a man and a woman for each other cannot be an end in itself.

g. Beyond marriage: the heavenly Bridegroom

It is this observation that makes the natural or literal interpretation by itself unsatisfying. The Song of Songs is not merely Solomon on Sex (Dillow, 1982), because sex itself is never just sex, nor is marriage. Marriage is designed by God to give us language and experiences that are not merely satisfying and delightful in themselves, but out of which we learn to understand our relationship with God more fully. When Michael Fox observes of the lovers’ speech, ‘This is not just communication but communion, intimate and reciprocal influence through language. The words of each lover penetrate the other’s thought and speech. Love in Canticles is thus the interinanimation of two souls, as John Donne defined love’s essence’ (1985: 322), he is pointing beyond the purely natural interpretation of the Song that he himself advocates. John Donne connected such profound human love with the overpowering and all-encompassing divine love, of which he wrote (1977: 315),

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

To miss that connection between human and divine love, which allegorical interpretation makes instinctively, even if sometimes inappropriately, is to miss something profound and important. The awesome power and unique nature of human love within marriage is precisely what makes it such a perfect analogy for the relationship between the bride of Christ and her husband, or between the individual believer and God. The original human one-flesh intimacy in the garden was never simply about Adam and Eve enjoying each other’s company. It was intended to reflect an image of the nature of God himself in his intertrinitarian relations – two distinct and different people who become one flesh, conjoined forever. This same intimacy will ultimately be extended to the bride of Christ by her Saviour; as a result, application to the relationship of Christ and the church flows naturally from the Song of Songs, in a metaphor designed by God himself (Eph. 5:22–33). Of course, the metaphor of bride and bridegroom is an analogy, as are all metaphors. This frees the interpreter from trying to find forced spiritual significance in every poetic detail of the text. But the metaphor is a rich and profound mystery that will repay much pondering.

That deep connection between marriage and the Lord’s relationship with his people also elucidates other aspects of the text. For example, it has been observed that the description of the woman draws extensively on images of a beautiful land or a garden. For someone who is described so extensively, the woman remains remarkably difficult to picture clearly (Davis 1998: 533). This is because she is predominantly described in similes and metaphors that compare her with aspects of the land: flowers and animals (lilies, crocuses, palm trees, mares, flocks of goats, fawns, etc.), place names (Kedar, Bether, Jerusalem, Tirzah, the tower of David), types of land (vineyard, garden), and its produce (milk, honey, wheat, wine, dates, pomegranates, etc.; Clarke 2006: 35). Perhaps most strikingly, in the description of 4:12–16 her body becomes pure landscape: the contours of her shape are completely subsumed by physical geography. The result of this interconnected constellation of metaphors is that our eyes end up focused on the land as much as on the woman. As Davis puts it, ‘What is prospicuous here is not a great-looking man or woman, but rather a gorgeous land: a heap of wheat shaped like a belly, fawns soft and round as breasts browsing in lotus, mountains of myrrh, frankincense hill, flock of black goats winding down the mountain slopes’ (Davis 1998: 539).

Nor is this beautiful land an indeterminate countryside, as if the poem could have been set anywhere or everywhere: it is specifically the land of Israel, as the place names make clear. More precisely, it is the land of Israel as it was originally intended to be, a land flowing with milk and honey, fertile and prosperous as a result of God’s blessing, not the blighted and difficult location that Israel often experienced it as, because of the curse on their sin. As the Lord put it in Isaiah 62:4, ‘You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate, but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her, and your land Married; for the LORD delights in you, and your land shall be married’ (Clarke 2006: 37).

Meanwhile, the male character in the Song is described in ways that invite the reader to see him as the image of God. He is first introduced as a king (1:4, 12–14), yet he is also an active shepherd with a flock (1:7–8), two roles that no Israelite ruler ever fulfilled at the same time. The language used by the young women of Jerusalem about this king in 1:4 (exulting, rejoicing and celebrating) evokes the festival celebrations of the Lord’s greatness (Clarke 2006: 43). Even though, according to our interpretation, the man is not specifically Solomon or a Davidic king, he is nonetheless presented in ways that evoke the people’s longing for a true king and shepherd of Israel (Hamilton 2006: 339, n. 48). In addition, the refrain, ‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine’ (2:16; 6:3), echoes the classic covenant formula: ‘I will be their God and they will be my people’ (Exod. 6:7; Jer. 7:23; Ezek. 36:28; Longman 2001: 125).

These connections invite us to ponder how the journey from isolation to union in the Song, with all of its trials, joys and frustrations, is shared in many respects not just by married couples but also by God and his people. The primary note that is struck in the Song is desire: the poem is not a lover’s lament, or a celebration of the satisfaction that love brings, so much as an expression of endless desire for union with the beloved (Keel 1994: 19). This intimacy with God is both desired and frightening, overwhelming and all-powerful (Walsh 2000: 201). It is a journey whose destination cannot be gained in this life, though there may be glimpses of God’s delightful presence with the believer and an assurance of belonging to him along the way. Consummation of the relationship comes only through death, by which the believer finally enters the perpetual presence of the Beloved and receives the rest for which they yearn. Not until then will our desire for God reach its longed-for goal.

h. The Song and Jesus Christ

Since every part of the Old Testament speaks to us of the sufferings of Christ and the glories that will follow (Luke 24:44–45), we may expect the Song of Songs to point us to Christ and the gospel (Duguid 2013). As with other Old Testament books, it will do so in a way that does not bypass the literal meaning, but rather provides a deeper and richer context in which to understand the literal meaning – a metanarrative that forms the backdrop and enriches the meaning of each individual text. The Song of Songs speaks to us of Christ and the gospel precisely as it speaks to us concerning human love and marriage. As it confronts us with the ideal of such love, it convicts each of us of our personal sin and failure, and shows us our need of redemption. The Song challenges all of us as failed lovers and points us to the perfect Lover, who has loved us and given himself for us. Jesus Christ enfleshed that perfect love for the sake of his bride, the church, in two distinct aspects. In his humanity, he embodied perfect love for those around him. Even though he remained single while on earth, he fulfilled the ideal of sacrificial, servant love. In all of the specific ways in which we have failed to love others and have misused our sexuality, Jesus loved perfectly and perfectly tended his vineyard.

What is more, on the cross, Jesus suffered and died for our many failures to love properly. The wages of the sinful abuse of our sexuality, whether in singleness or marriage, were paid once for all by Jesus through his death in our place. Though death, the last enemy, seemed at the cross to have the last word, it was not strong enough to overcome such a divine love as this – a love that truly gave everything and endured the ultimate scorn for the sake of an undeserving bride. Christ rose triumphant from the grave for the sake of his beloved, whom he now clothes in the wedding garments of his perfect righteousness.

As a result, all those who are united to Christ by faith long for that final wedding day. On that day, Christ’s bride will come up from the wilderness of this world, clothed in a radiant glory that is not our own, to be received forever into the arms of the One who loved us before time began. We have a glorious inheritance stored up for us in heaven in Christ, an inheritance for which we are to long with an intensity that only our experience of human love gives us the language and the ability to comprehend. The love that is so beautifully described in the Song of Songs is the love for which we were truly made, and for whose consummation we continue to long. This love does not undercut or compete with our calling to love our earthly spouses, but rather undergirds it: ‘Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her’ (Eph. 5:25).7

5. Structure and unity

There is a wide diversity of opinions among scholars about both the unity and the structure of the Song. Some scholars have seen it as an anthology of originally unconnected poems, some of which are mere fragments, linked primarily by the common theme of love (e.g. Longman 2001: 56). Others have identified the poem as a fundamental unity, on the basis of a coherent setting (springtime in the land of Israel), consistent characters (the male and female protagonists and the ‘daughters of Jerusalem’), verbal and thematic echoes (nocturnal wanderings, the theme of the vineyard, eyes like doves, etc.), along with repeated refrains (the warning against stirring up love and the declaration of mutual possession; see Exum 2005: 33–34). The singular title, ‘Song’, in contrast to plural titles like ‘Proverbs’ (mĕšālîm) or ‘Psalms’ (lit. ‘praises’: tĕhillîm) or the Egyptian ‘Songs of Love’, itself implies a unitary aspect to the Song (Barbiero 2011: 19). It is always possible that earlier poems, or parts of poems, have been picked up and reused, but the Song as a whole exhibits the marks of a conscious composition.

That is not to say that the poem tells a straightforward sequential narrative. Some have sought to make the Song the libretto for a dramatic or musical piece, involving two or three characters (Solomon and the Shulammite, or Solomon, the shepherd and the Shulammite). Yet this approach requires reading a great deal of background narrative into the poem, so that it can be read out again (see Garrett 2004: 81, who comments, ‘As it stands, the Song has minimal plot, no character development and no sub plot’). Nor is there any evidence for the existence of drama as an art form in ancient Israel, even after the exile. The poem’s unity is primarily a lyric or poetic unity rather than that of a strict, chronological narrative.

While the precise microstructure is difficult to pin down, especially in 1:2 – 2:7; 6:11 – 7:11 and 7:12 – 8:4 (see Roberts 2007: 395), there is general agreement about the broad outlines of the Song. After the superscription, there are six major units: 1:2 – 2:7; 2:8 – 3:5; 3:6 – 5:1; 5:2 – 6:3; 6:4 – 8:4; 8:5–14 (Exum 2005: 38). Many of the divisions between the units are marked by the appearance of particular terms, such as ‘come’; ‘house’, ‘room’ or ‘garden’; ‘wine’ and ‘embrace’ (Hess 2005: 31), and some by the repeated refrains about not stirring up love (2:7; 3:5; 8:4). The opening and closing sections balance one another with a number of significant verbal parallels, while the section 3:6 – 5:1, which includes the consummation of the marriage, forms the central core. Attempts have been made to find a more detailed chiastic structure for the poem (e.g. Exum 1973: 47–79; Dorsey 1990: 81–96; Garrett 2004: 30–35), but they have not been generally persuasive.

Without attempting to argue that there is a strict narrative behind the Song, or that it presents a detailed chiastic structure, it does seem that there is a broad development and logical flow. In general, this movement leads up to and away from the marriage and the consummation of the relationship, a flow that makes it possible to speak of ‘before’ and ‘after’ in their interactions. Unlike Hollywood stories, which typically focus exclusively on the excitement of the ‘before’ phase of the relationship, the Song shows us some aspects of the ongoing relationship after the wedding as well, while still leaving the couple (and us) at the end of the Song longing for something more complete.

ANALYSIS

1. TITLE (1:1)

2. PROLOGUE (1:2 – 2:7)

Introduction (1:2–14)

Desire (1:2–4)

Uncertainty and request (1:5–7)

Response and reassurance (1:8–11)

Desire (1:12–14)

A litany of love (1:15 – 2:7)

Mutual affirmation (1:15 – 2:3)

The delights and dangers of love (2:4–7)

3. BEFORE THE WEDDING: JOINED AND SEPARATED (2:8 – 3:5)

Morning (2:8–17)

Night (3:1–5)

4. THE WEDDING (3:6 – 5:1)

Question (3:6)

Solomon’s glory (3:7–11)

The beloved’s glory (4:1–7)

Consummation (4:8 – 5:1)

5. AFTER THE WEDDING: SEPARATED AND REJOINED (5:2 – 6:3)

Night (5:2–8)

The lover’s glory (5:9–16)

Restoration (6:1–3)

6. CONTEMPLATION AND RENEWED CONSUMMATION (6:4 – 8:4)

Contemplation of the beloved (6:4–10)

Her response (6:11–12)

Renewed contemplation of the beloved (6:13 – 7:9a)

Renewed response (7:9b–10)

Consummation (7:11 – 8:4)

7. EPILOGUE (8:5–14)

The overwhelming power of love (8:5–7)

The incomparable value of love (8:8–12)

The unending nature of love (8:13–14)

TRANSLATION

¹ The Finest of Songs, about what is Solomon’s.

Woman

² Oh, that he would kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!

For your caresses are better than wine.

³ As for the scent of your oils, it [too] is better.

Your name is flowing oil.

No wonder the eligible young women love you!

⁴ Carry me off with you, hurry!

Oh, that the king would bring me [to] his chambers!

Daughters of Jerusalem

We will exult and rejoice in you!8

We will celebrate your caresses more than wine.

Woman

Rightly they adore you!

⁵ I am dark but beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem,

like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon.

⁶ Do not stare at me because I am weather-beaten,

because the sun has glared down on me.

The sons of my mother were harsh with me;

they set me as a keeper of the vineyards;

[but] my vineyard – the one which belongs to me – I have not kept.

⁷ Tell me, you whom my soul loves,

where are you shepherding?

Where do you make [your sheep] lie down at noon?

Why should I be like a veiled woman

around the flocks of your companions?

Man

⁸ If you do not know, O most beautiful of women,

follow the tracks of the sheep

and pasture your young goats

around the dwellings of the shepherds.

⁹ I compare you to a mare among the chariots of Pharaoh, my darling.

¹⁰ Your cheeks are beautiful with earrings,

your neck with strings [of jewels].

¹¹ We will make earrings of gold for you,

with studs of silver.

Woman

¹² While the king is on his couch,

my nard gives its scent.

¹³ My beloved is to me a pouch of myrrh;

between my breasts he will spend the night.

¹⁴ My beloved is to me a cluster of henna

in the vineyards of Engedi.

Man

¹⁵ Behold! You are beautiful, my darling!

Behold! You are beautiful!

Your eyes are doves!

Woman

¹⁶ Behold! You are beautiful, my beloved!

How lovely! How verdant is our bed!

¹⁷ The beams of our house are cedars;

our rafters are pine trees.

2:1 I am [just] a wildflower of Sharon, a lily of the valleys.

Man

² Like a lily among brambles

is my darling among young women.

Woman

³ Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest,

so is my beloved among the young men.

With great delight, I sit in his shade,

and his fruit is sweet in my mouth.

⁴ He brought me to the house of wine,

and his banner over me was love.

⁵ Prepare for me a bed with raisin cakes;

stretch me out among apples,

for I am weak with love.

⁶ May his left hand be under my head,

and his right hand embrace me!

⁷ I charge you, daughters of Jerusalem,

by the gazelles or the does of the field,

that you will not arouse or awaken love

until it delights.

⁸ The sound of my beloved!

Look, now he comes,

leaping over the mountains,

bounding over the hills.

⁹ My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag.

Look, there he stands behind our wall,

gazing through the windows,

looking through the lattice.

¹⁰ My beloved speaks and says to me,

Man

‘Arise, my darling, my beautiful one, and come away,

¹¹ for look, the winter rains are past;

the spring rains have come and gone.

¹² The blossoms appear on the earth,

the time of singing has come,

and the sound of the dove is heard in our land.

¹³ The fig tree ripens its figs,

and the vines are in blossom, emitting fragrance.

Arise, my darling, my beautiful one, and come away.

¹⁴ O my dove, in the clefts of the rock, in the crannies of the cliff,

let me see your form, let me hear your voice,

for your voice is sweet,

and your form is lovely.’

Woman

¹⁵ ‘Catch the foxes for us,

the little foxes that spoil the vineyards,

for our vineyards are in blossom.

¹⁶ My beloved is mine, and I am his

– he who grazes among the lilies.

¹⁷ Until the day comes to life

and the shadows flee,

turn around, my beloved,

like a gazelle or a young stag on the mountains of Bether.’

3:1 Upon my bed night after night

I sought the one whom my soul loves.

I sought him but did not find him.

² Therefore, I will arise and go around the city;

in the streets and plazas I will seek the one whom my soul loves.

I sought him but I did not find him.

³ The guards who go around the city found me:

‘The one whom my soul loves – have you seen [him]?’

⁴ Only a little [while] after I passed on from them,

I found the one whom my soul loves.

I seized him and would not leave him alone

until I could bring him to the house of my mother,

to the chamber where she conceived me.

⁵ I charge you, daughters of Jerusalem,

by the gazelles or the does of the field,

that you will not arouse or awaken love

until it delights.

Man

⁶ Who is this9 coming up from the wilderness

like columns of smoke,

perfumed with myrrh and frankincense

from all of the merchant’s fragrant powders?

⁷ Behold! His bed – Solomon’s – sixty mighty men surrounding it

from the mighty men of Israel!

⁸ All of them skilled swordsmen, experienced in battle,

each with his sword by his side

because of the terrors of the night.

⁹ King Solomon made a litter for himself

from the wood of Lebanon.

¹⁰ Its posts he made of silver,

its roof of gold, its seat of purple,

its interior inlaid with love

by the daughters of Jerusalem.

¹¹ Go out and look at King Solomon, daughters of Zion,

wearing the crown with which his mother crowned him

on the day of his wedding,

on the day of his heart’s rejoicing.

4:1 Behold, you are beautiful, my darling!

Behold, you are beautiful!

Your eyes are doves behind your veil.

Your hair is like a flock of goats

streaming down from Mount Gilead.

² Your teeth are like a flock of newly sheared sheep

which are going up from the washing,

all of them bearing twins

– none of them bereaved.

³ Your lips are like scarlet thread;

your mouth is beautiful;

your cheek is a slice of pomegranate

behind your veil.

⁴ Your neck is like the tower of David,

built with courses of stones;

a thousand shields are hung upon it

– all the shields of the warriors.

⁵ Your two breasts are like two fawns,

twin gazelles who graze among the lilies.

⁶ Until the day comes to life

and the shadows flee,

I will betake myself to the mountain of myrrh

and to the hill of frankincense.

⁷ You are altogether beautiful, my darling,

and there is no blemish in you.

⁸ [Come] with me from Lebanon, bride; come from Lebanon.

Travel from the peak of Amana,

from the peak of Senir and Hermon,

from the dens of lions,

from the mountains of leopards.

⁹ You have stolen my heart, my sister and bride;

you have stolen my heart with one [glance] from your eyes,

one strand from your necklace.

¹⁰ How delightful are your caresses, my sister and bride

– how much better are your caresses than wine,

and the scent of your oils than all spices.

¹¹ Your lips drip nectar, bride;

honey and milk are under your tongue,

and the fragrance of your garments is like the fragrance of Lebanon.

¹² A locked garden is my sister-bride,

an enclosed fountain, a sealed spring.

¹³ Your shoots are a paradise of pomegranates,

with choice fruits – henna and nard.

¹⁴ Nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with every incense tree,

myrrh and aloes, with all the best perfumes.

¹⁵ A garden spring, a well of living water,

flowing streams from Lebanon.

Woman

¹⁶ Arouse, O north [wind] and go in, O south [wind]!

Blow on my garden;

let its perfumes flow!

Let my beloved come into his garden

so that he may eat its choice fruits.

Man

5:1 I come to my garden, my sister and bride.

I pluck my myrrh with my spices;

I eat my honeycomb with my honey;

I drink my wine with my milk.

Daughters of Jerusalem

Eat, friends, drink, and get drunk with caresses.

Woman

² I slept, but my heart was awake.

The sound of my beloved, pounding on the door!

Man

‘Open for me, my sister, my darling, my dove, my perfect one.

My head is filled with dew,

my locks with the drops of the night.’

Woman

³ ‘I have stripped off my robe.

Must I put it back on again?

I have washed my feet; must I dirty them?’

⁴ My beloved sent his hand through the hole [in the door],

and my insides were in turmoil over him.

⁵ I got myself out of bed to open to my beloved:

my hands were dripping with myrrh,

and myrrh was flowing from my fingers to the handles of the bolt.

⁶ I myself opened to my beloved,

but my beloved had turned and gone away;

I almost died at his departure.

I sought him but did not find him;

I called him but he did not answer me.

⁷ The guards who go around the city found me.

They struck me and they bruised me.

The guardians of the walls took my mantle from me.

⁸ I charge you, daughters of Jerusalem,

if you find my beloved, what should you tell him?

That I am sick with love!

Daughters of Jerusalem

⁹ What makes your beloved better than other beloveds,

most beautiful of women?

What makes your beloved better than other beloveds,

that you would charge us like this?

Woman

¹⁰ My beloved is radiant and ruddy,

standing out from the crowd.

¹¹ His head is pure gold;

his locks are like clusters of date-flowers, black like the raven.

¹² His eyes are like doves

beside deep currents of water,

washed in milk,

sitting beside full [pools].

¹³ His cheeks are like a flowerbed of balsam,

raised beds of spices;

his lips are lilies,

dripping with liquid myrrh.

¹⁴ His arms are rods of gold,

set with jasper;

his belly is a plate of ivory,

overlaid with lapis lazuli.

¹⁵ His legs are columns of alabaster,

set on pedestals of pure gold;

his appearance is like Lebanon,

choice as cedars.

¹⁶ His palate is sweet

and all of him is desirable:

this is my beloved, this is my darling,

daughters of Jerusalem.

Daughters of Jerusalem

6:1 Where has your beloved gone,

most beautiful among women?

Where has your beloved turned,

that we may seek him with you?

Woman

² My beloved has gone down to his garden,

to flowerbeds of balsam,

to graze in the gardens

and to gather lilies.

³ I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine

– he who grazes in the lilies.

Man

⁴ You are beautiful, my darling, like Tirzah;

lovely like Jerusalem;

awe-inspiring like [armies] with banners.

⁵ Turn your eyes away from me,

for they disturb me!

Your hair is like a flock of goats

streaming down from Mount Gilead.

⁶ Your teeth are like a flock of ewe-lambs

which are going up from the washing,

all of them bearing twins

– none of them bereaved.

⁷ Your cheek is a slice of pomegranate

behind your veil.

⁸ There are sixty queens, eighty concubines

and virgins without number.

⁹ But she is unique, my dove, my perfect one;

she is unique to her mother,

pure to the one who bore her.

Daughters saw her and called her blessed;

queens and concubines envied her and praised her.

¹⁰ Who is this that looks down like the dawn,

beautiful like the full moon,

incomparable like the sun’s heat,

awe-inspiring like [the heavenly armies] with banners?

Woman

¹¹ I went down to a garden of walnut trees,

to look at the shoots of the valley,

to see if the vine had budded

and the pomegranates were in bloom.

¹² I don’t know what’s up with me.

You set me in chariots with a nobleman.

Man

¹³ Return, return, O Perfect One;

return, return, so that we may gaze upon you.

How you gaze on the Perfect One,

like on the dance of two camps!

7:1 How beautiful are your feet in sandals,

[like the] daughter of a noble!

The curves of your hips are like ornaments

made by the hands of a craftsman.

² Your navel is a rounded bowl;

may it not lack mixed wine;

your belly is a heap of wheat,

bordered by lilies.

³ Your two breasts are like two fawns,

twins of the gazelle.

⁴ Your neck is like a tower of ivory;

your eyes are pools in Heshbon,

by the gate of Bath-rabbim.

Your nose is like the tower of Lebanon,

keeping watch towards Damascus.

⁵ Your head upon you is like [Mount] Carmel,

and the hair of your head is like purple;

a king could be bound by the tresses.

⁶ How beautiful you are and how pleasant, love,

the daughter of pleasures!

⁷ Your stature is like a palm tree,

and your breasts are like clusters of dates.

⁸ I said, ‘I will climb up the palm tree,

I will seize its date blossoms.

May your breasts be like clusters on the vine,

and the fragrance of your breath be like apples.’

⁹ Your palate is like the best wine ...

Woman

. . . flowing smoothly for my beloved,

gliding past sleeping lips.

¹⁰ I am my beloved’s,

and his desire is towards me.

¹¹ Come, my love,

let us go out to the field;

let us spend the night among the henna bushes.

¹² Let us get up early [and go] to the vineyards;

let us see if the vine has budded,

if the blossom clusters have opened,

if the pomegranates have bloomed.

There I will give my caresses to you.

¹³ The mandrakes emit their scent,

and beside our doorways are all of the choice fruits,

new and old, my love,

[which] I have treasured up for you.

Woman

8:1 Oh that you were my brother,

who nursed at the breasts of my mother.

When I found you in the street, I would kiss you,

and no-one would despise me.

² I would lead you; I would bring you

to the house of my mother who taught me;

I would give you spiced wine to drink,

the juice of my pomegranate.

³ May his left hand be under my head,

and his right hand embrace me!

⁴ I charge you, daughters of Jerusalem,

that you will absolutely not arouse or awaken love

until it delights.

Daughters of Jerusalem

⁵ Who is this coming up from the wilderness,

supporting herself upon her beloved?

Woman

Under the apple tree, I aroused you;

there your mother conceived you;

there she conceived,

she who brought you forth.

⁶ Set me like a seal upon your heart,

like a seal upon your arm.

For love is as strong as Death,

jealousy is as intense as Sheol.

Its flames are flames of fire,

an Almighty flame!

⁷ Many waters are not able to extinguish love,

and rivers cannot drown it.

Even if a man should give all the wealth of his house as the price of love,

he would be utterly scorned.

Brothers

⁸ We have a little sister,

and she does not [yet] have breasts.

What shall we do for our sister

on the day when she will be spoken for?

⁹ If she is a wall,

we would build upon her a battlement of silver;

if she is a door,

we will enclose her with a panel of cedar.

Woman

¹⁰ I was a wall,

and my breasts were like towers.

Now I have become in his eyes

one who brings peace.

¹¹ Solomon owned a vineyard in Baal-hamon.

He gave the vineyard to keepers;

each would bring as the price of its fruit one thousand [shekels of] silver.

¹² My vineyard belongs to me; it is my very own.

You may keep the thousand [shekels], O Solomon,

along with two hundred [that go] for the keepers of its fruit.

Man

¹³ You who dwell in gardens,

companions are listening attentively for your voice.

Cause me to hear [it]!

Woman

¹⁴ Flee, my beloved,

and be like a gazelle

or a young stag upon the mountains of perfumes.

COMMENTARY

1. TITLE (1:1)

Context

The title verse stands alone, separated not merely by its content but by linguistic style: it is prose, while the rest of the Song is poetry. In addition, the title contains the only use of the relative pronoun ’ăšer in the Song, which elsewhere exclusively uses the shortened prefix form šĕ. This has led some scholars to argue that the title is a later addition designed to give the book a religious interpretation by associating it with King Solomon, the famous ancient man of wisdom, husband of many wives and author of other religious writings (Fox 1985: 95). However, we do not have any version of the Song without the present title, so it deserves to be treated as an integral part of the text. For a full discussion of issues of dating and authorship, see Introduction: Title, authorship and date, pp. 19–24.

It is certainly true that the function of the title is to introduce and to guide interpretation, as well as to identify the book, providing a frame of reference that orients the reader to the material that follows in the same way that Proverbs 1:1, Ecclesiastes 1:1 and Isaiah 1:1 do. As such, it immediately links this book with other wisdom texts associated with Solomon, such as Proverbs and Ecclesiastes,10 and invites the reader to interpret its contents in the light of what we know about Solomon’s personal history, as well as the rest of biblical revelation about love, sex and marriage.

Comment

1. The title Song of Songs focuses our attention immediately on the unity and the genre of this book. The singular form, ‘song’ (šîr), suggests that this book comprises a single song, rather than being a diverse collection of disparate materials in the way that the book of Proverbs is a collection of proverbs (contrast the ascription in Prov. 1:1: ‘The proverbs [plural] of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel’) or that a portion of the book of Psalms is a collection of ‘The prayers [plural] of David’ (Ps. 72:20). We should therefore expect to find a unified message in what follows such a title, in spite of its diversity. For more about the structure and unity of the book, see Introduction: Structure and unity, pp. 52–54.

The title also tells us that what follows is a song rather than some other genre of writing, such as a proverb, a prophetic vision or a historical narrative. It is lyric poetry, which means that what C. S. Lewis said about the Psalms (1958: 3) applies equally to the Song of Songs:

What must be said ... is that the Psalms are poems, and poems intended to be sung: not doctrinal treatises, nor even sermons ... Most emphatically, the Psalms must be read as poems: as lyrics, with all the licenses and all the formalities, the hyperboles, the emotional rather than logical connections, which are proper to lyric poetry. They must be read as poems if they are to be understood; no less than French must be read as French or English as English. Otherwise, we shall miss what is in them and think we see what is not.

The compound form ‘Song of Songs’ is best understood as a superlative title, like ‘King of kings’ or ‘Holy of Holies’ (Murphy 1990: 119). This book contains the best of all songs because it concerns the greatest subject matter of all, which is love (1 Cor. 13:13). It is clear from the rest of Scripture that the greatest song about love is likely not merely to speak of human love, but also to celebrate and teach us something about the divine love that God has for his people (Isa. 5:1–7). As the apostle John reminds us, the greatest love in this world is not the love that humans have for one another, nor even our love for God, but rather his love for us (1 John 4:10).

Yet at the same time, God’s love for us is always intended to evoke in us love for him and for our neighbour (Deut. 6:5; Lev. 19:18; Matt. 22:37–40). God’s relationship with his people is repeatedly described in the Bible as a marriage relationship (Ezek. 16:8; Hos. 1 – 3). In the New Testament, this promise finds its consummation in the church, which is the bride of Christ (Eph. 5:23–33). Indeed, the passage in Ephesians tells us that human marriage exists to provide an apt metaphor for God’s love for his own. For a fuller explanation of these themes, see the Introduction: Themes and message, p. 39.

The remaining words of the title, which is Solomon’s, are ambiguous. They could mean that this song was written by Solomon. The preposition lamed is often understood as designating authorship in the Psalms (as well as in Hab. 3:1); as a result, many have understandably taken this to be an ascription of authorship (e.g. Murphy 1990: 119; so unequivocally, the NJPS translation). However, the preposition lamed has a wide variety of uses: lišlōmô may mean ‘belonging to Solomon’ (1 Kgs 10:28) or ‘pertaining to Solomon’ in a more general sense (1 Kgs 5:30 [Eng. 5:16]).

Grammatically, all three understandings are theoretically possible. Yet it is striking that this verse departs quite significantly from the normal method of attributing authorship elsewhere in the Old Testament. In Hebrew, in order to say ‘The Song of X, written by Y’, the standard form is apposition: the second part of the title simply follows the first. This form is attested many times in the Psalms. For example, Psalm 42:1: ‘A maskil of the Sons of Korah’ is maskîl libnê qoraḥ. Particularly striking is Psalm 127:1, which almost exactly parallels Song of Songs 1:1 in form, in that it is a plural construct phrase followed by a lamed of authorship: ‘A song of ascents, by Solomon’ (šîr hamma‘ălôt lišlōmô). Yet in the Song of Songs, we have the intervening relative pronoun which is never found in the titles of the Psalms (šîr haššîrîm ’ăšer lišlōmô). That relative pronoun is found regularly, however, with the lamed of possession.11 In fact, ’ăšer lišlōmô (‘which belongs to Solomon’) appears in 1 Kings 10:28 with reference to Solomon’s vast collection of horses. So, rather than indicating authorship, it seems that the title suggests that this book is in some more general sense about ‘that which belongs to Solomon’. In particular, the allusion to 1 Kings 10 and 11, which themselves focus on Solomon’s extensive illegitimate collection of Egyptian horses and foreign wives, may not be coincidental, as we shall see.

Direct Solomonic authorship is hard to defend, given the apparently late language and linguistic borrowings of the book (see Introduction: Title, authorship and date, pp. 19–24). If he is the author, then his work has almost certainly been significantly updated and translated into later Hebrew style. Moreover, if Solomon is both the author and hero of the narrative, at what period of his life did he write it and to whom? For the various possibilities and the difficulties of fitting the Song with Solomon’s own experiences, see the Introduction, pp. 20–21.

Furthermore, it is not clear that the man in the Song really fits the role of royalty. Certainly, he is presented under the figure of a king (e.g. 1:4), but he is also described as a shepherd, taking care of his flocks at noon (1:7). Would a king, or even a royal son of David and potential heir to the throne, literally have been out in the fields shepherding his own sheep? In addition, was Solomon describing himself in the flattering description of the man in 5:10–16? Even when recording reported speech from the mouth of his beloved, if the author is also the hero of the Song, such a paean of praise for himself seems a little boastful, to say the least.

Interestingly, similar questions have been raised with reference to the ‘Solomonic’ superscription of Psalm 72. With its profuse praise of the Davidic son and its extravagant prayers for his well-being and world domination, it too seems a little awkward if penned by Solomon concerning himself.12 Rather, regardless of who wrote the psalm, it seems to provide a depiction of an idealized image of the king, a model to which Solomon and all subsequent sons of David should aspire, and for whose coming the people of God should pray. Indeed, from the time of Solomon onwards, the failure of the various historical sons of David to live up to this ideal would inevitably have fed the people’s longing for the One to come, the promised Son of David who would embody perfectly this ideal of righteousness, justice and peace, and who, as a result, would receive all nations as his possession (see e.g. Jer. 23:1–6).

In the same way, since the glorious and idealized events described in Song of Songs are difficult to connect with the harsh realities of Solomon’s love life as described in the book of Kings, it seems best to see the man in the poem as an idealized figure, a poetic persona rather than an historical individual. The focus of the Song is, in any event, not on the specific identity of the lovers so much as it is on the nature of their love (Walsh 2000: 7).

Of course, it is not impossible that such an idealized description of love could stem originally from Solomon himself, even if he never personally experienced it, just as he could potentially have described the blessings that would attend the reign of a perfect messianic Son of David, even though the historical accounts are very clear about Solomon’s own failure to be that king. However, it seems more plausible overall, given Solomon’s negative role in what follows, that the author is anonymous, and he intends to contrast the true, wholehearted, lifelong devotion of the couple that he describes with Solomon’s notoriously different perspective on ‘love’.

Meaning

However we understand the superscription, Solomon is not being presented merely as a model lover to imitate (as some interpret the Song), or merely as a salutary warning to us of the dangers to be avoided in this area of our lives (as 1 Kgs 11 clearly depicts him). As hero or villain, Solomon points us on to Christ, the true Son of David and perfect Lover, in whom true blessing may be received by those who (like David and Solomon) have deeply blemished personal sexual histories. In Christ, we may all find a husband who is both true King and true Shepherd, the physical embodiment in flesh of the God who is himself Love.

2. PROLOGUE (1:2 – 2:7)

A. Introduction (1:2–14)

Context

After the briefest of introductions – a single title verse – the book launches immediately into its subject matter, without pausing to introduce the characters or set the stage. Before we know anything about who the girl is or where she lives, we discover that she wants something (or rather, someone) with a passionate and breathless desire. This is, of course, precisely how love often strikes us: unexpectedly, in the course of normal life, we are suddenly overpowered by our feelings. In this way, the poet begins by showing us vividly what he will later declare to us explicitly: the ferocious power of love (see 8:6–7). There are many connections between the opening and closing chapters of the Song, which create an inclusio. Yet the end is not merely a return to the beginning, as if love were part of an eternal round (so LaCocque 1998: 190); the similarities also highlight the differences and encourage us to observe the progression that has taken place in the experience of love through the Song, from entirely unsatisfied longing to desire that is partially fulfilled.

The opening and closing words of the Song are both placed in the mouth of the woman, which is fitting, as she is the primary speaker throughout. Some people have deemed this choice sufficiently striking and unusual in antiquity to suggest that the author of the poem was probably a woman (LaCocque and Ricoeur 1998: 240–246). Yet, as discussed in the Introduction, that seems to confuse authorial voice with authorial identity. A poet of the skill that is evident in this work has the ability to create believable characters who may reflect aspects of their own experience, but that does not mean that the author is to be identified with the characters that they describe.

Verses 2–4 begin by introducing the primary theme of the Song – desire – after which the poet immediately shifts the reader’s attention to the note of tension and difficulty that runs parallel to desire throughout (Horine 2001: 74–75). The woman worries that her intense desire for the man will be unrequited: she is concerned that she will be found unattractive because she doesn’t fit the conventional stereotypes of beauty, which form an idolatry in every culture. In addition, she fears not being able to find her beloved and being left to search for him unsuccessfully. She expresses her concerns and her fears in verses 5–7, and the man responds by answering each of these concerns in reverse order in verses 8–11, first giving her directions to enable her to find him and then affirming her unique beauty and attractiveness to him. In verses 12–14, we return to the woman expressing her desire for the man in terms reminiscent of the opening section (vv. 2–4), giving their initial interaction a chiastic structure:

A: Desire (1:2–4)

B: Difficulty (1:5–7)

1) Attractiveness (5–6)

2) Access (7)

B': Difficulty resolved (1:8–11)

2) Directions for access (8)

1) Attractiveness affirmed (9–11)

A': Desire renewed (1:12–14)

i. Desire (1:2–4)

Comment

2. We do not have to wait to discover what it is that the woman desires from the man: kisses – or more specifically, kisses of his mouth. This may be in contrast to more formal ‘nose kisses’ attested in surrounding cultures (Fox 1985: 97). Certainly, she has in view something more intimate than the kind of kissing in which a brother and sister may engage in public (see 8:1). Indeed, she desires not only his kisses, but his ‘caresses’ (dôdîm), translated as love in most English versions (e.g. ESV, NIV). The singular form of the word, dôd, can designate a close relative (e.g. Lev. 10:4; Esth. 2:7) or a beloved individual (e.g. Isa. 5:1 and repeatedly in the Song). However, whenever it occurs in the plural in the Old Testament, as here, it generally has sexual intimacy in view (Garrett 2004: 128). For example, in Ezekiel 16:8, it describes a young woman who has reached sexual maturity and is therefore ready for dôdîm. In Ezekiel 23:17, Judah shares a bed of dôdîm with her Babylonian lovers. Meanwhile, in Proverbs 7:18, the adulteress seduces the young man with the words: ‘Come, let us take our fill of dôdîm until morning.’ It is thus a particular kind of ‘love’ that she desires – sexual love – yet at the same time, the word also connotes a particular kind of sex – passionate sex, not simply an act of procreation. She wants the man for himself (and for herself), not just so that she can bear his children.

This desire is clearer still when the woman compares his caresses to wine, a symbol often connected with the good life and rich feasting in the Bible. Good wine is tasty and intoxicating, leaving the drinker with a desire for more. So too are the kind of intoxicating embraces that the young woman desires from the man (Barbiero 2011: 55). The image is particularly fitting as a description of the sweetness of kisses, and the link between kissing and wine recurs later in the Song (7:9; 8:1–2).

3. From taste, the poem moves to smell, as the girl conjures up the fragrance of the man’s anointing oils. Such lotions were used by both men and women in the dry countries of the Ancient Near East. Scent has a particular ability to evoke the presence of someone who is absent and to provoke memories of past encounters, for good or ill. In this case, the memories that are stirred are happy ones. While the man’s kisses are better than wine, his scent is good without any explicit object of comparison. Perhaps, in view of the pervasive echoes of creation and the Garden of Eden in the Song, his fragrance is ‘good’, in contrast to the ‘not good’ of being left alone (Gen. 2:18).

The woman’s desire for her beloved is not purely physical, even though she begins with desiring his kisses and longing for his scent. She also finds his character (šēm ; literally, name) as enticing as flowing perfume (ESV: oil poured out ; the Hebrew plays on an alliteration between šemen [oil] and šēm [name]). It is the whole person with whom she wishes to be united, body and soul. She is intoxicated by everything about him, not just his physical appearance.

It is characteristic of such profound adoration that it demands to be shared. Those newly in love often wear out their friends with the constant urge to share additional details that confirm the un-equalled desirability of their beloved. So, too, the woman believes that her view of her beloved is naturally shared by all of the ‘ălāmôt.13 These are not strictly virgins, as the word is used in contemporary English, where it serves as a non-gender-specific word that has to do purely with the lack of sexual experience. Nor are they generic ‘young women’, for whom the Hebrew word nĕ‘ārôt would have been used. Rather, the ‘ălāmôt are specifically those young women who have recently reached the age of sexual maturity and are thus ready for marriage. Because of the nature of modern Western society, where the link between sexual maturity and marriage has been completely severed, there is no English word for this status, though many other languages around the world have a comparable term for this important life transition.

This class of young women tend to be the arbiters of what constitutes male desirability in every culture. The woman in the Song can record the positive opinion of the ‘ălāmôt about the attractiveness of her man without fear or jealousy, because she is secure in the fact that her beloved has chosen her above all others. As a result, the other young women form an audience before whom she can boast of the attractiveness of her lover, rather than rivals for his affections who are to be feared. They all love (’āhab) him, but she alone will receive his caresses (dôdîm).

4. Desire seeks satisfaction. So she asks her beloved to carry her off with him – and swiftly! The verb māšak is forceful, though not necessarily violent. It is used for pulling someone out of a pit (Gen. 37:28) or for carrying a heavy load of seed (Ps. 126:6), as well as for subduing Leviathan (Job 41:1 [Heb. 40:25]). She wants to be swept off her feet, we might say. The force of the phrase let us run is adverbial rather than describing a separate action, so that the NIV correctly translates it: ‘let us hurry!’ The imperatival force continues into the next phrase: ‘Let the king bring me into his chambers’ (NIV).14 The identity of the ‘king’ here depends on the larger question of the identification of the characters in the Song (see Introduction: Themes and message, p. 50); I take this to be a metaphorical reference to her beloved’s status in her eyes, rather than a literal reference to an actual king. What is not in doubt is the woman’s longing to have her desire for physical intimacy completely satisfied, which can only take place in the privacy of the inner chamber.

Such a conclusion would not merely be satisfactory to the woman. As the camera fades away from the desired union of the happy couple, allowing them the privacy they seek, their lovemaking is declared to be something for the community to exult and rejoice over, something that should be broadly celebrated more than wine (v. 4). The language of ‘exult and rejoice’ is used of dramatic celebrations, such as at a fruitful harvest time or after a victory in war (cf. Isa. 9:3). Finding true love is a similarly great blessing from the Lord. The identity of those adding their approval is not made plain, though the catchword ‘they love you’ with which both verses 3 and 4 end suggests that this is the verdict of the young women, the ‘ălāmôt. They may also be identified with the ‘daughters of Jerusalem’ who appear repeatedly in the poem (1:5; 2:7; 3:5, etc.). Their admiration of the beloved and, by implication, of the happy ending of their love story to which the woman aspires, is itself judged ‘right’ (mêšārîm). The community of faith thus adds its own ‘Amen’ of approval at the outset to the love story of the couple depicted in the Song.

In this way, we are reminded that even when it enters the privacy of the bedroom, love between a man and a woman is never an entirely private act of two individuals in which love is its own justification. In the Song, what other people think about the couple matters intensely (see 8:1). Some love is ‘right’ and therefore may rightly be celebrated, while other expressions of ‘love’ are not right, and must be cautioned against (e.g. Prov. 7:18). This affirmation guards against any reading of the Song that sees their relationship as subversive, individualistic and rebellious (e.g. Landy 1983: 17). True love has a communal aspect to it; it is not just a vehicle of personal satisfaction for the individual man and woman.

At the same time, it should be noticed that the opening scene is simply an expression of the young woman’s longing, not an actual dialogue between her and her beloved. As yet, her love for him is still a fantasy rather than a reality. The man is not present in this poem, except as the object of the woman’s desire. He does not actually kiss her, nor do they yet make love. Indeed, it is not clear at this stage whether the woman’s longing for a relationship with the man is even reciprocated, let alone whether it will ever be consummated. Has the time for true love arrived in this case, or has love been stirred up too soon?

Meaning

At the outset, the Song sketches a paradigm for male-female relationships that is neither traditionalist nor radical. The woman is no feminist, eager to assert her independent equality with her man. She does not dream of grabbing him and planting a kiss on his lips before pulling him behind her into her bedroom. She wants him to take the lead in the relationship. Yet neither is the girl an emotionally dependent creature who will pine away in silence waiting forever for the man to make the first move. She expects and longs for the man to provide leadership in their relationship, yet she is not shy about declaring her own hopes and desires for their future together.

Equally, the vision of sexuality presented here is a long way from the glorification of celibacy in the early church (see Introduction: Themes and message, pp. 45–46). Nor does she describe a traditional macho model of male-female relationships in which the only sexual desires are his, and her role in the relationship is simply to be his passive helper. In the Song, the woman is not a land to be conquered by the man or a field to be planted with his seed; she is a vineyard to be cultivated by him so that together they can enjoy the sweet wine of their relationship (see Walsh 2000: 90).

No-one embodies the kind of loving servant leadership that men are called to demonstrate in marriage more profoundly than Christ (Eph. 5:25–33), whose life-giving fragrance fills the universe through the witness of his church (2 Cor. 2:14–15). Likewise, the knowledge of the grace and forgiveness to be found in his name alone is good news for all of us as broken men and women, who have failed repeatedly to love our spouses and others as we ought to have. The reality of Christ’s costly love for us should stir our hearts to a passionate devotion to him, along with a deep longing for the day when we will be able to enter his presence and be with him forever.

ii. Uncertainty and request (1:5–7)

Context

Unlike those love stories that begin with a shared repulsion that is slowly transformed into attraction, such as The Taming of the Shrew, the woman and the man in the Song express a mutual interest in each other from the beginning. For both of them, it is love at first sight. Yet the woman fears that, since she cannot measure up to conventional standards of beauty, her love will not be reciprocated.

Comment

5. In pre-industrial societies, where poor peasants work in the fields while the rich are able to stay inside, a pale complexion is often valued as beautiful in women. It was only after the Industrial Revolution, when poor women began working long days indoors in factories, that the cult of tanning began. The woman of the Song does not conform to this pre-industrial cultural stereotype of pale beauty: she is dark (v. 5). This is not as a racial feature, but is rather because she has been forced to work outside in the vineyards where her complexion has been darkened by the sun (v. 6). With a note of defiance in her voice, however, she proclaims herself nonetheless lovely, comparing herself to the tents of Kedar and the curtains of Solomon (v. 5). The terms of her comparison highlight several contrasts: the tents of the Bedouin tribes of Kedar were not only made of a dark and rather coarse functional material, but also represent the epitome of the rural lifestyle on the margins of society. In contrast, the curtains of Solomon were presumably not only light and beautiful, but the height of urban fashion (Munro 1995: 38). This suggests that her conversation partners in these verses, the daughters of Jerusalem, may perhaps also be her social opposites: they are fashionable, attractive city dwellers, and she fears that in comparison she may appear as an undesirable country bumpkin. This urban-rural tension recurs elsewhere in the Song. The daughters of Jerusalem are not really partners in this conversation, however; they remain silent throughout, and simply provide a foil for her thoughts and an audience for her admonitions.

6. While the daughters of Jerusalem do not open their mouths, their disapproving eyes apparently speak volumes. There is a complex play on words in verse 6. The woman asks people not to gaze (rā’â) at her because the sun has looked (šāzap) upon her, causing her to become dark. Meanwhile, the word for the ‘sun’s glare’ sounds like the Hebrew word šādap, which means ‘to scorch’. Continuing the image of heat, the woman says, My mother’s sons were angry [lit. ‘hot’] with me, which provides the reason why they made her work in the vineyards, causing the situation of her distress. By naming these men ‘my mother’s sons’ rather than ‘my brothers’, the woman emphasizes her emotional distance from them (Provan 2001: 268). There is no father present in the Song to protect and provide for her. These features lend a ‘Cinderella’ motif to the Song (Gerleman 1965: 99–101): she feels trapped and oppressed as a servant in her own home, waiting for her handsome prince to come and carry her away to a life of happiness, abundance and love.

In stark contrast to the physical vineyards that she was forced to maintain for the sake of others, she was not able to maintain her own vineyard (v. 6), which represents her body. She has not been able to expend the time and resources necessary for developing her appearance, yet nonetheless she is still beautiful. True beauty does not reside in the artificial standards of any society or culture, but may be recognized by all those who have eyes to see (rather than to stare). The themes of caring for vineyards and their ownership will recur, along with her relationship with her brothers, in chapter 8.

7. After affirming her own beauty in the face of potential detractors, the woman asks her beloved to give her directions to find him. In keeping with the shifting kaleidoscope of metaphors that is characteristic of the Song, the image of her beloved shifts from a king (v. 4) to a shepherd. These are not completely unrelated images, of course, since kings in the Ancient Near East were often regarded as the shepherds of their people (e.g. Ezek. 34:23–24). Yet this verse represents her beloved as a literal shepherd, who would actually be found out in the fields day by day with his flocks. In the countryside, away from the sophisticated terrain of the city and the palace, perhaps her physical deficiencies would be less threatening and her beauty more easily affirmed.

The focus of the image here, however, is not specifically on the man’s role as a shepherd, but on the opportunities and complications that that role brings to their relationship. If he is a shepherd, whose job description necessarily involved moving constantly from place to place during the day, how can she find him? Her love is such that she cannot simply wait for him to come home in the evening. She wants to be with him at noon as well (v. 7). To be sure, the heat at that time of the day means that the man’s flocks would be lying down rather than moving on, allowing precious time for them to be together. Yet if she were to be with him at noon, that would mean having to venture out during the hottest part of the day, exposing herself still further to the sun’s powerful and harmful gaze.

She is also aware of the social risks that come with searching for him. She does not want to have to conceal her identity as one who veils herself, which might lead to her being regarded as a loose woman or a prostitute (like Tamar in Gen. 38:14; Fox 1985: 103). She wants to be able to find the one whom her soul loves on his own, so that she can be with him with unveiled face, able to pursue a deeper relationship with him.

iii. Response and reassurance (1:8–11)

Comment

8. Now the man speaks for the first time, immediately addressing his beloved’s insecurity by calling her most beautiful among women. He answers her concerns in reverse order, first giving her directions to find him and then once again affirming her desirability and beauty. In a teasing tone, his counter-question (If you do not know ...) suggests that she should actually know perfectly well where to find him (Fox 1985: 103). All she has to do is follow his trail. As the image of the man has shifted from king to shepherd, so the woman has shifted from a vineyard keeper to a shepherdess, taking care of a flock of goats.

9–11. The man then likens his beloved to a mare among Pharaoh’s chariots. Many commentators have followed Pope (1977: 339–340) in seeing this as a reference to the recognized military tactic in antiquity of releasing a mare in heat onto the battlefield as a distraction to the stallions pulling the chariots. However, in the description that follows, the key element seems to be decoration, not pheromones. Royal horses were often highly decorated in antiquity, both in Egypt and later in Persia (see Esth. 6:8; Moore 1971: pl. 4; Horine 2001: 134). There is no reason why the chariot in question has to be a war chariot rather than a light chariot such as a mare might pull. Just as those cherished royal horses often had decorative bridles, so too the woman’s cheeks were adorned with ‘earrings’ (NIV) and her neck with a jewelled necklace (or perhaps an Egyptian-style jewelled collar; Munro 1995: 57). As the woman earlier invited others to join her in praising the man, so now the man invites others to join him in adorning her with earrings of gold, studded with silver. However, it is striking and significant that he refers to her as ‘most beautiful among women’ before she receives such external adornment (Mitchell 2003: 646). She is beautiful in his eyes in her own right, with or without jewellery. Moreover, whereas his subsequent praises of her charms will descend to describe the lower parts of her anatomy, here at this early stage of their relationship, he restrains himself and praises her cheeks and neck.

Meaning

Fashions in feminine beauty may have shifted from eulogizing a pale skin and a robust figure to praising women who are tanned and slender, but concerns over appearance and body image continue. If anything, they have expanded in our culture to include many men as well as women. There is more than a hint of insecurity in the woman’s defiant claim to be beautiful, though dark. Instead of dismissing the woman’s fears about her appearance as unspiritual or ridiculous, the man responds kindly by repeatedly affirming her beauty and enhancing it through his gifts of jewellery. By his words of praise, the man is building the woman up and assuring her of his love.

The woman does not want merely to be praised and adorned as if she were a living doll, however. She also longs to be with the man and to share a real relationship with him. This involves effort and a certain amount of risk on her part, as well as requiring responsiveness on his. Both express willingness to play their part fully in pursuing the relationship. Good relationships require such active and thoughtful pursuit on both sides.

In terms of our relationship with God, our problem is that we are not at all beautiful. Our sin leaves us profoundly darkened and disfigured, with nothing that is attractive in us to which the Lord could possibly be drawn. Yet such is the depth of God’s love that he chose us, in spite of who we are, and disfigured his own Son on the cross in order to pay for our sins. He now clothes us in the glorious royal robes of his righteousness, adorning us with a breathtaking beauty which we do not merit (compare the Lord’s provision for his people in Ezek. 16:8–14). Having reclothed us and made us able to stand before him, the Lord also invites us into his presence to enter an ongoing relationship with him, experiencing his constant affection and love.

iv. Desire (1:12–14)

Comment

12–13. The woman responds to the man’s encouraging words with a renewed affirmation of her own affection for him, expressed in three verses that are linked by the theme of fragrance. As in verse 4, she refers to the man as her king. Whereas in verse 3, she delighted in his scent, now it is the scent of her nard that wafts over to him while he is reclining on his couch.15 Nard was a costly and exotic fragrance that came all the way from the mountainous regions north of India. Although the man is on the couch, there is no evidence that the woman is with him there. Perhaps he was enjoying a festive meal with friends, yet she is confident that her scent can nonetheless bridge the gap between them (Assis 2009: 55). The theme of distance between the two lovers is maintained throughout this part of the Song. She longs for her beloved not merely to lie with her but to spend the whole night (yālîn ; cf. KJV) between her breasts, like a sachet of myrrh that would have been placed there as a perfume. Obviously, their love is not yet able to be consummated in this way, but in the meantime, the myrrh serves as a stand-in for her beloved, reminding her of him. According to Möldenke, sprigs of henna were worn in the hair and bosoms of young girls in the Middle East, which provides a link to the next verse (Munro 1995: 50). The three scents – nard, myrrh and henna – recur frequently throughout the Song.

14. Once again there is movement in the poem from a domestic location to the countryside, as we travel from the king’s couch, which was presumably located in his chambers (v. 4), to the vineyards of Engedi, an oasis on the western shores of the Dead Sea. Engedi was the location of royal gardens, the home of some of these perfumes, and would have been all the more romantic for its isolation and the stark contrast between its lushness and the dryness of its wilderness location. There is no attempt to provide an ‘objective’ assessment of her lover’s appearance: what counts is what he is to me (Clarke 2006: 47).

Meaning

The desire for an intimacy that bridges the distance that exists between human beings lies at the heart of the marriage relationship. Yet in a fallen world, such intimacy is not easy to find. Some men and women have never found their ‘king’ – a person with whom to share a lifelong love story. Others have found marriage, but not the tender intimacy that marriage was intended to give. For many, marriage has proved to be a dry and barren wilderness rather than a land flowing with milk and honey. These verses serve as an antidote to the cynicism that can easily invade our wounded hearts. Love is not a mirage; there is indeed a fragrant oasis to be found in the desert of life. Intimacy is not an impossible dream. There is hope of bridging the gap that separates us from one another through marriage relationships that provide rich intimacy between men and women.

Of course, the richest and deepest hope of experiencing intimacy is to be found in the One who loved us before the world began, God himself. Our passionate desire for human intimacy, our longing to love and be loved deeply by someone else, is a reflex of the thirst for the intimacy that may be found only in him. At the same time, Christ’s self-sacrificial love at the cross provides the remedy for all of our failed attempts to pursue false intimacy in this broken world. Jesus Christ invites all of us to leave behind our barren wanderings in the wilderness and to enter into the refreshing oasis of his love.

B. A litany of love (1:15 – 2:7)

i. Mutual affirmation (1:15 – 2:3)

Context

The first true dialogue between the lovers (1:15 – 2:3) involves both reciprocity and diversity. It begins with the expression of almost identical praise to each other, modified only by the appropriate gender inflections: Behold, you are beautiful. Yet the terms of endearment used by the lovers are distinctive: she calls him my beloved (dôdî), a name that he never calls her. Meanwhile, he calls her ‘my darling’ (NIV; ra’yātî), a name that he repeatedly gives her in the Song (1:9; 2:2, 10, 13; 4:1, 7; 6:4), though she only calls him that once (5:16). Both have eyes that can be compared to doves (1:15; 5:12) and both can be compared to trees (2:3; 7:7), yet one could hardly imagine the man in the Song asking to sit in the woman’s shade. They are equal but not identical partners in the experience of love.

Comment

15. In celebrating the woman’s beauty, the man’s praise focuses on her eyes, which he compares to doves. His declaration of her beauty and the invocation of the image of doves for her eyes recurs almost verbatim in chapter 4 as the introduction to a much longer paean of praise for her entire body. Here it stands as a shorthand summary of that longer declaration: he is captivated by her eyes, which are so powerful in communicating a person’s thoughts. How exactly her eyes resemble doves has been the subject of much debate: is it their shape, their colour or their liveliness (see Keel 1994: 69–71)? Elsewhere in the Old Testament, doves are also noted for their moaning sound (Isa. 38:14) and the fact that they hide in inaccessible locations (Song 2:14; Jer. 48:28). This reminds us that not every image of love is necessarily neatly analysable. Perhaps more important than the exact meaning of the comparison is the fact that he fastens on this particular feature of her face rather than any other as the key element of her beauty, as was also the case for Jacob with Rachel (Gen. 29:17). Gazing deeply into someone’s eyes is surely one of the most personal experiences possible.

16–17. The woman echoes the man’s declaration of beauty, which is the first time she has actually mentioned his appearance. Yet she moves almost impatiently beyond discussing his good looks to speak of their future together as a couple. When she delights in the fact that our couch is green (ESV; NIV more accurately has ‘verdant’), she is not praising the colour choices of their furniture, but rather revelling in the expectation of great fruitfulness that will come from their sexual union.16 Likewise, when she talks about the cedar beams and pine rafters of their house, she is not describing her delight in the beauty of a wood-panelled bedroom or her pleasure in making love outdoors in the woods (so Longman 2001: 108). Rather, she is exulting in the enduring firmness of their relationship, which provides the solid materials out of which to build a lasting house and home, that is, a family (Assis 2009: 63). We may compare Lady Wisdom building her house and establishing its seven pillars in Proverbs 9:1. This is one of many indications in the Song that the relationship that the woman has in mind with the man is not merely a brief sexual liaison that will satisfy their youthful passions, but rather an enduring marriage in which they will build a home and a family together.

2:1–2. As the dialogue continues, the woman once again expresses insecurity over her appearance. She says, I am [just] a wildflower of Sharon, a [common] lily17 of the valleys. The traditional rendering ‘rose of Sharon’, which is found in most English translations (following the KJV), is quite unlikely, not least because it sounds like a positive affirmation.18 The Hebrew word ḥăbaṣṣelet occurs only here and in Isaiah 35:1, where it denotes a common flower that blooms in the desert. This suggests that it is most probably either a crocus (as ESV and NIV translate the word in Isaiah) or an asphodel. The woman declares that she is just an ordinary, common-or-garden wildflower, like a desert crocus or an ordinary lily. One may compare the ordinariness of the lilies of the field that Jesus describes in his parable in Matthew 6.

The man, however, turns her own image on its head, asserting that far from simply being one among many other equally attractive flowers, she is as uniquely attractive as a solitary lily would be when set among brambles. Brambles are the exact opposite of lilies: ugly and useless, a sign of curse rather than blessing. On the other hand, even though lilies are common enough, they are proverbially beautiful (Matt. 6:28); indeed, they formed a prominent part of the decorations of Solomon’s temple (1 Kgs 7:26). The man thus declares that his beloved is not merely the first in rank among many beautiful women; in his eyes, she is the one and only beauty among women.

3. The woman responds with parallel words of praise for the man. Just as she is a lily among brambles, so he is an apple tree 19 among the trees of the forest. Specifically, she delights to sit in his shadow (‘shade’, NIV) and taste his fruit. Though the apple tree was undoubtedly associated with sexuality in the Ancient Near East (see Pope 1977: 381), this reference need not have any overt sexual connotations here. Rather, his ‘shade’ represents the protection that he provides for her from the glare of the burning sun, which was a concern for her in the first chapter of the Song, while his fruit that delights her taste is simply the sweetness of their mutual fellowship. To be sure, this does not exclude the delights of physical intimacy, of which she has already spoken longingly in the first chapter and to which she will return in the following verses, but the delightful metaphor is not narrowly limited to a sexual relationship.

It is striking that though both the woman and the man praise each other, they praise different things: he affirms that she is beautiful, while she affirms that he makes her feel safe and that his company is sweet. While stereotypes may be dangerous, it is worth noting that men and women are different and non-interchangeable in the Song, just as they are in the rest of Scripture. The ideal marriage involves not only the blending of two different people, but of two distinct genders into a greater whole, as Genesis 2:24 anticipated.

Meaning

Mutual attraction is important. If the only biblical advice on seeking a spouse were Proverbs 31:30 (‘Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised’), we might not think that chemistry matters in relationships. And, of course, the important point of the Proverbs passage is that chemistry is not the only thing that matters: character is even more vital. Yet the Song of Songs reminds us that mutual attraction has its own important place. If we cannot honestly say to our spouse on our wedding day that they are unique in our eyes – like a single lily among a world of thorns, or the only apple tree in the whole forest of ordinary trees for us – then we have no business marrying them.

Of course, what seems delightful shade and sweet fruit one day may seem an oppressive shadow and a sour taste the next. One way of keeping the flame burning in our marriages is to affirm repeatedly what it was about the other person that drew us to them uniquely in the first place and that we continue to see in them now. Marriage should not be the end of courtship, but rather should open the door to a constant courtship, in which both husband and wife seek to outdo each other in their expression of genuine appreciation and affection for the other.

For the Christian, whether married or unmarried, there is One who is uniquely beautiful above all others, who invites us to sit in his shade and enjoy the sweet fruit of his love. He is fully deserving of constant affirmation and praise from us. What is truly remarkable, however, is that, although we each really are one among billions of ordinary people, he also treasures us constantly as individuals, delighting in the beauty that he has bestowed upon us as a glorious gift.

ii. The delights and dangers of love (2:4–7)

Context

The dialogue between the man and the woman is followed by an address from the woman to the daughters of Jerusalem expressing both the delights and the dangers of love (2:4–7). Love is an overwhelming and delightful experience, but not one that is to be undertaken lightly or to be aroused before its time. This warning theme of the dangerous power of love emerges as a repeated refrain in the Song (cf. 3:5; 8:4; Schwab 2002). The first appearance of this refrain signals the end of the prologue.

In the previous chapter, the woman longed to be carried off into the privacy of the king’s chamber and, in his absence, wished that the scent of her nard at least would make its way to him while he reclined at his meal (1:4, 12). Now she fantasizes about what would happen afterwards. That this is a fantasy and not a description of actual events may be seen by the fact that the woman is lovesick, which in the Egyptian love songs is always the consequence of the lover’s absence, never his presence (Fox 1985: 109). If she had received the satisfaction of her longings, there would have been no cause for her lovesickness, nor any need for her to warn the daughters of Jerusalem of love’s difficulties and pains.

Comment

4. The woman imagines that the man has brought her to the banqueting house (lit. ‘house of wine’). This has been variously interpreted as a tavern or royal banqueting hall, such as the one where Esther, King Xerxes and Haman dined privately in Esther 7 (Keel 1994: 85), or even a temporary shelter out in the fields (Fox 1985: 108). Yet, since wine has already been used as a metaphor for the man’s kisses, a ‘house of wine’ could simply be anywhere where those kisses might be enjoyed. The traditional translation, his banner over me was love, understands the Hebrew word degel in its normal sense as referring to a military standard used to rally and identify troops. It would then fit with the military imagery that occurs elsewhere in the Song as a depiction of the woman’s complete and willing subjugation to him in love: she has left the standard of her father and mother and now joyfully submits to his authority over her, while he provides her with complete protection and safety. Alternatively, other scholars have suggested that degel here is connected to an Akkadian root that means ‘glance’ or ‘intention’, so that either his eyes have connected with hers in a look of love (Assis 2009: 72), or his intention in bringing her to the house of wine is lovemaking (Fox 1985:108).

5. The effect of this imagined encounter is to leave the woman overwhelmed, in such a state of lovesickness that she needs to lie down. She therefore asks the daughters of Jerusalem to prepare a bed20 for her, surrounded by ‘cakes’ and apples. The cakes in view here may be raisin cakes (cf. Hos. 3:1) which, together with apples, were often viewed as aphrodisiacs. Here, however, she seems to have no need for such artificial stimulants for her affections. Rather, it seems more likely that the apples should be connected with the fruit of her lover, who is himself an apple tree (see 2:3). The perfect remedy for her lovesickness would be the delightful presence of the one she loves.

6. The woman does not merely desire the man’s presence; she longs for his caresses. When she says, ‘May his left hand be under my head and his right hand embrace me’,21 diagrams are not necessary to explain what she has in mind. It is worth noting, however, how restrained the language of the Song is in comparison to other Ancient Near Eastern love poems in describing sex. The verb ḥābaq (‘embrace’) can be used to describe a greeting between relatives (Gen. 29:13) as well as a sexual encounter (Prov. 5:20). The context is what gives it the sexual connotation here. As was noted in the Introduction (Themes and message, pp. 39–52), the Song itself is always beautifully poetic and metaphorical in its descriptions of sex, never crassly literal or biological. As in ancient Egyptian love literature, lovesickness is always the result of the beloved’s absence, not his presence.

7. This poem is comprised of two parallel stanzas: in the first half of each (vv. 4, 6) the woman speaks about what she would like the man to do with her, while in the second half (vv. 5, 7) she addresses the daughters of Jerusalem (Assis 2009: 70). Her longing for sexual fulfilment with the man she loves has left her weak and lovesick; as a result, she warns the daughters of Jerusalem about the power of love. Because of its overwhelming power, she asks them to swear an oath not to stir up or awaken love until it pleases. The most natural sense of ‘ôr (‘stir up’) is to rouse something or someone from inactivity or sleep: here, particularly in its sexual dimension, love is portrayed as a sleeping lion. The oath is not a permanent admonition to let sleeping animals lie, however. It presupposes the fact that there is a right and appropriate time to arouse love (see 8:5), which is ‘when it pleases’. Until that time arrives, though, it is best not to meddle with love, or you may end up weakened and lovesick, like the woman in the poem.

The oath itself is to be sworn by the gazelles or the does of the field. At first sight, it may seem odd to swear an oath by a group of wild animals. These animals, along with stags, are clearly associated with lovemaking elsewhere in the Song, which suggests that to swear by these animals is to swear by love itself. Yet the sounds of the Hebrew words for gazelles (ṣĕbā’ôt) and does of the field (’ayĕlôt haśśādeh) also deliberately recall the divine names yhwh ṣĕbā’ôt (‘the Lord of Hosts’) and ’ēl šadday (‘God Almighty’), indicating clearly who the true God of love is.

Meaning

Love is an extremely powerful emotion. It can cause a kind of temporary insanity, in which we do things that we would not otherwise do, in the grip of the intense feelings that it evokes. The Song affirms the appropriateness and beauty of those feelings in their proper place. There is nothing wrong with the passionate desire for sexual union, for the eager longing to be embraced by one’s beloved in the house of wine. However, as the rest of Scripture makes clear, the proper place and time for such union is only within marriage. Those who are as yet unmarried, such as the daughters of Jerusalem, are warned about the danger of stirring up such feelings before their time.

In our contemporary context, we live in a culture that spends much of its waking time seeking to stir up our desires for love and sex, a culture in which sex outside marriage is increasingly regarded as normal. The woman in the Song urges all of us to beware of those temptations, not because sex is dirty or insipid, but precisely because it is so beautiful and potent. It is a glorious gift given to us by God, intended to bond two people inseparably together for life by its unique and overwhelming power.

Solomon is a good example of someone who failed to respect the power of sexual attraction. He married many wives, who ultimately led him away from his allegiance to the Lord (1 Kgs 11). Though many of us, like Solomon, have failed in this area, the cleansing blood of Jesus Christ has even greater power to wash away the stain of our sin and purify our souls.

3. BEFORE THE WEDDING: JOINED AND SEPARATED (2:8 – 3:5)

A. Morning (2:8–17)

Context

The reference to gazelles and does (v. 9) links this poem to the preceding one (v. 7). In the previous passage, the woman warned the daughters of Jerusalem against stirring up love too soon. The question remains: ‘When will that time come?’ In this poem, the woman hears her lover coming from a distance, declaring that the springtime has come and with it the time for love. He tells the woman that it is time for her to come away with him. However, although she affirms their mutual commitment to each other, she sends him away unrequited. Morning has not yet dawned for the consummation of their life together.

Comment

8–9. The passage opens with a focus on the sound of the lover approaching, although he will not speak until verse 10. The woman has to wait for his appearing, and the first intimation of his approach is the sight of him in the distance, leaping over the mountains ... like a gazelle or a young stag. The man embodies grace and beauty as well as strength and speed, in almost mythical quantities. Yet when he arrives at her house, he is powerless to enter her presence; no longer in motion, he stands on the outside of the wall, gazing at her through the window. The distance between them has been only partially bridged. Behold suggests that their eyes meet across the remaining distance that divides them.

10–13. At this point, the woman finally hears the sound that she has been listening for, her lover’s voice. The man speaks to invite her to arise ... and come away with him, declaring that springtime, the time for love, has now fully come. The winter (sĕtāw ; strictly, the rainy season; Carr 1984: 97) is past, and the seasonal rains that usher in the spring (gešem) are over. In his description, the marks of spring’s arrival are abundant and multisensory: one can see the blossoms, hear the turtle-doves, smell the fragrance of the blooms on the vines and taste the sweetness of the ripening figs. Every sensation cries out that the time is now right for finding a partner and producing fruit (Hess 2005: 94). Hence the man’s repeated invitation: Arise my love, my beautiful one, and come away. The doubled form ‘my love, my beautiful one’ stresses the fact that she belongs to him and that he uniquely values her.

14. The man then compares the woman to a dove, in the clefts of the rock, the location that forms its natural habitat (see Jer. 48:28). This image combines beauty with inaccessibility (Munro 1995: 24, n. 7): she is still separated from him in the family home, on the far side of the wall. He wishes to be able to see her face and hear her voice (v. 14), combining the senses of hearing and seeing with which the poem began. Of course, on one level both hearing and seeing can take place adequately through the window, but he longs for far more than that superficial connection. He desires uninterrupted sound and sight, true and complete communion.

15. The woman’s response is negative, however. It is not that she is not attracted to him: that much was clear from verses 8–9. Nor does she contradict his assertion that it is springtime: on the contrary, she affirms that our vineyards are in blossom. She has already used the image of a vineyard to describe her body in 1:6; here she is recognizing that both of them are physically mature enough for a relationship. Yet she develops the springtime metaphor in a different direction by reminding the young man of the dangers posed during this season of the year to blossoming vineyards by foxes (see Keel 1994: 109–110 for the agricultural background). The tender new growth on the vines is fragile and can easily be damaged. She does not unpack what specific dangers the metaphorical foxes represent, perhaps because the danger is obvious enough – it is the danger that would be posed by her going outside the wall to him at that time. The appeal to catch the foxes is plural; this could simply be a rhetorical plural, a wish addressed to no-one in particular (Fox 1985: 114). However, given the community that hovers in the background throughout the Song, it may also be an implicit appeal to others, such as the daughters of Jerusalem, to help the couple maintain the safety of their vineyards until the time is fully ripe for them to cross the wall and come together.

16–17. In spite of the woman’s refusal to come outside to join the man at this time, she is still nonetheless fully committed to him in a mutual, exclusive relationship. The image of him grazing among the lilies (v. 16) foreshadows the description of him as a gazelle or a young stag. Once again, as so often in the Song, the exact referent is elusive. Are the lilies her lips (cf. 5:13), or another part of her anatomy (7:2), or is this simply a description of his literal shepherding activities (1:7)? In context, it seems best to see this image as an affirmation of her continued physical desire for him. However, in spite of that continued desire, it is not yet time for the consummation of their relationship. The day has not yet fully come22 and so, picking up on the imagery used to describe the man in verse 8, it is time for her gazelle or young stag to turn around and go back to the mountains. ‘Turn’ (sōb) cannot mean turn towards her; it invariably has the sense of to turn away (see Hess 2005: 99).

The woman’s rejection of the man’s advances is not harsh or final, however. He is still my beloved, and the mountains to which he is sent are called ‘the mountains of Bether’ (v. 17). The NASV takes Bether as a place name, referring to Beitar, a hilly area west of Jerusalem (so too Fox 1985: 116). The ESV takes Bether as an adjective and translates the cleft mountains, which would presumably be the origin of the place name. Given the transparency of the name and the artfulness of the poem, there may be a play on words here. For now, the man has to leave her and return to the mountains of Bether that are visible in the distance from their location in Jerusalem. However, the cleft shape of those mountains serves to point him onward to the future consummation that he so desires. There is a day coming when he will indeed be able to romp like a deer on those spice-laden mountains (see 8:14). Her ‘No’ is a ‘Not yet, my love’, not a ‘Never’.

Meaning

Those who see the Song as an unfettered celebration of erotic love will find it hard to explain why the woman should send the man away when, by her own admission, their vineyards are in blossom (v. 15). They are physically ready for love, and their environment cries out to them to come together without further delay, as the man himself urges. Yet the woman’s refusal of his plea fits perfectly with her own warning to the daughters of Jerusalem in the immediately preceding poem, not to mention the concerns of broader biblical (and Ancient Near Eastern) morality. There is a time to say no to the appeal of sexual passion, not because sex is unattractive or evil, but because the day has not yet dawned for that aspect of their relationship to be expressed. What seems on one level simply natural and desirable may actually be as destructive as a fox in a vineyard, ruining the potential fruitfulness represented by the blossoms on the vine. Premarital sexual activity can have long-term consequences physically, psychologically and emotionally, providing plenty of reasons for wise couples to wait, even when one’s hormones are screaming the opposite message.

B. Night (3:1–5)

Context

From the optimistic setting of the dawning day in 2:8–17, the poem moves to a night-time scene in 3:1–5. Together, these settings remind us of the all-encompassing nature of love: it demands access to our thoughts day and night. This poem corresponds in many ways to the night-time scene in 5:2–8, where the similar themes of searching and eventually finding recur. Both scenes have a dreamlike quality, in that they are describing events that are outside the realm of normal experience, while nonetheless seeming disturbingly familiar. Of course, a poem about a dream is not the same thing as a dream; nor is either of them the same as an actual experience (Longman 2001: 127).

Comment

1. The plural ballêlôt could potentially mean either by night (ESV) or ‘night after night’ (NASV). However, the other occurrences of the plural form all seem to have a repeated force (see Pss 92:3 [Eng. 92:2]; 134:1 and Song 3:8). Together with the repetition of the phrase I sought him, it conveys a great intensity to her quest. This was not merely a casual desire on the part of the woman to find the one whom her soul loves ; it was a deep-seated craving. Yet her immediate search was frustrated: she did not find him close at hand. This is, of course, not surprising from a logical perspective, but in dreams our subconscious can play odd tricks on us.

2. When the man asked her to arise and go in 2:10 and 13, the woman declined. Now, however, she was determined to rise and go after him. The Hebrew verb forms are cohortatives, stressing the volitional aspect of her actions (Hess 2005: 103). The reasons for refusing to go with him that had seemed so clear and logical in the previous poem, in the cool light of early dawn, suddenly became confused in her thinking in the darkness of night. As a result, she resolved to venture out and face the dangers of the city at night-time, as a second stage in her search for her beloved. The city here is presumably Jerusalem, as suggested by the presence of the ‘daughters of Jerusalem’ in 3:5 and the reference in the previous scene to the mountains of Bether (Hess 2005: 103). For a woman to wander alone through the open spaces of a city at night would have been extremely risky and frightening behaviour. Yet, even after searching through the streets and in the squares in her dream, she did not find him. She had failed a second time.

3–5. Instead, the woman was herself found by the watchmen who patrolled the city. If anyone knew where her beloved was to be found, it should surely be these men whose occupation was to walk through the city, observing everything. Yet they gave no response to her question: they could not help her. Finally, when all hope seemed lost, after three failed attempts, she almost literally ran into him. Having found him, she held him – it is the same word used for catching the little foxes in the previous chapter – and she would not let him go until she had taken him to her mother’s house. There is nothing necessarily erotic about her mother’s house: it is simply where unmarried young women would live (Gen. 24:28; Ruth 1:8). The desire to bring him home into the context of her family is worth noting; it is a common theme in Egyptian love songs. Mention of the chamber of her who conceived me, however, clearly shows that her thoughts in her dream were still directed towards the realm of consummating their relationship (cf. 8:2).

Even though the poem ends up with having and holding, the focus of the passage is far more on the frustrating search for her lover than on the seemingly satisfying conclusion. This is particularly true if ballêlôt means ‘night after night’, so that essentially the same dream sequence is repeated over and over again. The man is absent for most of the poem, and even after he has been found, it seems that he must be grasped firmly lest he slip away again (Assis 2009: 102). This theme of the elusiveness of intimacy is underlined by the repetition of the warning refrain from 2:7. Unrequited passion has a haunting and painful quality to it, even if the search finally ends positively. Frustration may plague the entire experience. Yet it must not be missed that in the end the woman does find the man whom her soul loves and brings him home to her family. The warning against stirring up love too soon is not a caution against ever falling in love, or against taking the risks that are inevitably necessary if she is to find Mr Right. Faint heart never won fair lady – or fair gentleman, for that matter.

Meaning

The desire for intimacy with the beloved can often lead to intense frustration. In a fallen world, it is not easy to find love, nor to bring love from its first flickering flame to successful consummation. To bridge the gap between them, the woman resolved to risk her own safety and comfort to engage in a thorough search for her man. Eventually, after much effort, she found him. So too the search for true love is not for the faint of heart or the lazy. True intimacy is a hard-won prize that can be attained only after surmounting many obstacles. This is true, of course, not merely in human relationships, but in our desire for intimacy with God. This too can be a frustrating search for many people, one that may at times seem doomed to failure, in spite of our best efforts. Often even the people who ought to be our guides seem unable to help. But those who seek God will surely find him in the end or, rather, they will be found by him. And those whom the Lord finds, he will never let go (see Deut. 31:6, 8).

4. THE WEDDING (3:6 – 5:1)

Context

The central section of the Song focuses on the consummation of the marriage, for which the man and (especially) the woman have been longing since the beginning of the poem. At its centre, however, is a contrast between outward splendour and true beauty. It opens with a single verse question: ‘Who is this [fem. sing.] coming up from the wilderness?’ (3:6 NIV). The major challenge in interpreting the poem lies in determining the correct answer to that question.

Not surprisingly, since what follows the question is a detailed description of Solomon’s bed (3:7–11), most commentators have assumed that this is the object coming up from the wilderness, in spite of the grammatical and logical difficulties that attend that understanding (e.g. Murphy 1990: 149–151). Following the suggestion of Assis (2009: 103–106),23 however, I believe that the key is to recognize that the crucial identifier of the person coming from the wilderness is that she is ‘perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, with all the fragrant powders of a merchant’ (3:6). Nothing in the description of Solomon’s bed corresponds to this emphasis on scent. Rather, we have to wait until 4:6 for myrrh and frankincense to recur in the man’s description of his beloved, whom he then invites to come to him from the wild and untamed regions of Lebanon.

This suggests that there is a twofold potential answer to the question: ‘Who is this?’ with each part introduced with hinneh (‘Behold’; 3:7; 4:1). The first potential answer draws our attention to the glory of Solomon’s bed and his wedding day (3:7–11), which are described in great detail. Yet the superficial glory that so appeals to Solomon is not what has captured the man’s heart. Instead, the sight that he longs to see with aching eyes is the simple beauty of his beloved, whom he describes in equal detail (4:1–7). Solomon can keep his bed and all of its glorious accoutrements: the man’s desire on his own wedding day is simply to behold his beloved, coming up out of the wilderness to share their new life together. This comparison parallels the contrast in 8:11–12 between Solomon’s high-rent vineyard that requires endless keepers to maintain it and the simple joy of the woman’s own modest vineyard which she gives freely to her lover. The man’s undivided focus on his bride contrasts with Solomon’s undivided focus on himself.

The third part of the central section of the poem describes the consummation of the marriage as a poetic transition from the wilderness to the garden. This idea was introduced in 3:6, as the beloved comes from the wilderness, and finds its fulfilment in 4:8 – 5:1, as the lover finally enters into the full expression of his desires. The dangerous and barren landscape of the wilderness, filled with rocky mountains and wild beasts, makes way for the lush and fruitful terrain of the garden, which is well-watered and fertile. The consummation of their marriage thus resembles a return to the blessings of Eden from the chaotic and broken wilderness world of our normal experience.

A. Question (3:6)

Comment

6. As noted in the Context section, the question with which this section begins is crucial to its understanding. The interrogative particle mî normally indicates a person, not an object,24 and so it should properly be translated as ‘Who is this coming up ... ?’ (NIV; KJV) rather than What is that ... ? (ESV; RSV). The feminine singular demonstrative ‘this’ (zō’t) clearly indicates that a woman is in view, as do the parallel verses in 6:10 and 8:5. She is coming up from the wilderness, the place of desolation and death, the exact opposite of the fruitful garden that will be described in 4:12–15. The connection between her coming from the wilderness accompanied like columns of smoke has naturally invited comparison with the divine theophany in the wilderness as a pillar of cloud and fire (Exod. 13:21–22; Barbiero 2011: 147). However, neither of the specific Hebrew terms used in the Song is ever used to describe the wilderness theophany. Rather, the word here for column (tîmārâ) is a rare form that specifically describes a pillar shaped like a palm tree (tāmār). This provides another point of contact between the description of the person coming up from the desert and the woman, whose stature is likened to a palm tree in 7:7–8.

As the woman approaches from the wilderness, she brings with her a towering column comprising the scents of myrrh and frankincense, with all the fragrant powders of a merchant. If, as seems likely, the speaker is the man, then the desire that the woman expressed in 1:12–13 for her scent to bridge the gap between them has now been fulfilled. Even though she is still at a great distance from him, she is coming to him and he is already overpowered by her scents, as clearly as if she were sitting right next to him.

B. Solomon’s glory (3:7–11)

7. Although Solomon’s bed is often taken to be the object coming up from the wilderness in the previous verse, once that assumption is removed, there is nothing in its description that suggests that this ordinary piece of furniture is in motion, or indeed that it is located anywhere outside the royal palace (Fox 1985: 122). This bed represents the height of royal luxury and opulence, yet it holds no attraction for the man in comparison to the simple beauty of his beloved.

8. The glory of Solomon’s bed (miṭṭātô; ESV: litter ; NIV: ‘carriage’) is enhanced by no fewer than sixty bodyguards from the mighty men of Israel, twice the number of his father David’s famous retinue (see 2 Sam. 23). They afford protection against terror by night. Comparisons have understandably been drawn with various ancient Jewish legends about night demons who jealously kill husbands before the marriage can be consummated (Keel 1994: 129). In the Book of Tobit, the demon Asmodeus is credited with the deaths of Sarah’s seven previous husbands before the marriage can be consummated. In that case, the smell of burning fish heads and livers mixed with incense is apparently enough to send the demons packing (see Tob. 3:7–17; 6:14–18). However, kings have employed bodyguards throughout history to guard them against much more mundane threats, and the mention of the swords and expertise in war of these men suggests that more earthly dangers are in view. Solomon’s vast personal protection at night contrasts dramatically with the woman’s unguarded state during her night wanderings. If the woman were indeed Solomon’s bride, one wonders why she couldn’t have sent a couple of his bodyguards out to look for him in the next chapter, or asked them to accompany her on her dangerous search.

9–10. From the bodyguards, we move to a description of the bed itself which is called an ’appiryôn (ESV: carriage), a Hebrew word that appears only here in the Old Testament. It seems to be a kind of bed, but the exact etymology is not clear (Fox 1985: 125 translates it as ‘canopied bed’). It is clearly not a simple cot, but rather a bed of extraordinary magnificence, made of wood of Lebanon, with posts of silver, a roof 25 of gold and a seat of purple. These rich details match the splendid (even excessive) opulence of the palace of the Persian king, Ahasuerus, in Esther 1:6.

Its interior is also inlaid (or perhaps ‘paved’) with love 26 by the daughters of Jerusalem. ‘With love’ here could be taken as an adverbial clause, describing the devotion with which the daughters of Jerusalem worked – not their devotion to their craft, but rather their love for Solomon, given the usage of ‘love’ elsewhere (Roberts 2007: 154–156). Alternatively, some have taken ‘love’ as a description of the scenes with which the litter was portrayed – semi-pornographic depictions of the act of love (so Estes 2010: 340). This seems unlikely, given the rest of the Song. A third alternative is that ‘paved with love’ is a metaphor describing the interactions between Solomon and the daughters of Jerusalem that take place here (Assis 2009: 114). It is certainly striking that the focus here (on his wedding day!) is on the love that the daughters of Jerusalem have for Solomon, rather than on his love for his bride or her love for him. If this last interpretation is correct, then Solomon’s lovemaking to the many daughters of Jerusalem in these opulent surroundings would contrast dramatically with the exclusive love of the man and his beloved in their much simpler surroundings. Unlike the bed that belongs to Solomon and the daughters of Jerusalem, the bed of the man and the woman is not purple, but verdantly green; its beams and rafters are not made of gold and silver, but simple cedar and pine (1:16–17). Nonetheless, they are the ones who are building a solid and lasting house, constructed from true love, not glitzy counterfeit substitutes.

11. Just as the previous two stanzas focused exclusively on Solomon and his entourage, so too does the final verse in this poem. Here, the daughters of Zion27 are urged to go out and look at Solomon on his wedding day. There are no glances to be spared for his future wife, apparently. Solomon is there in his kingly splendour, crowned by his mother, with gladness in his heart, but entirely alone in the centre of the spotlight.28 The reference to Solomon’s mother contrasts with the woman’s longing to take her man home to her own mother’s house, which appears to be much more humble (3:4). At least on their wedding day, although they may lack the glorious outward trimmings of Solomon’s royal wedding, the man and the woman will share their gladness and joy together as one.

Meaning

Weddings can be glorious events. The bride and groom are often virtually unrecognizable, transformed from their usual jeans and casual shirts to a tuxedo and layers of toile. Yet that glory is not what marriage is about. Nor is it about acquiring the feelings of safety and significance that come from having sixty bodyguards and from owning a designer bed made of gold, silver and purple. These may be the things that someone like Solomon has to offer to the daughters of Zion as wedding gifts, but they are not the elements that make for a good marriage. The simple, unique, face-to-face relationship of the woman who emerges from the wilderness and the man who finds peace in her garden has a true splendour that is far greater than Solomon in all his glory.

In the same way, in the book of Revelation it is the great prostitute who is dressed in purple, gold and pearls (Rev. 18:16), while the bride of Christ is adorned in the simple but bright and pure linen of righteousness (Rev. 19:8). Yet it is the faithful bride who enjoys a face-to-face relationship with her Lord in the New Jerusalem through eternity, made pure by the blood of the Lamb (Rev. 7:14), while the smartly dressed prostitute and those who loved her luxuries are left outside (Rev. 18:9).

C. The beloved’s glory (4:1–7)

Context

In chapter 4 desire finally reaches its goal. The answer to ‘Who is this coming up from the wilderness?’ is not the glory and luxury of Solomon, but the simple beauty of the woman (Assis 2009: 121). The poem begins with a ‘Behold’ just like 3:7, but the vision that meets our gaze this time is very different.

The description of the woman begins where it did in 1:15, with an almost exact repetition of what the man said on that occasion: ‘Behold, you are beautiful my love, behold you are beautiful! Your eyes are doves.’ This time, though, he continues his description of her anatomy from her eyes downwards. As we approach the moment of the consummation of their relationship, there is now no reason for the man to stop with her face. The time for arousing love has drawn near and, given the feelings of insecurity that the woman expressed in 1:6, now is the time for her lover to praise all aspects of her beauty. It may be appropriate for a future mother-in-law to note that ‘Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain’ (Prov. 31:30; see 31:1), but for a husband on his wedding day, his wife’s beauty truly ought to be something to be celebrated.

Comment

1. The descriptive poem (sometimes called a waṣf) begins with her dove-like eyes. Like many of the other images in the poem, this metaphor is full of motion, as doves flutter about from branch to branch. It also communicates shyness and inaccessibility, since doves are often observed hidden in the clefts of the rock (see 2:14). Here, used in conjunction with her veil,29 the focus is on the latter attribute. Veils were used for a variety of reasons in the Ancient Near East, but were particularly associated with betrothal and weddings (Van der Toorn 1995: 330–336). Indeed, the Akkadian word kallātu (Heb. kallâ, ‘bride’; 4:11, 12; 5:1) is etymologically connected to kullulu, which means ‘to veil’. Given the matrimonial language in the previous and following scenes, there is no reason to deny it the same signification in this passage. In this poem, the phrase behind your veil occupies a key role at the end of both the first and second strophes (Barbiero 2011: 174). Veils separate and conceal (Munro 1995: 52), and so this veil represents the last and flimsiest divider between the man and the woman. They are now no longer separated by a lattice and a wall, as was the case in chapter 2, for the time is drawing near when even this last divider will be gone and full union will be achieved. However, as Van der Toorn has pointed out (1995: 332), the veil was not simply a form of concealment in an ancient context; it was also a pledge and sign of an exclusive relationship. When he veiled the bride, the husband was denoting a commitment to provide for her needs in much the same way as the similar biblical gesture of a man spreading the corner of his garment over his bride (e.g. Ezek. 16:8).

Having begun with her eyes, which are the most personal and communicative of features, the man moves on to describe her hair as like a flock of [black] goats, leaping (or ‘streaming’, since the verb expresses the movement of boiling water; Barbiero 2011: 178) down the mountain. The image is one of shimmering motion and life: as city dwellers, some modern readers may have a hard time recognizing this as a compliment, but the woman was, of course, a country girl who had personal experience in caring for goats (1:8). Mount Gilead was known for its excellent grazing land, so these goats would presumably have been well fed and healthy.

2. From goats, we move to ewes, newly shorn and washed, and therefore bright white, thus forming an apt analogy for the woman’s teeth. Goats and sheep are a natural pair, as are black and white; the contrasting pairing is strengthened by the fact that the sheep are going up while the goats are coming down. The man also notes the fact that she has a perfectly matched set of teeth: all of which bear twins, and not one among them has lost its young. Along with the idea of symmetrical perfection of form, the image of ‘bearing twins’ speaks of unusual fertility, an idea underlined by the description that not one of them has lost their young.

3. If the dominant colours in the first strophe are black and white, then the second strophe is dominated by the colour red. Her lips are like a scarlet thread, while her cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate, which would be blush red. Scarlet dye was a luxury substance in antiquity, and the colour was associated with life and with love. A scarlet thread (or cord) was used to mark out Rahab’s house in Jericho as a safe haven during the assault by Joshua (Josh. 2:18). Meanwhile, on account of their many seeds, pomegranates were associated with fertility, a theme never too far below the surface of this poem. The word for mouth (midbār) is unusual, focusing on the mouth as the organ of speech: it is not merely the appearance of her mouth that is lovely, but the use to which she puts it.

Given the fact that the man’s description of the woman is often described as erotic, it is worth noticing how much of his description focuses on the woman’s face – and a veiled face at that (Exum 2005: 161). In contrast to our pornography-obsessed society, in which everything must be uncovered and revealed, the Song understands the deeper allure of the concealed and the hidden. It turns out that modesty is the ultimate in attractiveness.

4. Continuing downward, her neck is like the tower of David. Commentators differ in the signification of this metaphor; however, it seems likely that this is an image of strength and confidence. She carries herself with a regal bearing. Her neck is also like the tower of David in its adornment: the decorative stonework and two different kinds of shields hung about the tower suggest a comparison to the woman’s multi-layered necklaces which the man admired in 1:10, though the language is admittedly obscure. The choice of such military imagery is an interesting one: it depicts her as a fortified city, impervious to assault (Walsh 2000: 97), just as she will later be described as a locked garden and a sealed fountain (v. 12) and as a city wall, defended with towers (8:10). Clearly, she is no easy conquest for any man who comes along; she has followed her own counsel not to stir up love too soon (2:7; 3:5). Yet in this picture, the shields are no longer deployed for battle, but have been hung up as decoration: the once stoutly defended city now surrenders itself willingly and peacefully to the unique love of her life (LaCocque 1998: 104; cf. the similar theme in 8:10).

5. From her neck, the man’s eyes move downwards and come to rest on her breasts, which he compares to two fawns, twins of a gazelle, that graze among the lilies. Once again, nature furnishes the material for the comparison, which is complex and multivalent. As with her teeth, the bodily symmetry of her two breasts allows comparison with twins, an image of fertility. This is, of course, particularly apt as an image for the breasts, whose connection with fertility is transparent (see Gen. 49:25), although in the Song it is their erotic significance that is primarily in the foreground, as in Proverbs 5:19. Fawns are shy and rarely observed, while gazelles are graceful: both qualities provide a fitting comparison for the woman’s breasts (again, as in Prov. 5:19). Finally, the image of these shy young deer who graze among the lilies provides a peaceful pastoral scene of the animals in their natural habitat, feasting on the richest of fare. Elsewhere in the Song, the man is similarly compared to a gazelle who grazes among the lilies (2:16–17; 6:3), and so the description points towards the fulfilment of the man’s own desires, which are now on the point of being realized.

6. As in 2:17, the phrase Until the day breathes and the shadows flee indicates the coming of the morning. Yet whereas in that passage the woman told the man to turn around and go away, now the time for the consummation of their relationship has come: he may take himself to the mountain of myrrh and the hill of frankincense. Given the parallel with 2:17 and the immediately preceding context in which his gaze descended no lower, this phrase presumably indicates ‘the cleft mountains’ of her breasts, which are now accessible to his touch (Barbiero 2011: 191). The desire that she expressed earlier for her beloved to lie between her breasts like a sachet of myrrh all night long (1:13) will finally receive its fulfilment. The clouds of frankincense and myrrh coming up from the wilderness (3:6) will envelop the man in their sweet perfume as he takes possession of his own promised land.

7. Having described the perfect number (seven) of perfect body parts, it is not surprising that the man concludes his description by saying, You are altogether beautiful, my love. Not only are the woman’s concerns about her own appearance in 1:5 swept away at a stroke, but when he adds, there is no flaw in you, he widens the statement. To be without flaw sometimes refers to physical appearance, as in the case of Absalom (2 Sam. 14:25), but it can also refer to moral and intellectual capacity as well (see Dan. 1:4). She is not just physically attractive, but altogether beautiful in his eyes. The man’s joy in his bride on their wedding day is comparable to the Lord’s delight in his original creation when he declared of all that he had made that it was ‘very good’ (Gen. 1:31).

Meaning

Solomon’s model of love involves large amounts of gold, silver and human artifice, but leaves the spotlight entirely focused on himself. In contrast, the man’s gaze points steadfastly away from himself and is entirely focused on the beauty of his beloved, described in terms that are primarily drawn from the natural realm. His delight in her is as a whole person, not just a body: her eyes and face are more clearly described and thus more important than other parts of her anatomy, and her mouth is not just something he desires to kiss, but the source of speech that equally delights his heart. To him, she is entirely without flaw. Thus, he rounds off the end of the lengthy and painful period of waiting for the consummation with a celebration of her beauty.

D. Consummation (4:8 – 5:1)

Context

The poem consists of three stanzas: verses 8–11, 12–15 and 4:16 – 5:1. The first stanza begins and ends with ‘Lebanon’, which also concludes the second stanza. The theme word ‘bride’ occurs six times in this poem (and nowhere else in the Song), forming an inclusio in the opening and closing verses (Assis 2009: 130). The poem starts with imagery of dangerous and exotic locales, which create a sense of distance and threat. Yet by the end of this poem that distance has been bridged, and the scene has changed from a wilderness to a beautiful paradise-garden. It is time for the woman to leave the realm of inaccessibility and enter the garden-world of consummated love, as she takes up the new role of ‘bride’.

The third stanza (4:16 – 5:1) forms the exact centre of the Song of Songs, with 111 lines before it (excluding the superscription) and 111 lines after it (Carr 1984: 127). The consummation of the man and the woman’s relationship thus forms the centre and climax of the whole Song, concluding with words of benediction on their union.

Comment

8. This poem begins apparently awkwardly with the construction ‘with me’ (’ittî). Some wish to emend the text to a smoother ‘Come’ (’ĕtî ; e.g. Pope 1977: 474), but that is unnecessary, given the presence of the verb at the end of the second line. Indeed, the change obscures the point that the man is making, which is the fact that, regardless of where the couple may end up, on the journey she will be ‘with me’ (Longman 2001: 149). What is being emphasized is not so much where they are going as where she is coming from, as may be seen by the repetition of the preposition min (‘from’). Pursuing love and entering marriage is, by definition, a journey into the unknown. Yet on that risky journey into the unforeseeable future, what counts most is the man’s enduring and committed presence with her.

At the same time, the place from which she is coming receives some emphasis too. Lebanon, Amana, Senir and Hermon are all visible but inaccessible mountain peaks, a theme reinforced by the fact that they are also viewed as the lairs of dangerous wild animals and/or sound like exotic spices.30 She is not, of course, literally located on these mountains: they serve as a metaphor. The man is asking the woman to leave these remote and inaccessible mountainous areas in order to come with him to experience a new life. This picks up some important themes from 2:8–17. Her inaccessibility in the distant mountains parallels the description of her as a dove in the cleft of the rocks (2:14). Once again, he is pleading with her to come away with him; this time, however, he will hear a quite different answer from the negative response he received earlier.

Significantly, this is the first time in the Song that the man calls the woman bride, which can hardly be understood simply as ‘an emotionally charged term of affection’ (so Snaith 1993: 65), any more than it would be in our own culture (Hess 2005: 139, n. 61). A man might call his wife ‘my bride’, recalling the joy of their first union, but it is hard to imagine any context in which an unmarried couple would use the term, even metaphorically. In every other context in the Bible, the word kallâ clearly has in view a bride or a daughter-in-law (e.g. Isa. 62:5; Jer. 2:32) and indicates the new familial bond that is brought into existence through marriage. Its repeated use in this poem marks this part of the Song out as the key turning point in their relationship.

9. The man does not merely wish to have the woman’s presence with him; he desperately craves it. The phrase that the ESV renders You have captivated my heart can better be translated: ‘You drive me crazy’ (Keel 1994: 162–163). In the West, we think of the head as the seat of thought, while the heart is the seat of the emotions. As a result, we think of a ‘heartless’ person as someone who has lost their ability to love. However, in Hebrew, the heart is the seat of the thinking, so the person who has lost their heart is someone who cannot think straight – in our parlance, someone who has lost their head (Barbiero 2011: 202). This is the mirror image of the woman’s declaration in 2:5 that she is ‘sick with love’. Once again, the man’s attention is drawn to the woman’s eyes and her jewelled necklace. The metaphorical weapons with which her neck is surrounded (see v. 4) have captured him completely.

Walsh (2000: 75) notes that such a self-revelation is far riskier than the rich compliments bestowed on the woman in the previous section. One may admire someone’s attractiveness in a flirtatious way from a safe distance, but such a declaration about one’s heart necessarily invites either acceptance or rejection. It cannot simply be passively parried with a neutral ‘Thank you’; it must either receive a positive response or be refused.

In contrast to the literal use of ‘bride’, the term sister is often used in Ancient Near Eastern love poetry as a term of endearment (Fox 1985: 136). It indicates that the bond of companionship in their relationship is like that between a brother and a sister, the closest bond of friendship that was possible with a person of the opposite gender. In chapter 8, the woman will likewise wish that the man were her brother so that she could openly display her love for him (8:1). This is a reminder that sexual union was never intended to exist by itself: it is a union of body and soul, in which two people are profoundly united in every aspect of their lives. From then on, there are no longer two separate individuals, but rather one new body, in which mutual care, respect and self-giving to each other in every area of life are the logical consequence (see Eph. 5:28–30).

10–11. As in the beginning of the Song, desire seeks the fulfilment of a kiss, but now the tables have been turned. Verses 10–11 closely mirror 1:2–3, only now the sentiments originally spoken by the woman are found on the man’s lips. Like her appearance (4:1), the woman’s caresses are desirable, better than wine. The meaning of the metaphor in the opening chapter is now illuminated and enhanced by the intervening comparison of her body to a vineyard that is in blossom (1:6; 2:13): we now discover that wine is not merely a random symbol for the sweetness of a kiss, but rather represents the appropriate product of vineyards that have been harvested at the right time, not when they are in blossom but when their fruit is fully ripe. Now, on their wedding day, the couple’s love is fully mature, like a fine wine, ready to be consummated.

Fragrance and taste go back and forth as the dominant sense in the poem: the taste of the woman’s lips combines with the scent of her oils to form a heady concoction. The fragrance of Lebanon links this section back to the mountain ranges of verse 8, as well as being a symbol elsewhere in the Old Testament of the land that is blossoming with abundant prosperity (see Hos. 14:7; there are numerous connections between Hos. 14 and the Song). The presence of honey and milk under her tongue likewise compares her to the Promised Land itself, a symbol of fruitfulness, prosperity and rest (cf. Exod. 3:8). Its presence under the tongue connects it with the location from where speech originates (compare Ps. 10:7). As in 4:3, the loveliness of the woman’s mouth is not simply in its physical appearance, or as a desirable organ of kissing; her speech is desirable and beautiful as well, presumably because of its wisdom and grace.

The phrase Your lips drip nectar is an exact parallel to Proverbs 5:3, where, in contrast, it describes the lips of the adulterous woman. This connection is a reminder that true delight and satisfaction are to be found by the man in the arms of his own bride, rather than in the caresses of some amorous stranger. Proverbs 2 – 9 is not just a homily about faithfulness in human relationships, however. Behind the adulteress (zarâ; lit. ‘strange’ or ‘foreign’ woman) in Proverbs lies Dame Folly and the dangerous attraction of idolatrous worship (Farmer 1991: 41–44). Relational and spiritual truth are interconnected: as a man only finds true joy in the arms of his own wife, so Israel would only find true delight and satisfaction in the arms of her own husband, the Lord, not by pursuing extra-marital affairs with the deities of other nations or through politically motivated alliances (cf. the similarities between Prov. 5:15–20 and Jer. 2:13).

12–15. This time the lovers’ pursuit of intimacy will not stop merely with kisses. As the Song reaches its climax, the man describes the woman as she has been thus far: a garden locked and a fountain sealed. A garden in the ancient world was a place of privilege, leisure and intimacy. Kings and rich people created walled or hedged areas planted with beautiful and aromatic plants that were carefully irrigated to provide a lush retreat from the stresses and pressures of everyday life (Eccl. 2:5). Such gardens were not open to all, but would be locked so that they could be preserved for the private use of the owner alone. Likewise, the fountain is only productive for watering the garden when its limited resources are not freely distributed to all: it was sealed to save its precious water until the right time, when it could bring fruitful abundance. These images of a fountain and of flowing water are used to describe both male and female sexuality in Proverbs 5:15–17, which makes it clear that there is no double standard in view here: both men and women alike are called to restrain their sexual desire until and within marriage, so that the delightful fruitfulness, prosperity and rest of that relationship can be realized.

The image of the sexual relationship as a locked garden containing innumerable delights evokes the recollection of Eden itself, the garden sanctuary where the Lord God walked regularly with the first man and woman. Like that original fruitful garden, the woman is an orchard [lit. ‘a paradise’, though that word is not used in the Old Testament to describe Eden] of pomegranates, filled with every good fruit and every aromatic spice: henna, nard, saffron, calamus, cinnamon, frankincense, myrrh and aloes – all of the best of spices. All the scents and tastes mentioned in other contexts in the Song are brought together in this garden, whose aromatic spices and sweet fruits come from many different lands and include the common (henna) along with the exotic (spikenard and saffron). No literal garden could possibly have contained all of these different plants – Landy calls it a ‘Noah’s ark of the vegetable kingdom’ (1983: 192) – but that merely heightens the Edenic associations that the image conjures up.

Exactly how the woman corresponds to the orchard of pomegranates is obscure in the Hebrew. The word is related to the root šālaḥ, which means to ‘send out’, so the alternatives shoots (ESV) or ‘watercourses’ have been suggested, depending on whether the image is related to the metaphor of the garden or of the fountain. Perhaps the poetic ambiguity is a deliberate move to link together the two images of garden and fountain. She can barely contain the abundant life that pours forth from her, whether she is viewed as a luxuriant garden sending forth its tendrils or as a well of living water, perpetually gushing forth cool, refreshing rivers like flowing streams from the mountain ranges of Lebanon. It is interesting to note that as the poem progresses, while the images of the garden and the fountain are maintained, their focus shifts from an evocation of the woman’s virginal purity to the promise of abundant life that she holds forth (Munro 1995: 108). What is being celebrated here is sexual purity that leads to a delightfully fruitful union, rather than the embracing of perpetual virginity and sexual abstinence as the marks of a higher spiritual state.

16. In the third stanza of the poem, the woman responds to the man’s words with an invitation for him to come to his garden and eat its choicest fruits. The garden that was once locked and the fountain that was earlier sealed are now freely and joyfully opened up for him to enjoy. The refusal of his invitation to go out in chapter 2 has now been fully reversed. When the woman summons the north and south winds to awake (‘ûrî) and blow upon my garden, she uses the same verb that was translated ‘arouse’ in 2:7, where she warned the daughters of Jerusalem against arousing love too soon (Assis 2009: 140). Likewise, the verb blow is the same as that used in 2:17, where she sent the young man away until the day ‘breathes’. The winds turn this once slumbering and locked garden into an opened and awakened paradise that now wafts abroad its delightful fragrance (Keel 1994: 181). The long-awaited day of their union has finally arrived. She is ready at last for her husband to enter the garden of her body and enjoy its abundant fruitfulness.

5:1. The man is equally eager and willing to accept her invitation: I came to my garden. Note that the woman is now no longer simply ‘a garden’; she is ‘my garden’: there are no fewer than eight first-person singular possessives in the course of sixteen Hebrew words. Now the myrrh and spice, the honeycomb and honey, the wine and milk that he described in the preceding verses belong to him and for him alone to enjoy. At this moment of consummation, he describes her as my sister, my bride, expressing the delightful relational as well as legal intimacy that they share. The family wall that separated them in 2:9 has been bridged: she has left her father and mother and been joined to her husband, and the two have become one flesh (Gen. 2:24).

At this central and climactic moment of the poem, an unidentified speaker or speakers add their approbation: Eat, friends, drink, and be drunk with love! (5:1). Commentators are divided about who says these words. Some think that it is the man, encouraging his companions to loosen the boundaries of normal life and engage freely in the delights of the banquet (Keel 1994: 184). However, it is more likely that this speech represents the daughters of Jerusalem (Hess 2005: 156–157), or even God himself giving his sanction on their union, as it were, declaring their marriage to be ‘very good’ (Estes 2010: 362). The distinction between the last two choices is perhaps more apparent than real, since in either case it reflects the author’s evaluation of the consummation of their marriage. However, this corporate benediction once again reminds us that sex and marriage are not simply individual appetites and pleasures that may be indulged as a private matter between any two consenting adults, but always exist in the larger context of the covenant community.

Meaning

In this poem, the man and the woman discover the true meaning of marriage as a union of heart, soul and flesh. The long period of waiting comes to an end, and their sexual union is a moment of great delight and joy, not merely for them but for the wider community. The garden that was once carefully sealed and locked is now open so that the pleasures of its paradise can be explored and enjoyed. The Song joyfully affirms that the context for the richest of human relationships is within God’s design for marriage, which is between a man and a woman.

Of course, all of our actual human marriages are deeply flawed, because all of us are sinners. In many cases, we have not kept our gardens safely protected until marriage, or we use our sexuality as a weapon or manipulative tool to exploit our spouse. Yet at its best, the sexual relationship within marriage points us towards an even deeper and more passionate love: God’s love for us in Jesus Christ. In spite of our brokenness and folly, Jesus treasured his bride enough to leave the glories of heaven and come to earth, journeying faithfully through the wilderness of this world and enduring the torture and shame of the cross in order to woo and win us. What incredible joy will be ours when the time finally comes for his return and for the marriage supper of the Lamb to be consummated! Each time we come to the Lord’s Table, the Lord summons us as his people to ‘Eat friends, drink and be drunk with love.’

5. AFTER THE WEDDING: SEPARATED AND REJOINED (5:2 – 6:3)

Context

The joy of consummation is no sooner achieved than it is threatened. This is no Hollywood story in which ‘Reader, I married him’ is followed by ‘And so they lived happily ever after.’ On the contrary, the man is largely absent again in 5:2 – 6:3. The separation is marked in the opening verse in which the woman is sleeping while her beloved is knocking. Yet by the end of the section, the couple have been reunited, and it is once again the case that ‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine’ (6:3).

This larger unit can be subdivided into three poems: 5:2–8 in which the woman searches fruitlessly for her beloved at night; 5:9–16 in which she describes the beauty of her beloved to the daughters of Jerusalem; and 6:1–3 in which the couple’s intimacy is restored. The unit opens with a scene that corresponds to the first night sequence in 3:1–5. On that occasion, the woman was also dreaming on her bed, longing for her absent lover. She then went out looking for him and, after much searching and a couple of dead ends along the way, that first pursuit ended successfully with the woman finding her beloved. This second night search is brought on by her own coldness, however, and is much longer and more difficult, although the end result is the same.

A. Night (5:2–8)

Comment

2. The poem begins with the woman half-awake and half-asleep: I slept, but my heart was awake. The heart is the organ of thought in Hebrew, so even though she was sleeping (falling asleep?), she was not entirely unconscious. Some commentators have assumed that she was roused from this sleeping state by her beloved’s knock on the door and that what follows is an entirely realistic description of the subsequent events that night (e.g. Brooks 1999: 121–128; Glickman 2004: 94–99), but this seems unlikely. Indeed, the whole sequence has a dreamlike quality to it, as did the earlier episode (Murphy 1990: 165). For example, if the chapter describes real events and the couple is married, why would her beloved have to knock on the door to gain access to his own house? On the other hand, if the woman is still unmarried at this point, it is extremely unlikely that she would be sleeping alone in a room with direct access to the outside (Keel 1994: 186). There are many other questions that could be raised. Why did the man leave so swiftly? Where did he go? Why did the guards of the city beat the woman and take her veil, when their earlier encounter in chapter 3 seemed unthreatening? This turn of events is particularly hard to explain if the woman were actually the wife of King Solomon: heads would surely have rolled for such an assault on a member of the royal harem! And after her painful encounter with the watchmen, though presumably now in a bruised and bloodied state, why did the woman turn so calmly to address the daughters of Jerusalem, as if nothing untoward had happened? These kinds of unexplained situations, bizarre events and sudden shifts in the action are typical of dreams but not of everyday life (Munro 1995: 120).

Other commentators, recognizing the unreality of the circumstances, have found in the story a euphemistic reference to a sexual encounter. Certainly, many of the key elements of the scene have euphemistic overtones in other contexts. For example, the motif of an open or closed door refers to sexual activity in 8:9, while yad (‘hand’; see Isa. 57:8) and regel (‘foot’; see Isa. 7:20) are sometimes used with reference to genitals; the internal turmoil experienced by the woman could plausibly refer to sexual arousal (Provan 2001: 334–335, who adds numerous other elements of the scene to his list of euphemisms). In light of these potential allusions, the man putting his ‘hand’ through the ‘hole’ in the door has also often been understood in sexual terms (Exum 1973: 50). However, as Fox has pointed out (1985: 144), this elaborate sexual understanding of the scene founders on the simple observation that the whole point of the poem is that though lovemaking was desired by the man, it did not take place.

It may be helpful to remember that the entire Song is a literary construct, not an exact account of actual historical events. It is realistic in describing the problems that couples encounter, but it is often metaphorical in the way that it describes those problems. As a result, even the question of whether she is dreaming or awakened from a dozing state by a knock at her door is somewhat moot: in poems, as in dreams, the normal and expected course of events does not always transpire.

In the midst of a pleasantly dreamlike state, the woman heard ‘the voice of her beloved’ (KJV). More modern translations appropriately render this phrase as A sound! My beloved ... , since what she actually heard was him knocking on the door. However, that translation obscures the fact that this phrase is an exact parallel to what the woman heard in 2:8, when her beloved came bounding over the mountains and leaping over the hills. That episode too left the man on the outside looking in, but on that occasion the woman felt no remorse or regret about sending him away. At that point in the story, the day of consummation had not yet fully come, in spite of his protestations about the arrival of the spring blossoms, and so her refusal was entirely appropriate.

In chapter 2, the man asked the woman to cross the wall and to come away with him, outside the house. Now, however, he wants to come into the house, which highlights the shift in their marital status. The man’s goal in this request is clearly sexual union, yet it is striking that it is a request, not a demand. He addresses her with great tenderness as my sister, my love, my dove, my perfect one. The first and second terms, my sister and my love, stress the relational intimacy that they share, while the third and fourth, my dove and my perfect one, emphasize her beauty. From the beginning, the man has strongly affirmed her attractiveness to him (see 4:1–7), and even now, after their marriage has been consummated, he continues to do so. Yet he is not merely attracted by her physically; they have a real relationship of affection and intimacy as well. The dove no longer needs to hide in the inaccessible crannies of the cliff as it once did (2:14); now she belongs to him and there is nothing to prevent them being together. The one epithet strikingly missing here after the previous poem is ‘bride’. For the man to stress the legal aspect of their union might make his request sound like a requirement, especially in a culture that gave men far-reaching rights to make sexual demands of their wives. This is precisely what he does not want to do.

As in chapter 2, the man seems to have come from quite a distance at night to seek her out, since his head is wet with dew.31 It is hard to explain under what normal circumstances that would be true for a married man meeting with his wife, so some have seen this as a flashback to the same situation that pertained earlier in the book, moving in a parallel fashion from separation to union (Barbiero 2011: 251). This, however, overlooks the significant differences between this episode and the earlier chapters. Given the metaphorical nature of so much else in this dreamlike encounter, perhaps we should not press the need for a logical explanation here. In the previous chapter, the woman’s abundant moisture symbolized her readiness to receive the man; here his wetness symbolizes the reverse: the frustrating reality of being shut out of his own house (Assis 2009: 152).

3. The woman’s response to his tender request is less than encouraging: ‘I have taken off my robe – must I put it on again? I have washed my feet – must I soil them again?’ (NIV). Again, no sexual innuendo is required to catch her meaning. She has made all of the usual preparations to go to bed and can’t be bothered to go through that routine again. This is in stark contrast from her earlier eagerness to be with the man: at that time, she was willing to undergo the effort and risk of travelling out into the fields under the heat of the midday sun to be with him (1:7); now, however, she can’t even be bothered to cross the room to let him in. It is indeed a flimsy excuse, especially given the significant effort that he seems to have made to be there. The tragic opposite of burning love is not necessarily fierce hatred; it can be a simple bored indifference to the desires and needs of the loved one (Glickman 2004: 93–94).

4. As the man persisted in his attempts to get through to the woman, he ‘thrust his hand through the opening’ (HCSB). Since the man is still outside the room at this point (and never gets inside in this scene), the opening is presumably an opening in the door, and the hand is literally his hand (rather than the phrase being a euphemism for a sexual act). It is unlikely that this opening was a keyhole, since they were rare in antiquity and would hardly have been large enough for the man to attempt to reach through with his arm. More probably, the small opening would have served as a peephole to allow the person inside to see who was seeking admittance (Keel 1994: 190). The woman is once again a locked garden as in 4:12, except that in this case, after the marriage has taken place, this description is no longer seen as a positive assessment.

Perhaps predictably, given any sensibly designed door, the man’s attempts to reach the internal bolt were frustrated. Nevertheless, his efforts had an effect on the woman, whose ‘feelings were stirred’ (HCSB) for him. Literally, the Hebrew says, ‘My insides were in an uproar.’ This could be interpreted in a variety of ways. Since ‘insides’ (mē‘îm) can denote the womb, some have taken this phrase to indicate sexual arousal, particularly in conjunction with a sexual reading of the previous image. However, the word often denotes internal organs more generally, as when it describes Jonah’s location in the great fish (Jon. 2:1 [Heb. 2:2]). Moreover, in Jeremiah 31:20 exactly the same phrase is used metaphorically to describe the Lord’s deep passion for his people. Here too, the most likely understanding is that the woman finds herself in a state of internal emotional upheaval, which of course does not preclude sexual desires, but is not limited to them. Her previous mood of tired indifference has been suddenly jolted into life.

6. Changed actions follow her changed feelings: I opened to my beloved. At the same time, however, a new complication arose: my hands dripped with myrrh, my fingers with liquid myrrh, on the handles of the bolt. The slipperiness of her hands apparently delayed her in her mission. Given the extreme costliness of myrrh, it is improbable that such a lavish application was simply part of her normal night-time routine, especially since she had by now been in bed for some time. Nor would it make sense for her to stop to prepare for her lover by anointing her hands with myrrh before opening the door to him. Rather, it seems that the dripping myrrh is a poetic symbol of the abundance of her reawakened love (Munro 1995: 49): she has no sooner changed her mind and arisen to open to the man than she finds herself physically responding to him. It seems that her actions had an impact on her feelings, and as she arose to welcome her beloved in, her emotions were stirred within her. The myrrh is concentrated on the handles of the bolt (lit. the ‘palms’ [kappôt] of the bolt), because that is the point at which their two hands come closest to touching in this scene (Barbiero 2011: 268).

But, alas, her turning is too late. By the time the woman has completed the slow-motion action of getting out of bed and fumbling with the bolt, her beloved had turned and gone. In response to his departure, she literally says, ‘My soul went out’, as if her very essence had gone out in pursuit of him.32 To have your nepeš depart from you means a diminishment of your life force, so we might render her words more idiomatically: ‘I almost died’ (Davis 2000: 278). Having failed to respond to the man’s initiative earlier, now the woman herself undertakes three fruitless actions: I opened ... I sought ... I called. This trio forms an almost exact inversion of the man’s earlier efforts to reach her: he called, then he sought to unbolt the door, but there was no opening. The couple’s desires end up moving in the same direction, but they are not synchronized, leaving them separated and alone. It is worth noting that the combination of seeking and calling occurs elsewhere in the Old Testament only in Proverbs 1:28, where the reference is the search for wisdom, and in Jeremiah 29:12–13, where the search is for God. These parallels give a transcendent quality to the couple’s search for one another and invite consideration of the parallels between the woman’s search for the man and our own search for God (Barbiero 2011: 274).

At this point we return to the theme of the night search from chapter 3. However, it is worth noticing the difference in the scenes that has been created by the intervening section. In chapter 3, the woman went from lying on her bed thinking about her beloved to searching eagerly for him; he was not present at any point prior to her finding him. In chapter 5, however, an opportunity for relationship has been missed. In this case, the necessity for the search has been created precisely by her own slowness to respond.

7. Once again, on her search the woman was found by the watchmen ... as they went about in the city (cf. 3:3). Whereas on the first occasion she asked the watchmen a question (‘Have you seen him whom my soul loves?’), on this occasion they immediately ‘beat her, they bruised her; they took away her cloak’ (NIV).33 Presumably, they took her to be a prostitute, especially if her ‘cloak’ represents a light and flimsy garment rather than a proper covering (Munro 1995: 55). To their unperceptive eyes, her behaviour resembled that of the prostitute in Proverbs 7:9–10, walking the streets of the city seeking custom. This explains their different response here from in chapter 3. What the woman feared in 1:7 has now transpired. Her search, which in chapter 3 was an uncomplicated and relatively rapidly successful quest, has now become a much darker and more difficult journey. The irony is profound: the one who did not want to get dressed in order to meet her beloved in verse 3 now has her covering taken away by strangers. The watchmen of the walls, part of whose job was apparently to guard against illicit sexual encounters, now punish her for her unwillingness to pursue a lawful sexual encounter with her own husband. Of course, since this is a dreamlike sequence, the watchmen are themselves also a product of her own imagination, yet their symbolic significance is enormous.

8. Even this painful humiliation of being assaulted by the watchmen does not dissuade the woman from her search for her husband, however. Far from giving up, she enlists the help of the daughters of Jerusalem, urging them that if they should find her beloved, tell him I am sick with love. The premarital frustration of 2:5 has now returned to haunt her. As in chapter 2, these women magically appear out of nowhere (in the middle of the night!) to provide an audience for her words, as if to remind us that the Song is lyric poetry and not a historical narrative. In this case, the oath that she urges upon them is an ironic footnote to the oath she required of them in chapter 2: there she encouraged them not to stir up love too soon, while in this case she herself is an object lesson of the perils and pains of love, even when it is not stirred up too soon.

Meaning

Good relationships revolve around the affirmation: ‘My beloved is mine and I am his’; however, the reality for most of us much of the time is that we live relentlessly self-focused lives, as if ‘My beloved is mine and I am my own.’ Sex is far from the only place where this plays out in the marriage relationship, but it is a common area of difficulty. Such an attitude easily leads to separation and isolation; it is easier to break a relationship than it is to mend it. The Song encourages us with its realism, recognizing that such problems are not uncommon within marriage, and with its hope, urging us to make the effort and take the risks necessary to find our beloved and restore the relationship.

In our relationship with our heavenly Father, we are all frequently guilty of lack of interest and desire for fellowship with him. Left to ourselves, we repeatedly find our hearts spiritually cold and barren wastelands, closed to the Spirit. Yet God does not leave us alone to search for him; he himself came searching for us in Christ, bearing the bruising cost of our restoration on his own back. As a result, we need have no doubt that when at last we seek him, he will be waiting for us like the father of the Prodigal Son, with open and welcoming arms (Luke 15:20).

B. The lover’s glory (5:9–16)

Comment

9. The daughters of Jerusalem know exactly what to say to the woman: ‘How is your beloved better than others, most beautiful of women?’ (NIV). Interestingly, they pick up the man’s term of endearment for the woman from 1:8 (‘most beautiful of women’), as if they were channelling his thoughts, and they invite her to reflect on the attributes that first stirred her love for him. What makes this man so special, out of all of the men in the world (cf. 2:3)? Her response to their question is not an identikit description that would enable them to recognize him if they encountered him on the street; rather, it is a celebration of his matchless beauty, much as he celebrated her beauty in 4:1–7. Strictly speaking, however, it does not form part of the same waṣf genre, since she speaks her admiration to her friends rather than directly to him – indeed, in effect, she is almost speaking to herself.

10. Since they asked the woman about her beloved, it is fitting that the description begins and ends with a reference to my beloved (vv. 10, 16), which provides an inclusio for the section. In between, the description starts with a general statement about his beauty and then moves from his head downwards to his legs, extremities which are bracketed together by the common element of comparison to finest gold, returning at the end to words of general affirmation. Overall, he is radiant and ruddy, with a bright and vigorous appearance, like that of David (1 Sam. 16:12). ‘Radiant’ (ṣaḥ) is often associated with the colour ‘white’, but it is used in Isaiah 18:4 and Jeremiah 4:11 to describe heat shimmering above the land (Estes 2010: 372) and is thus generally a symbol of health rather than purity. ‘Ruddy’ is associated with beauty in Egyptian art as well as in the Old Testament (Munro 1995: 61). So we might say that he was ‘glowing with health’. The word distinguished (dāgûl) comes from the same root translated as ‘banner’ in 2:4 and has military connotations, suggesting that it is particularly in battle that he is conspicuous among ten thousand (Keel 1994: 198). This contrasts him favourably with Solomon, who never goes out to war and is safely protected behind his sixty armed bodyguards (3:7–8).

11. The more specific description begins with his head which is finest gold, like the statue in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream (Dan. 2:32). This cannot be describing his hair colour, since she goes on to declare that that is as black as a raven, so presumably finest gold reflects the dazzling radiance of his complexion. She uses the same word for his locks of hair as was used in verse 2 for his wet hair (qĕwuṣṣôt), which links together his departure with her ‘missing-person report’. She describes his locks as taltallîm, a word which occurs only here and which may describe date-palm clusters. Like them, his hair is thick and wavy, perhaps even unruly.

12. Like her eyes in 4:1, the man’s eyes are also like doves. These doves are bathed in milk, though, which emphasizes their whiteness, perhaps with reference to the whites of the eyes in contrast to the dark pupils. Certainly, there is a sharp but pleasing contrast between the black, raven-like hair and the white, dove-like eyes. These doves are beside streams of water ... beside a full pool. The meaning of the last term is obscure, but both images speak of abundant moisture, which would be a blessing in such a dry land. The twinning of common imagery for the eyes of the man and the woman binds the two of them together as a matched pair (Munro 1995: 90). Indeed, the description of the man picks up several images from the earlier part of the chapter as well. Barbiero comments,

In her beloved, the woman recognizes herself. The same myrrh that drips from her hands, drips from his lips, and in his eyes she recognizes the same flame of love (‘dove’) which shines in hers. Love ... makes out of the two only one flesh.

(2011: 283)

13. From sight, we move to scent and taste: his cheeks [or ‘beard’?] are like beds of spices, mounds [lit. ‘towers’] of sweet-smelling herbs, while his lips are like lilies dripping liquid myrrh. In 1:2 and 4:10–11, these senses were associated with kissing, and the same association seems to be at work here. It is not so much a lifelike description of the appearance of his face as an expressed longing for her nose to be close enough to the man’s cheek for her to smell his scent and for her lips to be able to graze among the lilies of his lips (see 4:5). The idea of his lips dripping with flowing myrrh is something of a mixed metaphor, since myrrh was not edible. However, the metaphor combines references to both the flowing myrrh that was on the woman’s fingers in 5:5 and her lips that dripped with nectar in 4:11.

14. At this point, the woman’s description moves from the man’s face to his body. In the process, the metaphors change from predominantly natural images to images drawn from the world of sculpture and architecture, which are perhaps better suited to describe the man’s strength and stature. His arms are rods of gold, set with jewels: gold recurs in the description of all of his extremities, though the word here is the more common zāhāb rather than pāz (‘fine gold’). It is combined with a variety of gemstones to express the infinite value of his person. The ESV’s His body is polished ivory could more precisely be rendered: ‘His belly is a plate of ivory’; the word mē’îm indicates the part of the anatomy between the arms and the hips, as the similar description of the statue in Daniel 2:32 makes clear. Often it refers to the internal organs, as in verse 4, but it can also describe the outer part of the body. Perhaps it indicates that his abdominal muscles were flat and hard like ivory, or possibly that they shone like polished ivory. The ivory is ‘inlaid with lapis lazuli’,34 which probably does not correspond to any specific detail in his appearance so much as assigning great value to his body (as with the arms set with jewels).

15–16. The last part of his anatomy to be described is his legs, which are like alabaster columns. Again, the imagery is of a statue, for which alabaster is a suitably fine material. Nor does this body diminish in value as it proceeds downward, as the statue in the vision in Daniel 2 does. Instead, it remains of the finest material from head to toe, as the alabaster columns are set on bases of gold, bringing us back to the material with which we started.

The woman concludes her assessment with a general description of his appearance, which is like Lebanon. Lebanon was noted for its majestically tall and straight cedars, to which she compares his noble bearing (an attribute that he correspondingly praised in her in 4:4). She then adds an image of taste to this visual image: his mouth is ... sweet. As in 2:3, her description of him as a tree and its sweet-tasting fruit belong together. This is her beloved and her ‘darling’ (ESV: friend): the latter term is only used here by the woman to describe the man, as if it took the prospect of losing him for her truly to discover what he meant to her. Her expansive description of his attractions more than answers the question that the daughters of Jerusalem posed to her: how is your beloved better than others (v. 9)?

In spite of the undeniable beauty that the woman describes in her beloved, her description of him is somewhat wooden and cold in comparison to his luminescent description of her in chapters 4 and 7. The image of a statue made of cold, hard stone, metal and jewels may be beautiful, but seems rather distant. Perhaps this represents the woman’s present uncertainty concerning him: she is not sure at this point what sort of response she will encounter from her beloved when she eventually finds him. Will he be cold and unresponsive, or will he be eager to forgive her and renew their friendship?

C. Restoration (6:1–3)

Comment

6:1. The daughters of Jerusalem ask a simple question that clarifies the woman’s thinking: Where has your beloved gone, O most beautiful among women? This question paves the way for the final turn in this song, as she finds fresh assurance of the unbreakable reality of their relationship. The more the woman describes her beloved, the more she finds herself using the same language of him that he used of her, underscoring their deep and unbreakable unity. As she describes him, she realizes that even though the man has turned and gone from her, in a sense he has never left her. Their separation is only temporary, for they are two halves of the same coin, ultimately inseparable. Though the daughters of Jerusalem now profess their readiness to join her in the search, she doesn’t require their assistance. The final twist in the dream is that the difficult and dangerous search that she went through was ultimately unnecessary, since she discovers that she knows precisely where to find her beloved.

2–3. My beloved has gone down to his garden: this is not some separate geographical location to which he has retired. Rather, she herself is his garden (see 4:12); his grazing in the gardens and gathering lilies refer to enjoying the delights of married love (see 2:16; 4:5). Now she is assured that he will certainly come back to her to enjoy the pleasures that he tasted at the beginning of the chapter. They have made a mutual commitment to one another – I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine – and so, in spite of their differences and her own indifference towards him, she is assured that he will come back to her and they will come together again. What God has joined together cannot so easily be separated. Strikingly, though, the order of the phrase is reversed from 2:16, as if to emphasize the fact that, in contrast to her earlier selfishness, she is now eager to affirm first that she belongs to her lover before claiming any ownership of him (Assis 2009: 182).

Meaning

Marriage is not the cure-all for lovesickness, nor does it mean an end to the need to search and pursue one another in order to attain intimacy. It is easy for a husband and wife to become out of step with each other, not least in the realm of physical intimacy. If left uncorrected, these difficulties can result in a couple drifting apart and losing touch with each other. She may end up painfully tormenting herself over missed opportunities and lost intimacy. The remedy for the woman lay in what follows: searching eagerly for him, no matter how painful the pursuit; pondering and declaring the manifold beauty of her husband; remembering and recounting everything that she once saw in him. In such a way, she rekindled the romance that she had lost. Here is wise counsel not just for wives, but for husbands as well, in those times of marital estrangement.

Every married person has similar experiences of distance in their relationship: not all have such a happy outcome. For some, their failures to pursue their spouse, coupled perhaps with equal failures on the part of their spouse, have led to a deep and settled coldness within marriage, or a separation or divorce that ends the marriage. For that reason, our hope of peace cannot rest in the state of our marriage and our own faithfulness to our wedding vows. It must rest instead in the grace and mercy of our greater Beloved, Jesus Christ, whose beauty truly is beyond compare. Though we have often failed to pursue intimacy with him and have squandered many sweet and tender moments that we might have enjoyed in his presence, he is never unfaithful to us. Instead, he delights in us and will never leave us nor forsake us, even though we are deeply broken and ungrateful.

6. CONTEMPLATION AND RENEWED CONSUMMATION (6:4 – 8:4)

A. Contemplation of the beloved (6:4–10)

Context

The woman assured us at the end of the previous poem that she and her beloved have been reconciled: she found her lost lover in his garden, and once again, ‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine’ (6:3). He has once more returned to graze among the lilies. Yet thus far, these are merely her words. Now the man returns to the stage to confirm that their reconciliation is real, by reprising his earlier affirmation of her attractiveness. In contrast to chapter 5, in which the woman declared the man’s attractions to the daughters of Jerusalem in his absence, now there is a return to face-to-face dialogue between the couple, in which he speaks and she responds. This is another mark of their renewed relationship. Yet at the end of his speech in verse 10, the images used still stress the distance between them: she is as glorious as the sun and the moon, but perhaps still as far away. It is not until verses 11 and 12 that the gap between them is finally bridged, as she goes down to her garden and is suddenly caught up alongside him.

Comment

4–5. The man begins his praise of the woman in exactly the same way as he did in chapter 4: You are beautiful ... my love. His fundamental appreciation of her beauty has not changed. He then compares her to two cities of Israel, Tirzah and Jerusalem. Tirzah was the first capital of the northern kingdom after the split during the reign of Solomon’s son, Rehoboam. The comparison of the two cities thus links the northern and southern parts of Israel; as capital cities, they stress the uniqueness of the woman (Barbiero 2011: 329). The cities’ names may also be significant. ‘Jerusalem’ means ‘city of peace’ and connects to the name that the woman is given in 6:13, ‘Shulammite’ (‘Peace-filled one’; see 8:10), while Tirzah sounds like rāṣâ, ‘to desire, take pleasure in’. Like these famous cities, the woman is beautiful and desirable, the source of the man’s peace.

However, she is more than beautiful; she is awesome in the sense of awe-inspiring or, as the French would say, formidable! (Davis 2000: 286). The same word is used to describe the terrifying Babylonian army (Hab. 1:7). This is a new note in the man’s description of the woman. A city is not a comfortable, domesticated image of beauty, like a dove or a flock of sheep; rather, it is a proud and glorious image. In her awesome splendour, the woman is like the nidgālôt, which literally means ‘bannered ones’. Most translations take this to refer to (human) armies with banners. However, in verse 10 the same phrase refers to the stars, which are sometimes depicted as God’s heavenly army (cf. Dan. 8:10), and it may have the same sense here (see Estes 2010: 380–381). Either way, the force of the image is the same. Through the conflict of the previous chapter, the couple’s relationship has acquired a new depth. She is no longer merely beautiful, but now is both beautiful and terrifying at the same time. The man finds the gaze of her eyes scarcely bearable. In the man’s previous (and largely parallel) description of her attributes in chapter 4, he compared the woman’s eyes to unthreatening doves (4:1). Now, though, he asks her to turn her gaze away from him, for her look overwhelms him. The Hebrew word rāhab here means something like ‘to cause to tremble’. She has a mysterious power over him that he finds both fascinating and terrifying.

This is the reflex of her frantic night search for him in the previous chapter: he too understands more of her unique power to unsettle him than he did in the earlier stages of their relationship where everything was going smoothly. As Barbiero puts it, ‘Love is war, turning upside down the ordered and reasonable life of a person, but only by entering upon this war is peace to be found’ (2011: 332).

6–7. Yet in other ways, the woman is still exactly the same person as she was before this revelation of the complexity and power of her inner nature. Her hair, her teeth and her cheeks have not lost their natural attractiveness, as he reiterates his earlier praise of her physical attributes almost word for word from chapter 4. This time, however, he avoids all the erotic elements in his description: he does not mention her lips or proceed further down than her face to her neck and her breasts. Since the conflict was over sex to begin with, he wishes to reassure her that he is not merely interested in getting her to sleep with him again; it is their face-to-face relationship that he wishes to see fully restored. Since the veil was connected with the marriage ceremony (see commentary on 4:1), the repeated reference to the beauty of her cheeks behind her veil is a way of saying, ‘You are still as lovely as the day on which I married you.’

8. The Solomonic model of love values quantity over quality: sixty queens and eighty concubines is a twenty-fold increase on the standard poetic number pairing of three ... and four (see Prov. 30:15, 18, 21, 29; Amos 1:3, 6, 9, etc.; Gordis 1974: 94). The total of wives and concubines is thus 140 (twenty times the perfect number of seven), along with innumerable virgins (i.e. young women who have reached sexual maturity and are of marriageable age; see comment on 1:3) who are ready to take the place of any who drop out. Even this vast horde is a tiny harem compared to that of Solomon himself, who had a total of no fewer than 700 wives and 300 concubines (1 Kgs 11:3). Of course, the contrast is not just with Solomon personally, but with the general tendency for kings to multiply wives, often at the expense of others. The parable that Nathan recounted to David after his sin with Bathsheba contrasted the rich man with his substantial flocks and the poor man with his one ewe lamb (2 Sam. 12:2–4). The point is obvious: David had no shortage of wives even before he saw Bathsheba, while Uriah had only one (LaCocque 1998: 133). Such a crowd of women as Solomon possessed can only be managed, not truly loved (see comments on 8:11). To keep order, Solomon must have employed an official with a title similar to that of Hegai, who served as the ‘keeper of women’ for the harem of King Ahasuerus (see Esth. 2:3).

9. In contrast to this Solomonic model, the man in the poem needs and desires only one woman. His beloved is utterly ‘unique’ (NIV). She is my dove, my perfect one, as she was in 5:2, belonging to him alone, and she has no equal. She is ‘the only daughter of her mother’ (NIV), which means that she has no sister to whom she might be compared. Her unique virtue is recognized not only by the favouritism of her own mother (whose opinion might be suspected of bias), but by all of the young women (lit. ‘daughters’), as well as by the queens and concubines themselves. Using language that echoes the acclamation of the noble wife in Proverbs 31:28, they praise her and call her blessed. The sophisticated and successful royal set, precisely those whose scorn the woman feared in chapter 1, here join the man in declaring her praises.

10. In verse 10, we come full circle to the question that began this section back in 3:6: Who is this? The answer – that it is the woman, who is like the ‘bannered ones’ – forms an inclusio with the beginning of the man’s speech in verse 4. Once again, the answer to the question describes the woman, but this time, instead of coming up from the wilderness, she is ensconced in the heavens themselves looking down like the Ancient Near Eastern deities, the dawn, the moon, the sun and the stars (the army with banners ; see comment on verse 4 above). She thus dominates both the day and the night or, as W. B. Yeats would put it, ‘the night and the light and the half-light’ (Yeats 1996: 73). In the woman’s glorious splendour, her fears of 1:6 are reversed. She feared that she was too dark because the sun had gazed on her; instead, she is like the bright whiteness of the full moon (lĕbānâ ; lit. ‘the white one’) or like the heat of the sun’s rays. In this description, we have the same combination of the fair and the terrible that occurred in his earlier description of her appearance (6:4).

The man has gone from praising the woman to her face in verses 4–7, to boasting about her to others in verses 8–10. At the end of this poem of praise, as at the beginning, the focus is on her unique splendour and glory that set her apart from all other women. Of course, it is precisely her uniqueness that makes both his longing for her so intense and his fear of losing her favour so awful. Because she is the unique object of his fascination and desire, she is utterly irreplaceable.

B. Her response (6:11–12)

11. There is no clear change of speaker in verse 11, and so many commentators take these to be the man’s words, with the ‘garden’ being a metaphor for the woman, as it often is elsewhere in the Song. However, the garden in view here is specifically described as a ‘garden of nuts’, which distances it somewhat from the other parallels.35 Moreover, the difficult verse 12 seems to make more sense in the mouth of the woman than the man. For that reason, I take these verses as the woman’s response to the man (see the discussion in Exum 2005: 223).

Whereas the man went down to his garden to graze (rā‘āh; 6:2), the woman went down to the garden to gaze (rā’āh), which forms a parallel for her activity in the exalted position of the skies in the previous verses. She went down to look for evidence of the return of the spring: to see whether there were blossoms in the valley, whether the vines had budded and the pomegranates were in bloom. This language is strongly reminiscent of 2:12–13, where these features were signs that the whole world was in flower, and that it was therefore the time of love. Now, after her earlier rebuff of the man, she is hesitantly but hopefully searching for similar signs of a spring thaw in their relationship.

12. What happened subsequently is not entirely clear to the reader, as perhaps it was not clear to the woman herself. Literally, the Hebrew reads: ‘I do not know/my soul/set me/chariots of Amminadib.’ ‘My soul’ here may perhaps be both the object of the first clause and the subject of the second (Exum 2005: 224). ‘I do not know my soul’ does not normally mean ‘Before I knew it’ (pace ESV, NIV, HCSB); rather, it connotes a mental disturbance in which one does not know clearly what one is doing: ‘I was beside myself’ (see Fox 1985: 156). There seems no clear meaning to be obtained by taking Amminadab as a personal name, and in any case, the text as it stands reads ‘Amminadib’, not ‘Amminadab’. It could be translated ‘the chariots of my noble people’, but it is perhaps better to emend ‘ammî here to ‘im, with the Peshitta, and translate ‘my soul set me in a chariot with a noble’ (cf. 7:2; Fox 1985: 156). The whole sentence then would describe her emotional state after going down to the garden of nuts and discovering that the vines and pomegranates were indeed still in bloom. Her fears that she had lost the man forever were false: he still loved her, in spite of her earlier coldness. When she heard the man’s words and discovered that he still found her uniquely attractive, she was as enraptured as if she had been caught up in a royal chariot with Prince Charming. She was utterly overwhelmed emotionally to find that their romantic relationship had been restored.

Meaning

The restoration of their relationship reveals the man’s commitment to the woman as well as his dependence on her. Instead of upbraiding and scolding her for her unreasonable refusal of him, the man affirms once again her beauty and her power over him. These strong emotions display the fearsome side as well as the beauty of love. The woman’s displeasure has the power to unsettle the man deeply; her approval means the world to him. In contrast to the Solomonic model of ‘love’, where a vast multitude of wives and concubines means that the king has no great need of any particular individual wife and is therefore not greatly affected by her attitude towards him, the woman is unique in the man’s estimation. As a result, he comes to know her more intimately and to depend on her more thoroughly than would ever be possible under the Solomonic approach. This affirmation of single-hearted devotion catches her by surprise and joyfully disconcerts her in turn. Her visit to the garden to see whether the vines are in bloom is successful: the time for love has returned. This discovery leaves her feeling suddenly caught up with overwhelming joy – as if riding along in a state procession with the nobility.

It can be hard for us as Christians to think of God truly delighting in us, particularly if we are very aware of our personal history (and present reality) of sin. Yet the prophet Isaiah reminded the exiles that in spite of the record of failure that had led to the exile, nonetheless the time was coming when God would once again delight in his people (Isa. 62:4). God is committed to recreating his people into a beautiful and spotless bride of overwhelming beauty, and even now, he sees us as utterly beautiful in Christ (Eph. 5:27).

C. Renewed contemplation of the beloved (6:13 – 7:9a)

Context

The man summons the woman back from her imaginative flight and once again praises her beauty (6:13 – 7:9a). This time, with their quarrel at an end, he describes the physical attractiveness of her body in its full glory. Unlike previous descriptions which start at the head and work downwards (4:1–15; 6:1–9), the man now starts at her feet and moves upwards, including the more erotic parts of the anatomy. Nor is he content to describe her appearance; he also expresses his desire to touch and caress her. This time, she responds to his invitation with eagerness (7:9b–10), and they make plans to renew their love first in the countryside (7:11–13) and then in the city (8:1–4).

Comment

13. Once again it is not clear who is speaking in the opening verse (6:13 in the English = 7:1 in Hebrew). Most likely, given what follows, it is the man who asks the girl to return. Some have thought that the request is for her to ‘turn’, in the sense of performing a twirling dance, but šûb does not seem to have that meaning elsewhere (Fox 1985: 157). Since the woman went down to the gardens, where she was swept up into an emotional ecstasy, the request for her to come back so that the man can continue to praise her makes sense as it stands. He desires not merely to look upon her (ESV) but to ‘gaze on’ her (NIV): the verb is ḥāzâ, which is often used of prophetic visions. The woman is addressed as the Shulammite, which is a title rather than a proper name. This is the only place in the Song where the woman has a specific designator. It may mean ‘perfect one’ (cf. the similar epithet in 5:2) or ‘peace-filled one’ (cf. 8:10).

The meaning of the second half of the verse is debated. Most English translations render mah as ‘Why?’, but it more commonly has the force of ‘What?’ or ‘How?’. In the following verse, it has exclamatory force and perhaps it should be rendered in the same way here: ‘How you gaze upon the Shulammite, as upon the dance of the two camps!’ (Exum 2005: 228). Since the whole point of the depiction of the woman is to make her beauty plain, it seems unlikely that the poet would have rebuked those who desired to look upon her. Women danced publicly (and perfectly modestly) in celebration of military victories in ancient Israel (Exod. 15:20; Judg. 11:34; 1 Sam. 18:6–7), a connection that is underlined by the reference to the ‘dance of Mahanaim’ (NIV). ‘Two camps’, which is what Mahanaim means, could have military connotations, though it is also a significant place from Israel’s past, the location where Jacob wrestled with God. On that occasion, the ‘two camps’ referred to the unseen angelic encampment that protected Jacob’s own tents (Gen. 32:2). There is no necessary suggestion that the woman is actually dancing at this point, however: the point is merely that she draws and holds the eyes of all around her in the same way that such dancers do.

7:1. The description of the woman’s beauty this time begins with her feet, which are described as beautiful ... in sandals, like those of a nobleman’s daughter, rather than the rough and work-scarred feet of the poor. Most women went barefoot in antiquity; only the very wealthy would have been able to afford the luxury of sandals. The word for feet here (pa‘am) normally indicates feet in motion and so may also have in mind the gracefulness of her steps (Estes 2010: 391). The process of beginning with her feet and moving upwards to her head, the reverse order from what is normal in these poems, emphasizes her height, a point that is explicit in several of the images. She is exalted in his eyes.

The next four items – thighs, navel, belly and breasts – are linked together by rounded shape and association with sex and fertility. Indeed, since the sandals are the only item of clothing mentioned in this poem, the impression is given that other items of apparel may have been entirely dispensed with. The woman’s thighs indicate the upper part of her legs: the curves in question here are therefore the buttocks, which are compared to ornaments made by a skilled craftsman. The Hebrew word for ‘craftsman’ (’ommān) invites comparison with Proverbs 8:30, where wisdom is the master craftsman (’āmôn) at work alongside God in creation, hinting that God himself is ultimately the craftsman whose splendid work the woman represents (Barbiero 2011: 374).

2–3. Her navel is a rounded bowl containing mixed wine, that is, wine that has been supplemented with sweeteners and aromatic scents. This probably does not refer strictly to her navel, which we would expect to come after the belly as the description moves upwards along the woman’s body, but is rather a discreet reference to the entire genital area and the intoxicating pleasures that it contains for her lover. Love is often compared to wine in the Song (e.g. 1:2), but this wine is particularly special.

Next he describes her belly as a rounded heap of wheat, the exact opposite of the flat stomach for which modern women (and men) so often strive. The colour of wheat reflects a healthy skin tone in the Middle East; while corn and wine were staple foods for the population, so an abundance of these things signifies the rich blessing of fertility. Since the Hebrew word for ‘belly’ also indicates the womb, it would appear that here, as in many other cultures, ancient tastes preferred women always to look slightly pregnant rather than in danger of imminent starvation.

The heap of wheat that represents the belly is surrounded by lilies. This is a slightly jarring metaphorical juxtaposition, as lilies would not normally grow around a heap of wheat. Within the world of the poem, however, it makes perfect sense. The man has previously grazed among the lilies (2:16; 6:3), and the lilies have previously been associated with his lips (5:13) and her breasts (4:5). Thus the woman’s belly is valued not simply for its procreative capacity, but also for its sensuality. The link with the breasts extends to the next verse as well, which is an almost verbatim repetition of 4:5, as they are compared to twin fawns. Once again, the images of fertility and sexual enjoyment overlap and overflow into one another.

4. Yet the woman is not just an objectified body, as in pornographic representations of the female form. The man also describes five elements of her upper body (neck, eyes, nose, head and hair) to balance the five parts of her lower body (feet, thighs, ‘navel’, belly, breasts). He values her as a person, not just a sexual object. Here, though, the lines tend to be straight and vertical, rather than the rounded and soft shape of the lower body (Barbiero 2011: 369–371). Her neck is like an ivory tower, slender and upright. Ivory decorations were occasionally used architecturally in the ancient world (1 Kgs 22:39; Ps. 45:8), and this image corresponds to the man’s belly of ivory in 5:14. The import of the image is that she holds herself upright with dignity and pride and has no need to hide her body in shame before her husband.

The woman’s eyes are like pools of water, clear and shining, just as the man’s were compared to doves beside the water in 5:12. Perhaps there is a subtle interplay of images here: her eyes and his connect as his doves are reflected in her pools. Heshbon continues a series of references to place names, including Tirzah and Jerusalem in 6:4, Gilead in 6:5 and Mahanaim in 6:13. These references further connect the figure of the woman with the land of Israel itself (Davis 1998: 539). Bath-rabbim is otherwise unknown as a place name, but literally means ‘daughter of great ones’, and so provides a suitable parallel for ‘daughter of a noble’ in verse 1, emphasizing her royal bearing. Meanwhile, her nose is like the tower of Lebanon – not literally in size or shape, of course, but rather because as the seat of her pride it looks down scornfully on all dangers, here represented by Damascus, the capital city of Israel’s ancient foes, the Arameans. From pastoral and agricultural metaphors, the Song moves to architectural and military images, which stress the woman’s determination and ability to defend her honour resolutely until the time comes to open the gates of her citadel to her husband (cf. 8:10).

5. The description of the woman began at her feet and ends with her head, her crowning feature, which is like Mount Carmel in her lofty bearing and carriage. The Hebrew word karmel sounds like karmîl, which describes a dark crimson colour and connects the image with the following one. Her flowing locks are like purple, which was one of the most expensive dyes in antiquity. It was extracted from the shell of sea snails through a complex and costly process, and was thus reserved for royalty and the extremely wealthy. The point of comparison is not directly the colour, but the value and sheen of her hair, which is depicted hanging loose around her face, like threads dangling from a weaver’s loom. Yet the woman’s hair is no passive appendage to her body: it has the power to hold a king ... captive in the tresses. In contrast to the images of defensive resistance created by the towers, her hair is an active force, holding the man tightly within her orbit. He is unable to escape her beauty, even should he wish to do so. This image of womanly perfection is not a compliant plastic doll who exists to serve the man’s every whim. On the contrary, she is a powerful and strong person, a masterpiece of God’s handiwork.

6–9a. The poem of praise for the woman’s beauty ends with a general description of her loveliness: she is beautiful and pleasant, words that recall her description of him back in 1:16 (and indeed the exclamation that begins the description in 7:1, forming an inclusio). Each of her individual features is not only attractive in its own right, but together they form a harmonious whole, waiting to be enjoyed. The metaphors shift from describing the woman as a cityscape or as mountains to depicting her as a tall date palm tree, with her breasts represented by bunches of dates. In ancient iconography, date palms were often pictured with a pair of date clusters symmetrically on either side of the palm (Barbiero 2011: 392). While continuing to affirm her stately majesty, the man declares that he is not content to admire the woman’s beauty visually from a distance; rather, he wants to engage his other senses as well, touching, smelling and tasting her sweetness. In metaphorical terms, he longs to climb the palm tree and pick her dates or, shifting the image in typical poetic fashion, her clusters of grapes. In more straightforward language, the man longs to bridge the distance that has come between them so that he can once again caress and fondle her breasts. He also desires to breathe in the scent of her breath, which he compares to apples (see 2:3–5), and taste the best wine of the kisses of her mouth (see 1:2).

D. Renewed response (7:9b–10)

Comment

9b–10. On this occasion, the man will not go away disappointed. The woman is so eager to respond positively to his request that she breaks in and finishes the sentence for him: her wine goes down smoothly for her beloved. The repeated participles here stress the ongoing nature of their mutual enjoyment of love, which like a fine wine goes ‘gliding over the lips of sleepers’ (NJPS). The significance of this image is not transparent, so some translations emend the initial yod to a vav and translate ‘sleepers’ as ‘teeth’. However, the reference to sleepers may be making the point that his declarations of love have aroused her from her slumber, something he was unable to do at the beginning of this section in 5:2. The images of distance and inaccessibility that were created by her coldness towards him are now bridged by the wine that flows from the lips of one to the other.

What the woman gives the man is not merely her body, but herself. Various forms of the refrain ‘My beloved is mine and I am his’ occur three times in the Song (2:16; 6:3; 7:10), each time on the lips of the woman. The first time it is an affirmation of mutual ownership, even though she has declined his invitation to come out into the fields with him. The second time it is a declaration of her submission to him and so the order is reversed, beginning with ‘I am my beloved’s.’ On this third occasion, the order remains reversed, continuing her joyful submission of herself to her husband, but now the second part becomes his desire is for me. The word ‘desire’ occurs elsewhere in the Bible only in Genesis 3 and 4. In the curse of Genesis 3:16, the Lord declares to the woman that ‘Your desire will be for your husband and he shall rule over you’, indicating the conflict between the sexes that results from the Fall (Waltke 2001: 94). Now, however, it is his desire that is extended towards her, pointing to a restoration and healing of that fundamentally broken relationship. Their delight in each other flows out of mutual submission, in which each delights to put the other first (Eph. 5:21).

Meaning

And so (back) to bed. The restoration of the man and the woman’s relationship ends up with renewed enjoyment of sexual union, here depicted not merely as a means of acquiring children, but as the highest form of intimacy between a married couple. This joy is something eagerly desired not merely by the man but by the woman as well, as the fullest expression of their love. Now they are once again ‘bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh’ (Gen. 2:23), giving and receiving joy from each other. In this mutual self-giving of bride to husband and vice versa, there is a beautiful picture of Christ’s self-sacrificial love for the church, and her joyful submission to his headship (Eph. 5:22–32), in which the broken relationship between people and God is finally healed. In that way, the declaration ‘I will be your God and you will be my people’ comes to fulfilment.

E. Consummation (7:11 – 8:4)

Context

These verses round off the section that began in 6:13. Now that the couple’s relationship has been restored, they seek opportunities to enjoy that relationship both in the countryside (11–13) and in the city (8:1–4). The latter location, which is where the woman’s family lives, prepares for the following section, in which the public aspects of their relationship once again come to the fore.

Comment

11–12. The woman continues to speak, this time addressing her words directly to the man and inviting him to go out into the countryside (the fields and ‘the henna bushes’),36 which is the natural habitat of love. Back in 1:13–14, she wished that he could spend a night (lîn, the same verb that the ESV translates as lodge in 7:11) between her breasts like a sachet of myrrh in the vineyards of Engedi. In chapter 2, the man asked her to go out into the countryside (2:10, 13); now she returns the invitation. The goal of the journey is the same: in chapter 2, he invited her to see whether ‘the vines are in blossom’ (2:13). The parallel with 6:11 is even stronger: there, while searching for her beloved she went down to the garden to see ‘whether the vines had budded, whether the pomegranates were in bloom’. Those earlier requests were frustrated searches: the man was not with her for the night in chapter 1; she refused to go out with him in chapter 2; she was still searching for him in chapter 6. Here, however, the emphasis is on the repeated first common plural forms: ‘I’ and ‘you’ have now been replaced with ‘we’ and ‘us’. The search is over for both of them; the delights of sexual love that the man sought unsuccessfully in 5:2 will now be given to him: There I will give you my love (lit. ‘caresses’; see comment on 1:2).

13. The desire expressed in verses 11–12 finds its fulfilment in verse 13. The doors of their rustic ‘house’ (cf. 1:16–17) are surrounded by mandrakes, which were associated with love and fertility in the Ancient Near East (see Gen. 30:14–16; Keel 1994: 257–260). Their very name in Hebrew, dûdā’îm, sounds like ‘love fruits’. The choice fruits of this garden (see 4:13) are new as well as old, which may be a merism referring generally to all of the various kinds of conjugal love, or more specifically may indicate the joy of renewed union (‘new’) as a reiteration of their original union on their wedding night (‘old’). Either way, these are the delights of love that the woman has laid up and kept safe to give to her husband alone. There is certainly no celebration of promiscuity in the Song.

8:1–2. The scene shifts from the country to the city, uniting these two locations, with the sections being linked together by the common leitwort ‘give’. The difficulties of celebrating love in the city are prominent, yet in this poem they are overcome. The woman expresses a wish that the man were like a brother to me who nursed at my mother’s breasts. In the Song, breasts usually have erotic overtones and express the desire for intimacy, but here the reference to her mother’s breasts as the source of milk highlights the lack of intimacy between them. The implication is that near relations can embrace on the street acceptably, without sexual connotations, whereas even husbands and wives cannot (Barbiero 2011: 425). In Genesis 29:11, cousins kiss publicly while adulteresses do so brazenly in Proverbs 7:13, but apparently not respectable married people. These social limitations cannot simply be tossed aside at the bidding of love.

In the previous section, set in the countryside, such social niceties need not be observed. But true love is never content to exist in secret: it craves public approbation of the relationship. Therefore, the woman wishes to bring the man to the house of her mother, to receive the approval of her family. In chapter 3, this was where she wanted to bring the man when she found him, as a sign of public approval of their relationship. Now she is able to bring him there without fear. This is an appropriate place for celebrating their relationship, since it was there her mother used to teach her. The exact nature of what her mother taught her is left unspecified, but in context, it is presumably the ways of love (perhaps illuminating an important aspect of what the older women are to teach the younger women in Titus 2:4). There, having been received in the parental home, she would give him spiced wine to drink,37 which is reminiscent of the ‘best wine’ of 7:9. This fine wine is further described as the juice of my pomegranate; her pomegranates (her breasts; Munro 1995: 73) are not merely in bloom, as in 6:11 and 7:12, but have budded and borne fruit, which now becomes the source of his intoxicating refreshment. There is an element of newness about this sexual encounter (cf. 7:13): as Assis puts it, ‘They have drunk the wine, but not the spiced wine, they have eaten the pomegranate, but they have not yet drunk the nectar of the pomegranate’ (2009: 230). Yet at the same time, it represents the fulfilment of the old desire that has existed from the beginning of the Song.

3. The literal description of what she wishes for now replaces the metaphorical: she says, ‘Let his left hand be under my head; let his right hand embrace me’ (NASV). This refrain matches 2:6 and expresses her desire for their relationship to be consummated again in the context of full public approval. There is, however, still a distance between her desire and what she possesses (Assis 2009: 230). Although modern translations and commentators almost universally render the verbs as present active indicative (‘His left hand is ... ’), the imperfect verb matches the imperfects in the previous verse, whose optative force it continues, as in 2:6–7. It is still a wish rather than something already attained.

4. This naturally leads to a return to the repeated refrain adjuring the daughters of Jerusalem not to stir up or awaken love until it pleases (2:7; 3:5). Love that cannot be celebrated by the wider society is love that is incomplete and frustrating: a privately enjoyed love in the countryside is not enough. On this third use of the refrain, the adjuration is strengthened by the use of the particle mâ rather than ’im (Longman 2001: 206). As will be made abundantly clear in the following section, the power of love is intense, and those who pursue it unwisely will end up burned in its mighty flame, not warmed by its enchanting fire.

Meaning

Marriage, and the public affirmation of the relationship that it represents, is not merely a meaningless piece of paper. It matters what society thinks about the relationship between the man and the woman. Sex is not simply a private matter between two consenting adults; it is something that needs to be celebrated by the family and the community in order to be fully enjoyed. Equally, though, sexual enjoyment is not simply the domain of men: women too are designed by God to long for and enjoy satisfying sexual passion within marriage.

7. EPILOGUE (8:5–14)

Context

There is little agreement among commentators as to the structure of the final poem of the Song. However, the disparate elements of these verses draw together the themes of the rest of the poem, much like the finale to a symphony. In particular, the epilogue provides an inclusio with the prologue in 1:2 – 2:7. For example, the vineyard theme in 8:11–12 corresponds to 1:6: these are the only two passages in the Song where the woman speaks of ‘my own vineyard’. Her brothers appear only in 1:6 and 8:8–9, while ‘companions’ (ḥăbērîm) are found only in 1:7 and 8:13. ‘Keeping the vineyard’ and the person of Solomon provide other links between 1:5–6 and 8:11–12.

There seems to be a threefold dialogue in these verses: between the daughters of Jerusalem and the woman (vv. 5–7), between the brothers and the woman (vv. 8–12), and between the woman and the man (vv. 13–14). Fittingly, the woman has the last word in the Song, just as she had the first word.

A. The overwhelming power of love (8:5–7)

Comment

5a. The question Who is this ... ? has been asked twice before, in 3:6 and 6:10. In each case, the answer is the same: the woman. As in 3:6, she is coming up from the wilderness, but this time she is no longer alone. The gap between the man and the woman has been bridged, and so she comes up from the wilderness leaning on her beloved. This recalls the joy of her wedding day back in chapter 3. The question ‘Who is this?’ does not receive an immediate answer in what follows (just as it did not in 3:6). Instead, the question is an invitation to observe that the woman’s desire expressed in verse 6 to be a seal on her lover’s heart and arm is already a reality: the couple proceeds through life tenderly bonded together. As in the preceding poem, the journey starts in the countryside and moves towards the city. The parallel with 3:6 invokes a similar geographical setting, travelling up towards Jerusalem, which is elevated in comparison to its surroundings. She has no need of Solomon’s sixty warriors to protect her from the dangers of the journey: the mere presence of her beloved is sufficient (Barbiero 2011: 447).

5b. The woman then addresses her beloved: Under the apple tree I awakened you. The verb is the same as that in the woman’s repeated adjuration to the daughters of Jerusalem not to arouse or awaken love (2:7; 3:5; 8:4), which makes it clear that in this context she is not merely talking about awakening the man from sleep, but rather about arousing him sexually. The erotic overtones of apples were discussed in connection with 2:5, but in this scene the individual apples have become an entire tree, symbolizing the lasting nature of the loving relationship into which the couple have entered. Nor is their relationship merely about mutual sexual satisfaction, for the second half of the verse reminds us that sex is naturally related to childbirth. When the woman says, There your mother was in labour with you, she does not mean to suggest that her husband was literally born under that specific tree. It is a metaphor linking what the apple tree represents (sex) with the joyful/painful results of that act in terms of offspring. The verb could also mean ‘There your mother conceived you’ (NIV), but if the woman’s goal is to connect cause and effect, there is little difference in meaning between the two translations. The point, as with 8:2, is to highlight the continuity of the family line that is represented by their relationship (Hess 2005: 237). The goal of sexual arousal within marriage is not merely mutual pleasure (although in the Song it certainly includes that); it also hopes and longs for the joyous outcome of pregnancy and childbirth, even with all of the pains and challenges that parenting brings.

6. Thus far, the Song has dealt with love through the specific experiences of the lovers. Only here, at the climax of the Song, do we find an affirmation of the nature of love in general. The woman asks the man, Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm. Seals were objects of great personal value in antiquity and were therefore guarded carefully, carried on a cord around the owner’s neck or on an armlet (Hallo 1985: 22). They were used to identify possessions and to sign documents, by making an imprint on another object, as we might brand an animal or imprint a wax seal on a legal contract. In a similar way, the woman wants to be imprinted on the man’s heart and his arm. The heart was the seat of a person’s thoughts and feelings, their inner self (cf. Prov. 3:3), while the arm was the locus of a person’s actions or power. Together they represent the whole person (Longman 2001: 210): the woman wants to be constantly by his side and in his thoughts, an integral part of his identity.

The reason for her desire is the overwhelming power of love, which is as strong as death. Death cannot easily be challenged or prevented: it is a tenacious foe, and when it calls, no human has the power to resist it (Isa. 5:14; Hab. 2:5). Once people enter its grip, there is no going back: death never releases those whom it holds captive. So, too, love is tenacious and single-minded, an irresistible force. Love marches hand in hand with jealousy, which is fierce as the grave (or better, ‘Sheol’, as the HCSB has it, for Sheol is much more than the grave in the Old Testament; see Johnston 2002). We typically think of jealousy as a negative emotion, a refusal to share something that ought to be shared. However, in the Bible it is often used positively to describe what we might call ‘zeal’ or ‘passion’, the assertion of rightful claims of possession against anyone and anything that might stand in our way (Carr 1984: 170). It is an attribute of God himself, who claims exclusive rights over his people and will not share them with other deities (Deut. 4:24).

Love and jealousy are likewise compared with flames, which also have a life of their own and are not easily mastered. These are no ordinary flames, however, but the very flame of the LORD. Translations are divided over whether to take the abbreviation yah as shorthand for the divine name (ESV; NASV) or simply as a superlative (‘a mighty flame’; NIV; HCSB). This would be the only reference to the divine name in the entire book, but since this is the climax of the Song, such a reference cannot be ruled out. There are plenty of more direct ways of expressing a superlative in Hebrew that would not evoke the Lord’s name in quite the same way. It must be remembered that Death (môt) and Sheol, along with Flames (rešep), were deities in the Ancient Near East, so a climactic reference to the true God of love seems plausible. Perhaps the most elegant translation, retaining something of the ambiguity of the original, is ‘an Almighty flame’ (Exum 2005: 254). Love’s superhuman powers rank it among the greatest forces in existence.

7. In Ugaritic literature, the phrase many waters is frequently used with reference to Yam, the chaotic sea. Fire and flood are opposites that together represent every uncontrollable force in the universe. In the Bible, however, the power of the Lord is even greater than that of many waters (Pss 29:3; 93:4). There are several notable verbal parallels between these verses and Isaiah 43:2, where the Lord promises protection for his people when they pass through the dangers of many waters and threatening flames. Even though enough water can normally put out a fire, not even the most fearful threats in this world can overwhelm the power of love. Nor can such a love be bought: even if a man gave all the wealth of his house, he could not buy it. It is truly the pearl beyond price, and such an attempt to commercialize and purchase it would simply leave him utterly despised.

Meaning

Love cannot be bought and sold. It is a single-hearted, lifelong, jealous devotion between one man and one woman, from the moment it seizes a person until the moment of their death. Nothing but the grave can separate two people who are thus joined together. This surely fits the biblical ideal of marriage, laid out in Genesis 2:24. The marriage that the Song describes is no insipid institution, no mere cultural convention, but a blazing fire of passion! Far from being opposed to one another, marriage and passion go hand in hand in the Song.

In a sense, 8:5–7 lays out the whole story of a life in brief compass: marriage (v. 5a), sex (v. 5b), children (v. 5c) and death (v. 6). Is there anything more profound to life than this? The subtle references to the Lord and his protection of his people in verses 6 and 7 point us beyond this life to the greater love that will never let us go, triumphing even over death, the last enemy.

B. The incomparable value of love (8:8–12)

Context

The last line of the previous section introduced the theme of this section (vv. 8–12), which speaks of arranged marriages and vineyards (wives) that Solomon has accumulated for himself at great cost. Nonetheless, this commercial model is very different from the true love that binds the woman and her man, which cannot be bought for any price. It is better to have one simple vineyard that you truly own and enjoy than the most costly vineyard that has to be managed for you by keepers.

Comment

8. The woman’s brothers were last mentioned in the opening chapter, where they were forcing her to work in the vineyards, to the detriment of her appearance. Now, although they seem more solicitous for her welfare, they still treat her as an object rather than as a person. According to her brothers, the woman has no breasts: that is, she has not reached sexual maturity and the status of an ‘almâ (see comment on 1:3). However, they are already planning her future for her, discussing the day when she is spoken for, the day on which someone will come and acquire her by paying a dowry. It is taken for granted that such negotiations will be undertaken by the family on her behalf: the possibility that she might wish to have input on the matter of her husband does not cross their minds.

9. The brothers compare the woman to a (city) wall and a door. These are generally seen as images of virginity, though it is not agreed whether these are synonymous or contrasting metaphors. A wall is clearly designed to keep people out, but a door could either be closed, symbolizing chastity (Keel 1994: 279), or open, symbolizing promiscuity (Murphy 1990: 198). Since the accoutrements which the brothers propose to add to her, a battlement of silver and boards of cedar, both seem to be more decorative than functional, it is probably best to take the metaphors as parallel. Thus far, her purity is unblemished, and the brothers propose to adorn that feature (perhaps to make up for the lack of other physical attributes, such as developed breasts) as their marketing strategy. Surely a city guarded by cedar doors whose walls are topped with battlements of silver is a worthwhile acquisition. Yet mention of ‘silver’ reminds us that the brothers’ motivations are far from personally disinterested: silver points back to verse 7 and on to verse 11 as the medium of commercialized love. The high wall, with its battlement of silver, is aimed at keeping the girl in as much as it is at keeping unwelcome suitors out (Barbiero 2011: 476).

10. Prior to meeting her beloved, the woman was indeed a wall. That is, she carefully protected her virginity and purity, without the need of her brothers’ assistance. True love, of the kind described in 8:6–7, is by its very nature chaste: it is single-hearted in its lifelong commitment to one individual. The woman’s breasts were like towers, which as a key part of the city wall provided the last bastion of resistance to the onslaught of the enemy. Once the towers fell, a city was lost. At the same time, the woman is asserting that she had indeed arrived at full womanhood, contrary to the brothers’ assertions. ‘Now’38 that she has found her true love, the strongly defended city has surrendered itself to a new master. This is not a tragic defeat, but a joyful act of submission, which finds39 no shame but rather peace. This ‘peace’, or wholeness, is found in his eyes, the organs that played such a significant part in the initial attraction process, observing and being observed in all of their beauty. The search for love, a prominent theme throughout the Song, ends when the lovers find each other, and in the process find completion in one another.

11. Mention of the ‘peace’ (šālôm) that is found in giving oneself uniquely to the beloved invites a stark contrast with the experience of ‘love’ enjoyed by Solomon (šĕlōmōh). Using the standard introduction to a parable (cf. Isa. 5:1), we are told that Solomon had a vineyard at Baal-hamon. The name of this otherwise unknown location literally means ‘lord/husband of a crowd’. In 2 Chronicles 11:23, Rehoboam, Solomon’s son, acquired a crowd (hămôn) of wives for his sons. Since the image of a vineyard stands repeatedly for the woman’s body throughout the Song (see especially 1:5–6), the metaphor is transparent: Solomon has the means to acquire a multitude of wives (the ‘thousand’ may be a reference to the 700 wives and 300 concubines listed in 1 Kgs 11:3; cf. Song 6:8–9). Yet instead of taking care of his vineyard himself, Solomon gave it into the care of keepers, who had to bring him the enormous sum of a thousand pieces of silver for its fruit. He employs others to take care of his wives as if his harem were a commercial farming enterprise, rather than actually knowing and loving his wives intimately himself.

12. The speaker of this verse is debated, but whether it comes from the lips of the man or the woman, its meaning remains the same. In contrast to Solomon’s vast wealth and high-rent vineyard, the woman has only one simple vineyard to give: her own body. Yet her man is fully satisfied with its fruit and needs no other. Solomon can keep his thousand, for which reward he has to pay his employees a significant share. Accumulating wives is not the same as accumulating wealth. In fact, it is the opposite, for multiplying wives means forfeiting the true peace and wholeness to be found only in a single-hearted commitment between one man and one woman. Few people who read Solomon’s story in 1 Kings could disagree with the conclusion that Solomon’s tragic personal history is the exact opposite of the ideal held up in the Song.

Meaning

Like the opening of the sealed spring and the unlocking of the locked garden in chapter 4, the surrender of the closely guarded city is a beautiful gift that the woman gives to her beloved. When this gift is given in the context of marriage, it does not bring remorse or shame, but rather wholeness and peace. On her lips, the phrase ‘My body, my choice’ means the exact opposite of a feminist manifesto: it is a commitment to preserve her purity until the day comes when she can offer it as a gift to her husband. Nor is the ideal of godly womanhood in the Song a perpetual virgin queen who successfully resists all suitors forever: the battlement-encrusted wall is a stage in the journey towards full womanhood and the wonderful joy of giving her untarnished vineyard to her true love. Multiple spouses or other sexual encounters do not represent success and wholeness, but exactly the opposite. Yet even the best human love in marriage provides only a faint analogy for the greatest peace of all, which is found when we surrender ourselves to our true Beloved, Christ himself. He gave himself for his bride with a single-hearted devotion that contrasts starkly with Solomon’s self-interested conquests (see Isa. 5:1).

C. The unending nature of love (8:13–14)

Context

Verses 13–14 form the epilogue not merely for this section but for the whole poem. The focus rests once again on the couple themselves rather than on love in general. They are together at last in the garden with nothing to worry about. The winter is past, and the rains are over: surely nothing remains now but their enjoyment of each other. Yet it is an ending that in some ways doesn’t conclude: there is no ‘And so they lived happily ever after’ to their story. Rather, the open-ended conclusion to the Song reminds us that love is not a destination at which we arrive, but a journey to be undertaken together, a song that truly never ends (Munro 1995: 89).

Comment

13. The woman is the subject of this verse, the one who dwells in the gardens, as the Hebrew makes clear. The garden is the sphere of love in the Song, so to dwell there permanently is to be constantly surrounded by love. The reference to companions harks back to 1:7, where the same term described the man’s fellow shepherds. Here they represent the wider society, with which the couple have had such an ambivalent relationship throughout the Song. At the end of the story, though, they are an affirming presence, a group listening attentively (maqšîbîm) to hear her voice, so that they too may understand the lessons of love that she has learned. Their posture invites us to listen and learn as well. The man too longs to hear the woman’s voice, just as he did in 2:14. He is as captivated by her charms as ever.

14. Yet what he hears from her lips is an unexpected command to flee (the English versions translate this as Make haste [ESV] or ‘Come away’ [NIV], though such a meaning for bāraḥ is not attested elsewhere in the Old Testament; see Barbiero 2011: 498–501). Since they are together, this verb requires the man and the woman now to separate, as they did in the parallel verse in 2:17. Yet it is certainly not a harsh dismissal: she says, ‘Flee, my beloved’, repeating again her favourite term of endearment. Paradoxically, the place to which she sends him away is her own body, represented by the mountains of spices. It seems that she has learned that the separations that life necessitates can never really take them away from each other. He leaves her only in order to return in due course and enjoy the pleasures of a gazelle ... on the mountains of spices, a vivid image of the delights of lovemaking (see 2:17). A love that cannot ever let the beloved out of a person’s sight is an immature, insecure thing. True love is able to send the beloved away, in order to receive him back in due season: where there is real love, absence can only make the heart grow fonder. In this movement of leaving and returning, of yearning and receiving and then yearning again, there is an intimation that love is not a static tableau, but a dynamic, ongoing relationship, truly a song that never ends.

Meaning

Love is a journey, not a destination. It is two people united into one, travelling together, but confident enough to be apart when necessary. At the centre of this union is a delightful physical relationship, but this is merely one aspect of knowing each other completely. The man longs to hear the woman’s voice, as well as to hold her in his arms. Her desire to kiss him, with which the poem began, has been fulfilled but not satisfied: it never can be. The note of yearning and longing persists in their relationship, wonderful as it is. This longing is intended to remind us all of a love greater than any human love, a love for which marriage provides the best picture that the world affords. This jealous love of God for his people has triumphed over death and Sheol through the cross, and now invites his bride into his eternal embrace, to embark on a journey together that stretches beyond our own deaths and the grave, onwards and upwards forever.

1. For a comprehensive survey of the history of interpretation of the Song, see Pope’s monumental study (1977: 89–229).

2. Thus the image of a dove in the clefts of the rock in 2:14 is often interpreted allegorically in terms of believers hiding themselves in Christ; yet in the original poem the force of the image is that the woman is inaccessible to the man, not that she is hiding herself in the man (see Fountain 1966: 100).

3. So Kline 1959: 23. C. J. Mahaney states, ‘The Song is full of erotic phrases, yet our relationship with God is never portrayed in the Bible as erotic ... When describing our relationship with God, or when communicating our passion for him in prayer or worship, it’s right to use a vocabulary of love. But this language should never include anything erotic. “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:24)’ (2005: 153).

4. The New Testament is not completely devoid of echoes of the Song. Rev. 3:20 in particular may draw on Song 5:2; see commentary below.

5. The term comes from Fountain, 1966.

6. As reported by Eusebius, though modern scholars have rightly been sceptical. Would the man whose model of exegesis was founded on allegory really be the only person in the history of the church ever to have taken Matt. 19:12 literally? See McGuckin 2004: 6–7.

7. For a fuller exploration of the ways in which the Song both points to Christ and speaks to our human relationships, see the expositions in my Song of Songs (REC; forthcoming in 2016).

8. Masculine singular.

9. Feminine singular.

10. The book of Ecclesiastes is not attributed directly to Solomon, but rather to ‘the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem’ (Eccl. 1:1). However, most commentators have seen a reference of some kind to Solomon, whether or not he is recognized as the author of the material in the book.

11. Joüon speaks of lamed + ’ăšer as giving ‘more precision or more emphasis’ than lamed by itself (1993: §130e). Though Joüon takes Song 1:1 as a lamed of authorship, it does not have this sense in any of the other twelve examples that he cites; rather, they are all lameds of possession (e.g. 1 Sam. 21:8[7]; 2 Sam. 2:8; 1 Kgs 1:33). Gesenius likewise says the combination is used ‘principally to state the possessor’ (1983: §129h).

12. Taking their cue from Ps. 72:20, many older scholars understood the psalm to be written by David about Solomon, interpreting the lamed in the superscription of the psalm as ‘pertaining to’ rather than authorship. John Calvin, who explicitly discusses the various uses of the lamed, hedges his bets: the words are David’s, but the poetic form was cast by Solomon (2003: 100). Of course, such scholars always recognized the figure of a greater ‘Son of David’ hovering in the background of the psalm.

13. Compare the similar impact that the woman has on all of the young men who see her in the Egyptian love song, Chester Beatty Papyrus IA 31(E) (see Fox 1985: 52). In 32 (E) of the same poem, the girl wishes that everyone would rejoice in like manner over her ‘brother’.

14. Translating as a precative perfect rather than the definite perfect of the ESV. On the translation, see Munro 1995: 21. Even if the definite perfect is retained, it is an expression of a desire – a dream – rather than a present reality (Barbiero 2011: 57).

15. The word couch literally simply denotes something round, so it could refer to a table (so NIV); however, in this context a couch seems more likely.

16. The most common usage of this word elsewhere is for the location of the pagan fertility cults, ‘under every green tree’ (Keel 1994: 75). The pagan aspect is removed, but the interest in fertility remains.

17. Although the Hebrew word šôšānnâ has been rendered rather generically as ‘lily’ by most English translations (KJV; ESV; NIV), many scholars have argued that it should more accurately be identified as a ‘lotus’, which is a kind of water lily. The evidence that Keel produces for the use of a variety of lotus forms in the architecture of Ancient Near East is compelling (1994: 78–79), especially in view of the connection of the šôšānnâ with the temple in 1 Kgs 7:19, 22, 26. However, given the ‘exotic’ overtones of lotus flowers in our culture compared to the ‘homeliness’ of lilies, I think that the traditional translation better captures the poetic connotations of the word. It also allows the apt comparison with Jesus’ use of the word in Matt. 6.

18. As Durham takes it to be, identifying these as the words of the man (i.e. Christ) rather than the woman (1982: 125–126).

19. Some scholars identify this as an apricot rather than an apple tree, on the grounds that apple trees were not introduced into Israel until much later (so HCSB; see Fox 1985: 107). However, this view seems mistaken: Keel cites evidence of carbonized apples discovered during an archaeological dig at a fortress at Kadesh in the north-eastern Sinai (1994: 82).

20. On sāmak as ‘to prepare a bed’, see Fox 1985: 108.

21. For the optative translation, see NASV and Estes 2010: 321–322. ESV translates: His left hand is under my head, and his right hand embraces me.

22. The Hebrew of v. 17 literally says until the day breathes, which could describe either the morning, when the day ‘comes to life’, or the evening, when the cool breezes blow. However, since this description is further qualified as the time when the shadows flee, it fits better as a description of morning than of evening. See Fox 1985: 115.

23. Fox also makes a sharp disjunction between the question in 3:6, which he agrees has to do with the woman, and the description of the bed in 3:7–11 (1985: 122).

24. BDB notes that mî is ‘rarely used of things and usually where persons are understood or implied’.

25. ESV has its back, and NIV ‘its base’, taking rĕpîdâ from a root meaning ‘support’. However, an alternative root means ‘that which is spread’; hence ‘its roof’ (Murphy 1990: 149).

26. It has also been suggested that the Hebrew word ’ahăbâ here comes from a different root, meaning ‘leather’ (Driver 1936:11, followed by HALOT). If so, there is probably a play on words here.

27. These are presumably the same as the ‘daughters of Jerusalem’ in the previous verse, but the change in terminology is striking. The plural phrase ‘daughters of Zion’ only otherwise occurs in Isaiah 3:16, 17 and 4:4, in contexts that are critical of these women as being proud and arrogant, as obsessed with their possessions as Solomon is with his own.

28. The pronouns in this verse are exclusively masculine (Barbiero 2011: 160).

29. The word for the veil (ṣammâ) behind which her eyes hide occurs only in the Song of Songs (also 4:3 and 6:7) and in Isa. 47:2, where it refers to a modest covering that will be removed from the virgin daughter of Babylon.

30. In particular, in Hebrew ‘Lebanon’ closely resembles the word for ‘frankincense’ (lĕbônâ), which invites a connection between the name of this mountain and the ‘hill of frankincense’ that the man desired to climb in v. 6 (Hess 2005: 140).

31. Provan sees this as a clear reference to sexual arousal (2001: 335); Fox, however, provides several ancient parallels that support a more straightforward reading (1985: 144).

32. The ESV translates bĕdabbĕrô as when he spoke, which makes little sense in this context, as the man has already left the scene. The NIV rightly renders the phrase ‘at his departure’, recognizing that it comes from a homonym of the root dbr (Murphy 1990: 165).

33. The ESV rendering of veil for rĕdîd easily leads to confusion with the quite different garments in 1:7; 4:1 and 4:3. Perhaps the best translation is ‘mantle’.

34. Virtually all English translations render the Hebrew sappîrîm as ‘sapphires’, yet most commentators follow HALOT in identifying the word with lapis lazuli, which was considerably easier to work. See Keel 1994: 205.

35. The nut in question is most likely a walnut, which had exotic connotations in Israel, like many of the plants in the garden in 4:13–14 (Keel 1994: 222–223).

36. See HCSB; ESV footnote; most English versions translate kĕpārîm as ‘villages’, deriving it from a different root, but if someone were seeking privacy, they would hardly go out into the countryside in order to lodge overnight in a village (Exum 2005: 240). Given the connections between this poem and 1:13–14, ‘henna bushes’ seems more probable.

37. There is a play on words here between ‘I would kiss you’ (’eššāqĕkā) and ‘I would make you drink’ (’ašqĕkā).

38. ESV has then; for ’āz as ‘now’, cf. Josh. 22:31.

39. Or ‘brings out’ if it is a qal form of yāṣā’ rather than a hiphil form of māṣā’.