Where did everyone go?
Hello?
Hello?
Apparently announcing a study through the Song of Songs is one of the fastest ways to discover just how committed a congregation really is to the proposition that all Scripture is God-breathed.
Christians love the Bible. We preach the Bible. We study the Bible. We memorize the Bible. We insist that every word of Scripture is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness. Then somebody stands behind a pulpit and says, “Wonderful. Open your Bible to the Song of Songs,” and suddenly everyone remembers they left the oven on.
There is probably no book of Scripture that produces quite the same combination of curiosity, confusion, embarrassment, and strategic avoidance. Genesis has incest. Judges has atrocities. Ezekiel contains passages nobody volunteers to read at the family Christmas gathering. Yet somehow Song of Songs has acquired its own special category: inspired Scripture that we would prefer God had not asked us to read out loud.
And, to be fair, we know why.
This is a book in which a man and woman are intensely attracted to one another. They talk about bodies. They talk about desire. They talk about kissing. They use gardens, fruit, fragrances, vineyards, gazelles, palm trees, and enough other poetic imagery that generations of interpreters have occasionally looked at the ceiling and decided, “Surely this must be about something else.”
But before we decide what Song of Songs means, we have to do something much simpler.
We have to stay in the church.
Come back. Sit down.
We’re going to read the book.
The first thing we should notice is that our discomfort with Song of Songs is not necessarily a problem with Song of Songs. It may be a problem with us. Scripture does not apologize for including this book. It does not place a warning before it, lower its voice when it arrives here, or suggest that particularly mature Christians may skip ahead to Isaiah. The Song simply appears among the writings of Scripture and begins:
Song of Songs 1:1–4 (WEB)The Song of songs, which is Solomon’s.
Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth;
for your love is better than wine.
Your oils have a pleasing fragrance.
Your name is oil poured out,
therefore the virgins love you.
Take me away with you.
Let’s hurry.
The king has brought me into his rooms.
Friends:
We will be glad and rejoice in you.
We will praise your love more than wine!
Beloved:
They are right to love you.
Well.
There went the oven again.
The opening is useful because it prevents us from pretending we do not know what kind of language we are encountering. The woman does not begin with an abstract theological reflection. She wants the man she loves to kiss her. She compares his love with wine, delights in his fragrance, wants to be taken away with him, and speaks openly about her attraction to him. Whatever conclusions we eventually reach about the larger theological significance of the Song, our interpretation has to account for the rather stubborn fact that this is how the book chooses to introduce itself.
That matters because one of the easiest ways to mishandle Scripture is to decide beforehand what we think God ought to have said and then interpret what he actually said until it becomes something more comfortable. Song of Songs has suffered from that temptation perhaps more visibly than most books. Christians have often recognized, correctly, that marriage points beyond itself. Scripture eventually describes Christ and the Church using the language of bridegroom and bride. God also describes his covenant relationship with Israel using marital imagery. Those connections are real, important, and worth following.
But a real biblical connection does not give us permission to erase the original subject of a passage.
If the woman says, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,” we should probably begin our interpretation with the revolutionary observation that she would like him to kiss her.
That sounds almost comically obvious. Historically, however, interpreters have sometimes managed extraordinary feats to avoid precisely that conclusion. The kisses become divine revelation. The breasts become the Old and New Testaments. Fragrances become virtues. Bedrooms become mystical communion. Individual details are assigned spiritual counterparts until the lovers themselves nearly disappear beneath layers of symbolism.
Some of those interpreters were thoughtful Christians sincerely attempting to understand how this unusual book belonged within Holy Scripture. We should not caricature them. They also noticed genuine biblical patterns that we will eventually need to consider ourselves. The mistake is not recognizing that human marriage can point toward something greater. The mistake comes when the greater reality is used to make the human reality disappear.
Our normal rule of interpretation cannot suddenly be suspended because the passage makes us blush.
We begin with the author.
We begin with the text.
We begin with the kind of literature we are reading.
And Song of Songs announces itself as a song—indeed, the “Song of songs,” a Hebrew expression indicating the greatest or finest song. We are entering poetry. That means imagery will be dense, comparisons will be imaginative, speakers will move in and out, scenes will not always behave like straightforward historical narrative, and attempting to flatten every metaphor into literal description will produce interpretations almost as strange as allegorizing everything.
When the woman later says of her beloved, “My beloved is to me a cluster of henna blossoms from the vineyards of En Gedi” (Song of Songs 1:14), nobody needs to investigate whether the man has undergone some unfortunate botanical transformation. Poetry communicates through comparison. When the man responds, “Behold, you are beautiful, my love. Behold, you are beautiful. Your eyes are like doves” (1:15), he is not conducting an ophthalmological examination. He is describing the woman he loves through the imagery available to him.
This becomes especially important once we reach descriptions that sound bizarre to modern ears. Hair like goats. Teeth like newly shorn sheep. A neck like the tower of David. If you tried some of these lines on your spouse tonight without explanation, BenMarkel.com accepts no responsibility for what happens next.
But ancient poetry was not written using twenty-first-century American romantic vocabulary. The question is not whether these comparisons would work on a Valentine’s Day card from Walgreens. The question is what those images communicated within the world of the Song.
And once we allow the Song to speak in its own language, something begins to emerge that is remarkably ordinary and remarkably beautiful.
A man delights in a woman.
A woman delights in a man.
Neither appears ashamed of that delight.
That may seem like a modest observation, but it gives us somewhere solid to stand before we start asking the larger theological questions. Because perhaps the reason this book belongs in Scripture is not that its apparent subject needs to be replaced with something sufficiently spiritual.
Perhaps human love, marital desire, physical attraction, and delight between a man and woman were never unspiritual subjects to begin with.
That possibility should not surprise anyone who has read the beginning of the Bible.
Long before sin enters the world, before Israel exists, before Moses receives the Law, before there is a temple, priesthood, sacrifice, prophet, king, or apostle, God creates human beings as male and female. Genesis does not introduce marriage as a concession to fallen human appetites. It places marriage inside a creation that God repeatedly calls good.
Genesis 2:18–25 (WEB)Yahweh God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helper comparable to him.” Out of the ground Yahweh God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. Whatever the man called every living creature became its name. The man gave names to all livestock, and to the birds of the sky, and to every animal of the field; but for man there was not found a helper comparable to him. Yahweh God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. As the man slept, he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place. Yahweh God made a woman from the rib which he had taken from the man, and brought her to the man. The man said,
“This is now bone of my bones,
and flesh of my flesh.
She will be called ‘woman,’
because she was taken out of Man.”
Therefore a man will leave his father and his mother, and will join with his wife, and they will be one flesh. The man and his wife were both naked, and they were not ashamed.
That last sentence deserves more attention than we usually give it.
They were naked, and they were not ashamed.
Genesis is not being accidentally graphic. Nakedness is important to what happens next. Immediately after the fall, the same man and woman who had been naked without shame become conscious of their nakedness and cover themselves. Shame enters the story after sin. Alienation enters. Hiding enters. The relationship between man and woman becomes affected by the same catastrophe that damages every other part of creation.
That means Christianity begins with a radically different understanding of the body than the idea that physical things are dirty while spiritual things are holy. God made bodies. God made sexuality. God made marriage. God made the possibility that one human being could look at another human being and say, in substantially more poetic Hebrew, “I very much enjoy looking at you.”
Song of Songs lives inside that created world.
That does not mean every expression of sexual desire is therefore good. Genesis itself will quickly demonstrate otherwise. Scripture places boundaries around sexuality precisely because sexuality matters. Adultery is condemned. Sexual exploitation is condemned. Incest is condemned. Lust directed toward someone who does not belong to you is condemned. Scripture never treats desire as an autonomous authority that becomes righteous simply because someone experiences it.
But there is an enormous difference between saying sexuality can be corrupted by sin and saying sexuality is itself a corruption.
The Bible says the first.
Christians have sometimes behaved as though it says the second.
That can produce a strange version of Christian teaching in which young believers hear for years that sexual desire is dangerous, lust must be resisted, pornography is destructive, fornication is sinful, adultery is wicked, and their bodies must be controlled—and all of those warnings have legitimate biblical foundations. Then they marry, and somehow everyone expects a switch to flip overnight. The thing they have primarily learned to associate with danger is suddenly supposed to be received as a gift.
Scripture gives us prohibitions because we need them. But Scripture also gives us Song of Songs.
That is important.
Song of Songs does not merely tell us what sexuality must not become. It gives us a picture of desire that does not need to apologize for existing. The lovers enjoy one another. They admire one another. They want proximity to one another. They speak about one another’s bodies with enthusiasm that, as we proceed through this series, will occasionally require all of us to behave like adults.
And significantly, the desire runs in both directions.
The woman is not scenery in a man’s romantic fantasy. She speaks first. She expresses desire. She searches. She invites. She praises his body. She announces that he belongs to her and she belongs to him. At times she is so direct that anyone approaching Song of Songs with the assumption that biblical sexuality consists of an active husband and a reluctantly cooperative wife is going to have a very long twelve studies.
Consider one of the most famous statements in the Song:
Song of Songs 2:16 (WEB)My beloved is mine, and I am his.
He browses among the lilies.
Later the wording shifts:
Song of Songs 6:3 (WEB)I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.
He browses among the lilies.
And eventually:
Song of Songs 7:10 (WEB)I am my beloved’s.
His desire is toward me.
There is belonging here, but it is mutual belonging. There is desire, but it is desire within relationship. There is physical attraction, but the other person is not reduced to a body. Throughout the Song, admiration, longing, exclusivity, affection, praise, absence, searching, reunion, and desire belong together.
That gives us another interpretive guardrail.
We should not read Song of Songs as though it were embarrassed about sex.
But neither should we read it as though it were merely about sex.
The lovers do not simply desire bodies. They desire one another.
That distinction becomes increasingly important as the Song develops, because eventually the poetry will reach its great declaration about love:
Song of Songs 8:6–7 (WEB)Set me as a seal on your heart,
as a seal on your arm;
for love is strong as death.
Jealousy is as cruel as Sheol.
Its flashes are flashes of fire,
a very flame of Yah.
Many waters can’t quench love,
neither can floods drown it.
If a man would give all the wealth of his house for love,
he would be utterly scorned.
That is where this book is going.
Not toward embarrassment.
Not toward pornography with religious vocabulary.
Not toward pretending the lovers are discussing something other than what they are plainly discussing.
Toward love that cannot be purchased, desire that belongs within exclusive devotion, and a union in which two people give themselves to one another so completely that the poet reaches for death, fire, flood, wealth, and ultimately the divine name to describe its strength.
Before we can understand that destination, however, we still have one major interpretive question sitting in the room with us.
If Song of Songs is genuinely about the love of a man and woman, what are we supposed to do with the centuries of Jewish and Christian interpretation that saw in these lovers the relationship between God and his people?
We should not simply laugh at it.
We should investigate why they saw it.
Because there is a larger biblical marriage story.
The question is whether Song of Songs itself is secretly an allegory of that story—or whether the connection works in a much more interesting way.
To answer that question, we need to distinguish between allegory and biblical theology. Those two things can sometimes produce conclusions that sound similar while arriving there by very different routes.
An allegorical reading assumes that the apparent subject of the Song is really a coded representation of something else. The man represents God or Christ. The woman represents Israel or the Church. Their kisses, bodies, fragrances, gardens, bedrooms, and movements then become symbols whose true significance lies beyond the human relationship described in the poem. Once that interpretive door is opened without textual controls, almost anything can become almost anything.
Biblical theology works differently. It allows the text to mean what it means in its own context and then asks how that reality participates in patterns that Scripture itself develops elsewhere.
Marriage unquestionably becomes one of those patterns.
God describes his covenant relationship with Israel using the language of marriage. That imagery is not something later interpreters invented because Song of Songs made them uncomfortable. It is embedded deeply in the prophets. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Hosea all use marriage to describe the covenant relationship between Yahweh and his people.
Isaiah gives us an especially clear example:
Isaiah 54:4–8 (WEB)“Don’t be afraid, for you will not be ashamed.
Don’t be confounded, for you will not be disappointed.
For you will forget the shame of your youth.
You will remember the reproach of your widowhood no more.
For your Maker is your husband,
Yahweh of Armies is his name.
The Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer.
He will be called the God of the whole earth.
For Yahweh has called you as a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit,
even a wife of youth, when she is cast off,” says your God.
“For a small moment I have forsaken you,
but I will gather you with great mercies.
In overflowing wrath I hid my face from you for a moment,
but with everlasting loving kindness I will have mercy on you,” says Yahweh your Redeemer.
Notice what Scripture is doing. Isaiah can describe Yahweh as Israel’s husband because everyone already understands the human institution being used as the metaphor. Marriage is not meaningful because it resembles God’s covenant relationship only after someone discovers a hidden code. Human marriage already possesses realities—exclusive belonging, faithfulness, intimacy, love, covenant loyalty—that make it capable of communicating something about God’s relationship with his people.
The prophets can therefore move in the opposite direction as well. When Israel worships other gods, Scripture repeatedly describes her idolatry as adultery. Hosea’s marriage becomes a living prophetic sign of Israel’s unfaithfulness. Ezekiel uses marital and sexual imagery with a level of bluntness that should permanently end the theory that God becomes nervous whenever biblical language makes modern readers uncomfortable.
Then we arrive at the New Testament, and the pattern becomes even more explicit.
Paul writes:
Ephesians 5:25–33 (WEB)Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the assembly and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that he might present the assembly to himself gloriously, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without defect. Even so husbands also ought to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself. For no man ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, even as the Lord also does the assembly, because we are members of his body, of his flesh and bones. “For this cause a man will leave his father and mother and will be joined to his wife. Then the two will become one flesh.” This mystery is great, but I speak concerning Christ and the assembly. Nevertheless each of you must also love his own wife even as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.
Paul does something extremely important here. He quotes Genesis 2.
The same passage we just read.
He does not tell us that Adam and Eve were never really about Adam and Eve. He does not say that the one-flesh union was secretly Christ and the Church all along in a way that makes the human marriage irrelevant. In fact, he uses the relationship in both directions. Christ’s love teaches husbands how they ought to love their wives, while the created institution of marriage reveals something profound about Christ and his people.
The earthly reality remains real while pointing beyond itself.
That gives us a much safer way to approach Song of Songs.
We do not need to turn every body part into doctrine in order to find Christ in the biblical story.
We can allow a husband to be a husband.
We can allow a wife to be a wife.
We can allow a kiss to be a kiss.
We can allow a garden to function as erotic poetry when the context clearly tells us that is what the poet is doing.
And then, after understanding the Song on those terms, we can back away from the individual brushstrokes and look at the mural.
Here is a book celebrating love, desire, beauty, exclusivity, belonging, and union between man and woman. That book exists inside a Bible beginning with a wedding in Eden, repeatedly describing God’s covenant with his people as marriage, identifying Christ as the bridegroom, identifying the Church as his bride, and ending with another wedding.
That final movement is impossible to miss.
Revelation 19:6–9 (WEB)I heard something like the voice of a great multitude, and like the voice of many waters, and like the voice of mighty thunders, saying, “Hallelujah! For the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigns! Let’s rejoice and be exceedingly glad, and let’s give the glory to him. For the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his wife has made herself ready.” It was given to her that she would array herself in bright, pure, fine linen, for the fine linen is the righteous acts of the saints. He said to me, “Write, ‘Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.’” He said to me, “These are true words of God.”
Genesis begins with man, woman, and marriage.
Revelation approaches its conclusion with Christ, his people, and a wedding.
That is not insignificant.
But neither does it mean that every time the woman in Song of Songs mentions her beloved’s body we should immediately begin searching for an anatomical correspondence to Christ.
Sometimes biblical theology requires us to stand close enough to examine the brushstrokes.
Sometimes it requires us to back up and see the mural.
Confusing those distances produces bad interpretation in both directions. Stand too far away and we may miss what the individual passage actually says. Stand with our nose against the wall and we may never recognize that the details belong to a much larger picture.
So throughout these studies we are going to do both.
We will stand close.
We will ask who is speaking. We will examine the poetry. We will consider Hebrew words when they matter. We will investigate ancient imagery rather than assuming that something sounding strange to us sounded strange to the original audience. We will pay attention to repeated phrases, changes in setting, the movements of desire and separation, and the structure of the Song itself. We will resist the temptation to sanitize passages simply because they make us uncomfortable.
Then we will back up.
We will ask where marriage came from. We will ask what sin did to it. We will follow marriage through Israel’s covenant story. We will listen when the prophets use husband and wife to describe Yahweh and his people. We will follow the pattern into Christ and the Church. We will eventually arrive at the marriage supper of the Lamb.
But we will not use the mural to erase the brushstrokes.
That is how we are going to read Song of Songs.
And it means that before proceeding into the poetry itself, there is one more assumption worth leaving behind.
We do not have to rescue this book from being about human love in order to make it worthy of Scripture.
God put human love there.
That observation forces us to confront another reason Christians sometimes struggle with this book: we have occasionally inherited ideas about holiness that owe more to suspicion of the physical world than to the Bible itself.
Scripture certainly commands self-control. Jesus speaks seriously about lust. Paul repeatedly condemns sexual immorality. Christians are commanded to flee porneia rather than negotiate with it. Nothing in Song of Songs overturns those commands. If anything, the Song helps us understand what those boundaries protect. Biblical sexual ethics are not built around the proposition that desire is disgusting. They are built around the proposition that desire is powerful enough to require a proper home.
That home is covenant faithfulness.
This is why the Bible can speak negatively about one expression of sexual desire and enthusiastically about another without contradiction. Proverbs, for example, warns a young man against adultery and immediately answers forbidden sexuality not with the command to become sexually indifferent, but with delight in his own wife.
Proverbs 5:15–20 (WEB)Drink water out of your own cistern,
running water out of your own well.
Should your springs overflow in the streets,
streams of water in the public squares?
Let them be for yourself alone,
not for strangers with you.
Let your spring be blessed.
Rejoice in the wife of your youth.
A loving doe and a graceful deer—
let her breasts satisfy you at all times.
Be captivated always with her love.
For why should you, my son, be captivated with an adulteress?
Why embrace the bosom of another?
There is no particularly effective way to sanitize that.
The father does not tell his son, “Bodies do not matter; concentrate on her personality.” He does not answer illicit desire by teaching that physical attraction is spiritually immature. He tells him where his delight belongs.
Rejoice in the wife of your youth.
The problem is not that the young man possesses sexual desire. The problem is where he might direct it.
And notice the imagery. Water. Wells. Springs. Animals. Breasts. Captivation. If some of that sounds familiar after reading only a little of Song of Songs, it should. Biblical wisdom literature is perfectly capable of using vivid physical imagery when discussing marital sexuality.
Paul makes the same basic point far less poetically.
1 Corinthians 7:2–5 (WEB)But, because of sexual immoralities, let each man have his own wife, and let each woman have her own husband. Let the husband give his wife the affection owed her, and likewise also the wife her husband. The wife doesn’t have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise also the husband doesn’t have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Don’t deprive one another, unless it is by consent for a season, that you may give yourselves to fasting and prayer, and may be together again, that Satan doesn’t tempt you because of your lack of self-control.
There is something here that deserves careful attention, particularly because this passage has sometimes been handled terribly.
Paul describes mutual obligation.
Not male entitlement.
Not female entitlement.
Mutuality.
The husband does not possess unilateral authority over his wife’s body. Paul immediately says something remarkably reciprocal for the ancient world: the husband likewise does not possess authority over his own body; his wife does. Even temporary abstinence is described as something undertaken by consent.
That does not turn sexual intimacy into a debt-collection system where either spouse can demand access to the other’s body. Paul is addressing married Christians tempted toward forms of asceticism and sexual deprivation, not providing theological ammunition for coercion. His solution assumes generosity toward one another, mutual belonging, mutual consideration, and mutual agreement.
That fits surprisingly well with what we will encounter in Song of Songs.
The Song contains longing, but it does not celebrate taking.
It contains intense desire, but the lovers speak to one another rather than merely about possessing one another.
And several times the Song repeats a strange refrain that will become important as we proceed:
Song of Songs 2:7 (WEB)I adjure you, daughters of Jerusalem,
by the roes, or by the hinds of the field,
that you not stir up, nor awaken love,
until it so desires.
The refrain appears again in 3:5 and, with slightly different wording, in 8:4. We will examine exactly what it means when we encounter it in context, because the Hebrew leaves some questions worth discussing. But whatever conclusions we eventually reach about the precise wording, the Song itself refuses to treat love as something that should simply be forced into existence on demand.
There is a time for desire.
There is a proper context for desire.
And when desire awakens within that context, Scripture does not respond to it with embarrassment.
That balance matters enormously.
Because Christian teaching about sexuality can fail in two opposite directions.
One error takes something God created and removes God’s boundaries from it. Desire becomes sovereign. If I want something, the wanting itself supposedly validates the action. Scripture rejects that completely. Human desires are affected by sin and cannot function as our final moral authority.
The opposite error sees how badly sexuality can be corrupted and begins treating sexuality itself as though it were the corruption.
Song of Songs will not allow us to do that either.
It stands inside Scripture almost defiantly celebrating something we are sometimes tempted merely to regulate.
A woman wants her man.
A man wants his woman.
They enjoy being wanted.
And God apparently did not consider that information too embarrassing to preserve in Holy Scripture.
Which brings us back to our mysteriously evacuated church.
Maybe everyone left because Song of Songs says things Christians are not accustomed to hearing said in church. Maybe we have unconsciously divided life into categories where prayer, theology, worship, and Bible study belong to the sacred world while attraction, bodies, romance, and marital sexuality belong somewhere outside it.
Song of Songs refuses the division.
If God created marriage, then marriage belongs to him.
If God created the body, then the body belongs to him.
If God created sexuality, then sexuality belongs to him.
And if God has spoken about those things, then opening the Bible to the place where he speaks about them is not dragging something inappropriate into Christianity.
It was already there.
We were the ones avoiding the page.
There is another complication we should address before we begin moving through the Song itself, because even after agreeing that the book genuinely celebrates human love, we still have to ask exactly what kind of human relationship it describes. The traditional title “Song of Solomon” can make the answer seem obvious: Solomon wrote a song about himself and one of his wives. The opening line certainly gives us a reason to consider Solomon important: “The Song of songs, which is Solomon’s” (Song of Songs 1:1). But that phrase does not settle every question we might like it to settle. The Hebrew construction can indicate something belonging to Solomon, associated with Solomon, concerning Solomon, or written by Solomon, and Solomon himself appears within the poetry in ways that have produced several competing interpretations of his role. Before building an elaborate story about the identities of the lovers, we should therefore distinguish what the text clearly gives us from what interpreters have reconstructed around it.
One popular reconstruction, sometimes called the shepherd hypothesis, turns the Song into something resembling a romantic drama. On this reading, the woman loves a humble shepherd while Solomon attempts to win her with royal wealth and splendor. She resists the king and remains faithful to her true beloved, making the Song not merely a celebration of romance but a contrast between faithful love and royal excess. It is an attractive interpretation, particularly because Solomon’s enormous collection of wives and concubines makes him an awkward candidate for the model of exclusive marital devotion. According to 1 Kings, “He had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines. His wives turned his heart away” (1 Kings 11:3). If we are looking for the Bible’s poster child for monogamous romantic faithfulness, Solomon does not immediately leap to the top of the list.
The problem is that the shepherd hypothesis requires us to identify changes of speaker and character that the Hebrew text itself does not explicitly mark. Modern translations help readers by inserting labels such as “Beloved,” “Lover,” or “Friends,” but those labels are editorial decisions based largely on grammatical gender, number, and context. Ancient Hebrew manuscripts did not come with a theatrical cast list announcing that Solomon has entered stage left while the shepherd waits behind the vineyard. Some distinctions between speakers are reasonably clear because Hebrew grammar tells us whether someone is addressing a male, female, or group. Other distinctions require more interpretation. We should therefore be cautious about turning a possible reconstruction into the meaning of the book.
The same caution applies in the other direction. Solomon is unquestionably present in the Song’s world. His name appears repeatedly, royal imagery occurs throughout the poetry, and the woman refers to “the king” very early in the book. Yet it does not automatically follow that every male speech belongs to the historical Solomon or that the Song is autobiographical. Poetry can invoke royal imagery without functioning as a court transcript, and wisdom literature associated with Solomon does not always require us to imagine Solomon personally experiencing every situation it describes. Our task is to follow the text as closely as possible without filling its silences with a novel of our own invention.
This becomes especially important because the Song does not behave like a modern narrative. We should not expect a continuous sequence in which scene A happens on Monday, scene B follows Tuesday morning, and by chapter eight we can reconstruct the couple’s complete dating history. Locations shift rapidly. The lovers imagine situations. Dreams or dreamlike scenes appear. Memories and desires can blur together. A woman may be searching through the city in one movement and enjoying the presence of her beloved in another. Poetry is capable of arranging experiences thematically rather than chronologically, and attempts to force every scene into a strict timeline often tell us more about the interpreter’s ingenuity than about the poem.
What remains remarkably stable beneath those uncertainties is the relationship at the center of the Song. The woman and her beloved repeatedly desire one another, praise one another, seek one another, and describe a relationship characterized by exclusivity. This is one reason the woman’s repeated declaration matters so much: “My beloved is mine, and I am his” (2:16). Whatever uncertainties remain about chronology, authorship, dramatic structure, or Solomon’s precise role, the Song continually returns us to mutual belonging.
That emphasis also helps answer an objection that naturally arises once we remember the historical Solomon. If Solomon himself accumulated hundreds of wives and concubines, how can a book associated with him teach us anything useful about faithful marital love? The answer begins with a principle we already use elsewhere in Scripture: the truthfulness of biblical wisdom does not depend upon the flawless obedience of the person associated with it. Solomon could warn against sexual foolishness while later committing sexual foolishness himself. In fact, Scripture makes no attempt to hide the contradiction between his wisdom and his behavior. The man who knew better did not always do better, and 1 Kings deliberately presents the consequences.
We should also avoid importing Solomon’s entire biography into every line before the Song itself gives us reason to do so. If a poem celebrates exclusive love between a man and woman, Solomon’s later—or possibly contemporaneous—failure to embody that ideal does not transform the ideal into something else. David’s adultery does not make the Psalms’ teaching about righteousness secretly pro-adultery. Peter’s hypocrisy at Antioch does not invalidate his confession of Christ. Biblical authors and figures can proclaim truths they themselves fail to obey consistently. Scripture’s willingness to preserve those failures is part of its honesty about human beings.
There is, however, a useful irony in having Solomon hovering around a book like this. The king who possessed extraordinary wealth, power, and access to women becomes associated with a Song whose most memorable conclusion insists that love cannot be purchased: “If a man would give all the wealth of his house for love, he would be utterly scorned” (8:7). Whether that contrast is intended as a direct criticism of Solomon is something we should reserve until we reach the relevant passages, but the tension is worth noticing. The Bible knows the difference between possessing many women and being loved by one.
For now, then, our method will remain deliberately modest. We will identify speakers where the Hebrew and context allow us to do so confidently. We will discuss Solomon when the Song brings Solomon into view. We will consider historical and literary reconstructions when they help explain the text, but we will label them as reconstructions rather than quietly turning them into Scripture. Most importantly, we will resist the urge to solve every uncertainty before allowing the poetry to do what poetry does.
That approach may feel less satisfying than announcing that we have decoded the entire book, but it gives us something better than a clever theory: it gives the Song room to speak for itself. We know enough already to begin. We are reading Hebrew love poetry associated closely with Solomon, centered upon a man and woman whose attraction is physical, emotional, outspoken, and mutual. Their love exists within the larger biblical world of creation, marriage, covenant, wisdom, and ultimately the marriage imagery Scripture applies to God and his people. We will keep that larger mural in view without using it to repaint the individual scenes.
With those interpretive boundaries established, we are finally ready to stop talking about how to read Song of Songs and actually read it. The woman has already been waiting for us since the opening verses, and she has not exactly been subtle about what is on her mind.
Conclusion
Perhaps the empty church was an exaggeration, but the discomfort behind the joke is real. Song of Songs is a book Christians can affirm as inspired while quietly having very little idea what to do with it. Some have solved that problem by avoiding the book. Others have solved it by spiritualizing the poetry until the man and woman almost disappear. Neither response is necessary. We can simply allow Scripture to speak about something Scripture considers worth speaking about.
That means we will read Song of Songs first as the poetry it presents itself to be. We will allow its lovers to love one another, its metaphors to function as poetry, and its celebration of physical attraction to remain physical attraction without assuming that something bodily must be converted into something “spiritual” before it can belong in the Bible. At the same time, we will not isolate the Song from the rest of Scripture. Marriage begins in God’s good creation, becomes covenant imagery throughout the prophets, points toward Christ and his people in the New Testament, and appears again when Scripture approaches its final vision of restoration. We can see that larger pattern without turning every kiss, vineyard, gazelle, and body part into a secret theological code.
There will also be places where we have to say that we do not know. We may not always be certain who is speaking. We may not be able to reconstruct a precise chronology. Solomon’s relationship to the Song will require attention as we encounter him, and some Hebrew expressions will permit more than one reasonable interpretation. None of that should frighten us. Faithfulness to Scripture does not require pretending that God answered questions the text itself leaves open. Where the text is clear, we can speak clearly. Where it leaves room for uncertainty, we can leave room too.
Most importantly, we should enter this book without embarrassment over the fact that God created human beings with bodies and gave marriage to them as a good gift. Sin has distorted sexuality terribly, which is precisely why Scripture gives it boundaries. But redemption does not require us to despise what God created. Biblical holiness is not embarrassment about the body; it is learning to receive God’s gifts according to God’s purposes.
So the pews can fill back up now.
Nobody needs to fake a medical emergency. Nobody needs to remember an urgent appointment halfway through the opening verse. We know what kind of book we are reading, we have established the rules by which we intend to read it, and we are going to follow the text wherever it takes us.
Next time, the woman gets the first word.
And she wants a kiss.
Prayer
Father, thank you for giving us all of your Word, including the parts that challenge our assumptions and make us uncomfortable. Forgive us when we approach Scripture wanting it to say what is familiar to us rather than listening carefully to what you have actually given us.
Give us wisdom as we study this Song. Help us distinguish what the text says from what we bring to it. Keep us from turning poetry into something it was never intended to be, and keep us from stripping away the larger truths your Word reveals through marriage, faithfulness, love, and covenant. Where we have inherited ideas that do not come from Scripture, correct us. Where our desires have been distorted by sin, sanctify us. Where shame has caused us to despise something you created as good, teach us to think according to your Word.
Teach husbands and wives to delight in one another with faithfulness, tenderness, generosity, and love. Teach those who are unmarried to honor the goodness of your design without treating marriage or sexuality as the source of their completeness. Above all, teach all of us to receive your gifts with gratitude while remembering that every good thing ultimately comes from you.
Give us humility where the text is difficult, restraint where it does not answer every question, and courage to follow it even when it takes us somewhere we would rather avoid.
Thank you for giving us Scripture worth reading rather than Scripture designed merely to make us comfortable.
In Jesus’ name, amen.