We have spent thirteen studies asking what Song of Songs means. We began by learning how to read a book that has made generations of Christians alternately blush, allegorize, and suddenly remember somewhere else they needed to be. Then we followed the lovers through desire and uncertainty, praise and absence, gardens and vineyards, walls and watchmen, friendship and sexuality, exclusivity and belonging. Finally, in the previous study, we backed away from the individual scenes and looked at the Song as a whole.
Now we can ask the question we deliberately kept from controlling the interpretation: What do we do with it?
That order matters. Application should grow out of interpretation rather than being imposed upon it. If we begin with, “What does this verse mean for my marriage?” before asking what the verse means in the poem, we can make Song of Songs say almost anything useful-sounding. The history of interpretation has already demonstrated how creative Christians can become once we decide what a text ought to mean before allowing it to speak. So we have done the slower work first. We have listened to the lovers, followed the repeated images, allowed difficult passages to remain difficult, and resisted turning every pomegranate into a spiritual principle.
Now we can bring the Song home.
Perhaps the best place to begin is with the warning the poem itself gives us three times.
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 warning returns in 3:5 and again in 8:4. When we first encountered it, we had barely seen what awakened love could become. By the end of the Song, we know. The woman who begins by wanting kisses eventually wants to become a seal upon her beloved’s heart. She misses him when he is absent, searches for him when she cannot find him, desires his body, wants his attention, delights in his affection, invites intimacy, and eventually describes their love with the language of death, Sheol, fire, and floods. Another human being has become enormously important to her.
That is why one of the simplest applications of Song of Songs is also one of the most important: do not play with people.
Romantic and sexual attachment are not emotionally neutral activities. It is possible to cultivate someone’s affection because being wanted feels good while having little intention of carrying the responsibility that affection may create. People can flirt, become emotionally intimate, exchange physical affection, structure their lives increasingly around one another, and create nearly every emotional feature of a committed relationship while remaining conveniently vague about what they are actually building. The Song asks us to think earlier than that: What are you awakening?
That is a better question than merely asking how far is too far physically. Physical boundaries matter, and Scripture calls Christians to sexual holiness, but wisdom asks what our actions are doing to us and to another person. What expectations are we creating? What attachment are we encouraging? What are we teaching our hearts and bodies to anticipate?
The Song does not provide a Christian dating chart. There is no inspired schedule telling us which date permits hand-holding or how many months must pass before somebody can kiss. We should not manufacture rules and pretend Solomon tucked them somewhere between the gazelles. Instead, the Song gives us responsibility. Another person’s affection is not a toy. Their vulnerability is not evidence of our attractiveness. Their desire is not something to collect because we enjoy knowing we could have it. If we know another person is giving their heart to something we have no intention of pursuing seriously, clarity is kinder than continued attention.
None of this makes desire dangerous or dirty. The warning exists precisely because the Song thinks desire is good enough to take seriously. The garden is guarded because there is something valuable inside it. The wall matters because access matters. Restraint is therefore not the Christian alternative to enjoyment; proper restraint protects something good from being treated carelessly. The woman who says, “I am a wall,” is the same woman who enthusiastically invites her beloved into the garden. Her wall did not make her less sexual. It made giving meaningful.
That is a much healthier foundation for Christian sexual boundaries than fear or shame.
The body is good.
Attraction is good.
Sexual desire is good. Intimacy is good. Another person’s freely given affection is good. Precisely because those things are good, they deserve better than careless consumption. The opening desire was never the problem; wisdom asks whether we know what to do with it.
The Song also teaches us that neither our bodies nor our affection are commodities. Near its conclusion, the poem deliberately places love beside wealth.
Song of Songs 8:7 (WEB)
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.
Money can purchase many things. It can purchase experiences, comfort, access, attention, and even things that imitate intimacy. It cannot purchase the thing Song of Songs celebrates. It cannot purchase my beloved. That matters in a culture extraordinarily skilled at turning human desire into a marketplace. Bodies sell products. Sexual images generate enormous industries. Attention can be monetized. People can present increasingly intimate portions of themselves in exchange for money, status, validation, or influence. Yet commodification does not require an actual financial transaction. We can turn ourselves into commodities whenever our sense of value becomes dependent upon how much desire we can generate in other people. Am I attractive enough? How many people notice me? How many people want me? Can I make someone jealous? Can I prove I still have options? Once desire becomes currency, we need a continuing supply, and the market never closes. There will always be another person whose attention we have not received and someone whose body better matches whatever standard currently surrounds us.
Song of Songs gives us something entirely different.
Song of Songs 6:8–9 (WEB)
There are sixty queens, eighty concubines,
and virgins without number.
My dove, my perfect one, is unique.
The world is full of alternatives, and yet: this one.
The woman says the same about the man.
Song of Songs 5:16 (WEB)
His mouth is sweetness;
yes, he is altogether lovely.
This is my beloved, and this is my friend,
you daughters of Jerusalem.
Love becomes particular. Your body therefore does not need to win some imaginary competition against every other body. The woman does not need to become objectively more beautiful than every woman in Jerusalem. The man does not need to defeat ten thousand competitors in a universally agreed ranking of male attractiveness. They have become beloved.
That has enormous implications for marriage because commitment changes the nature of comparison.
Before marriage, someone reasonably asks whether another person is someone they should marry. Attraction matters. Character matters. Convictions matter. Wisdom matters. Choosing a spouse is consequential. But once you have given yourself to someone in marriage, your spouse is no longer one candidate among many.
You stopped browsing.
Or at least you were supposed to.
Faithfulness does not require pretending attractive people have ceased to exist. Marriage does not produce blindness, and the Song itself knows other beautiful people exist. Faithfulness means refusing to keep placing your beloved into competition with them. That matters particularly in a world where thousands of carefully selected bodies can travel around in our pockets. Images appear under flattering lighting, from flattering angles, often altered and almost always separated from the ordinary realities of living with an actual human being.
An image has never required anything from you. A beloved has.
A beloved has a history. That face becomes the face you have watched laugh, worry, grieve, age, and awaken beside you. Those hands become hands that have worked beside you, held yours, cared for you, irritated you, touched you, and accumulated years of shared life. A body does not become less physical by acquiring history. It becomes more particular. There will always be someone younger, stronger, thinner, wealthier, funnier, or more conventionally attractive. Nobody wins every category.
The Song offers something better than winning.
Song of Songs 7:10 (WEB)
I am my beloved’s.
His desire is toward me.
Not everybody’s desire. His.
The same principle protects the person we desire. If our own bodies and affection are not commodities, neither are theirs. Attraction creates no entitlement. The woman in Song of Songs is intensely desired, yet she remains someone who speaks, chooses, guards, opens, invites, and gives. The man does not simply take the garden because he wants what grows there. She says, “Let my beloved come into his garden.” Later she says, “There I will give you my love.”
Sexual desire can say, I want you. Love remembers there is still a you on the other side of that sentence.
That is why the Song gives us something richer than merely the absence of coercion. Both lovers want. Both invite. Both respond. Both delight in being desired by the particular person desiring them. Love cannot be purchased, pressured, manipulated, guilted, or extracted. Neither money nor persistence nor loneliness can create an obligation for another person to return affection. Certainly attaching God’s name to our desire does not change that. “God told me you’re supposed to be my wife” is not a spiritual shortcut around another person’s freedom to say no. If God intends two people to marry, he does not need one of them to manufacture the other’s consent by claiming private revelation.
The person gets to want you too.
That mutuality continues into marriage, where faithfulness means considerably more than simply not leaving. A marriage can remain intact while husband and wife gradually stop treating one another as beloved. Nobody commits adultery. Nobody moves out. Bills get paid. Children get where they need to go. Groceries appear. Appointments are kept. The house functions. Eventually two people can become exceptionally efficient coworkers.
Ordinary life can accomplish that slowly because familiarity is both one of marriage’s greatest gifts and one of its dangers. There is something wonderful about being known well enough that you no longer need to perform constantly for another person’s attention. But knowing someone well can gradually become the assumption that we have finished knowing them.
Song of Songs never makes that mistake. These lovers pay attention. They notice bodies, voices, movement, fragrance, presence, absence, speech, and desire. More importantly, they tell one another what they notice. The man apparently does not assume that because he praised the woman previously she can simply consult the archived compliment whenever necessary. He tells her again. The woman does the same. When the daughters of Jerusalem ask what makes this particular man so special, she can answer at considerable length. She has been paying attention.
We do not need to imitate the metaphors. Depending upon your spouse, announcing that her hair reminds you of a herd of goats may produce a memorable evening for entirely unintended reasons. We should imitate the attention behind them.
Notice what you enjoy about the person you married, and say it. What have they done faithfully for so long that you barely notice anymore? What still makes you laugh? What physical feature do you genuinely enjoy? What difficulty have you watched them endure? What kindness have you seen that other people may never notice? What ordinary part of your life would suddenly become enormous if it disappeared?
Marriage can slowly train us to reverse the habits with which it began. Early in a relationship, we notice what delights us and overlook many irritations. Years later, we can become remarkably skilled at noticing irritations while treating the good as background scenery. Continuing to notice eventually becomes intentional.
So does continuing to listen.
Near the end of the poem, after all the physical descriptions, intimacy, searching, finding, and declarations of belonging, the man says:
Song of Songs 8:13 (WEB)
You who dwell in the gardens,
with friends in attendance,
let me hear your voice!
He already knows her voice. That is what makes the request beautiful.
People keep changing after marriage. Success changes us. Failure changes us. Children change us. Work changes us. Grief changes us. Age changes us. Our fears, hopes, convictions, bodies, and priorities can change. The person you know extraordinarily well can remain someone worth knowing better. Let me hear your voice becomes a posture: tell me what you think, tell me what has changed, tell me what I missed.
That posture belongs beside another beautiful description from the woman: This is my beloved, and this is my friend.
Marriage creates the possibility that friend and lover become the same person. The Song never asks us to choose between erotic desire and friendship as though passion belongs to immature relationships while mature couples eventually graduate to companionship and comfortable shoes. She likes the man she wants. He likes the woman he wants.
Protect both. Keep talking about things that are not merely logistics. Keep laughing. Keep developing shared memories. Keep learning who the other person is becoming. And do not make the Song’s marital application entirely about communication while politely hurrying past all those bodies.
Husbands and wives are allowed to want each other. Scripture does considerably more than reluctantly permit marital sexuality.
Proverbs 5:18–19 (WEB)
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.
Biblical wisdom does not merely say, “Do not commit adultery.” It says, “Rejoice in your wife.”
Song of Songs gives us that rejoicing from both directions. The woman enjoys the man’s body. The man enjoys hers. She enjoys his desire for her. He enjoys hers for him. That does not mean every healthy marriage will reproduce the emotional temperature of Hebrew love poetry every Tuesday evening. Real marriages contain work, children, exhaustion, dishes, bills, illness, changing bodies, stress, disagreements, broken appliances, and animals that occasionally consume objects no reasonable creature should identify as food.
Desire can fluctuate. Health, hormones, medication, exhaustion, resentment, and relational wounds can all matter. People differ. The Song is not a mechanism promising maximum sexual intensity if a couple follows the instructions correctly. It gives us something healthier toward which marital intimacy can aim: mutual delight rather than pressure, entitlement, or merely frequency.
Sometimes recovering that delight may involve sex. Sometimes it may require addressing something that happened long before the bedroom. Sometimes it may mean listening, apologizing, resting, seeking medical help, rebuilding trust, or simply learning one another again. The circumstances can become complicated, but the principle remains simple: keep turning toward your beloved.
Faithfulness certainly says, I will not choose another. Song of Songs reminds us to keep saying something positive as well: I choose you.
At the same time, celebrating marriage this enthusiastically can create another danger. We can begin treating a good gift as though everyone must possess it. Song of Songs makes romantic love look wonderful. It should. For someone who deeply wants that relationship and does not have it, however, that can hurt. We should not answer the pain by pretending the desire itself is spiritually immature. A person can trust God and still want marriage. They can practice contentment while experiencing loneliness. They can live faithfully with sexual desire while wishing there were a righteous place to express it.
Scripture does not require emotional anesthesia, but neither does Scripture promise everyone a spouse. Paul speaks positively about the unmarried life precisely because he does not consider it an incomplete waiting room before real adulthood begins.
1 Corinthians 7:32–35 (WEB)
But I desire to have you to be free from cares. He who is unmarried is concerned for the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord; but he who is married is concerned about the things of the world, how he may please his wife. There is also a difference between a wife and a virgin. The unmarried woman cares about the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit. But she who is married cares about the things of the world, how she may please her husband. This I say for your own profit, not that I may ensnare you, but for that which is appropriate, and that you may attend to the Lord without distraction.
Paul is hardly contradicting Song of Songs. The Song has spent eight chapters demonstrating just how concerned two people in love can become with one another. Marriage creates legitimate obligations. Singleness creates freedoms marriage does not. Different conditions contain different gifts and difficulties. Neither guarantees happiness, and neither automatically produces holiness.
So we should avoid two opposite errors. We should not tell an unmarried Christian who wants marriage that they should stop wanting it because “Jesus should be enough.” Neither should we tell them, “God definitely has someone for you.” Scripture promises no such thing. Faith sometimes means entrusting God with a genuinely good thing he has never promised to give us. We do not have to call the gift less good in order to acknowledge that.
Song of Songs itself gives us another reason not to manufacture marriage merely because we want the status. The woman does not merely want a husband. She wants him. When the daughters of Jerusalem ask what makes her beloved different from another beloved, she has an answer: This is my beloved, and this is my friend.
A spouse is not a vacancy to fill.
There is a difference between wanting marriage and wanting to marry a particular person. Loneliness can make the first so powerful that we become willing to force someone into the second. The Song encourages more wisdom than that. Attraction matters, but attraction does not prove a relationship is wise. Intensity is not identical to intimacy. Powerful sexual chemistry cannot tell you whether someone is honest, faithful, kind, responsible, teachable, or capable of keeping promises. The existence of desire proves that desire exists; it does not prove desire should make the decision.
That is why friendship matters so much. Can you talk when flirting is not carrying the conversation? Can you disagree without punishing one another? Can you tell the truth when the truth risks disappointing the other person? Can you solve ordinary problems together? Can you see the person who actually exists rather than the person you hope marriage will eventually turn them into?
You do not marry potential. You marry a person.
Once again, the Song’s refrain gives us wisdom rather than a formula: do not awaken love carelessly, not because love is bad, but because love is powerful.
The same wisdom means we need to be careful when applying this beautiful poem to lives that have not been beautiful in the same way. Some readers know betrayal. Some know divorce. Some know abuse. Some have buried a spouse. Some carry sexual histories they deeply regret. Some wanted marriage and never received it. Some know what it is like to love somebody who did not love them back.
Song of Songs celebrates a good. It should never become a weapon against people who have experienced that good’s corruption or loss.
A betrayed spouse cannot single-handedly create the mutuality of Song of Songs. A person experiencing abuse does not need to become more sexually