Song of Songs 7:6–13 (WEB)
How beautiful and how pleasant you are,
love, for delights!
This, your stature, is like a palm tree,
your breasts like its fruit.
I said, “I will climb up into the palm tree.
I will take hold of its fruit.”
Let your breasts be like clusters of the vine,
the smell of your breath like apples,
your mouth like the best wine,
that goes down smoothly for my beloved,
gliding through the lips of those who are asleep.
I am my beloved’s.
His desire is toward me.
Come, my beloved, let’s go out into the field.
Let’s lodge in the villages.
Let’s go early up to the vineyards.
Let’s see whether the vine has budded,
its blossom is open,
and the pomegranates are in flower.
There I will give you my love.
The mandrakes produce fragrance.
At our doors are all kinds of precious fruits, new and old,
which I have stored up for you, my beloved.
The description that began at the Shulammite’s sandaled feet has now reached its destination. The observer worked upward through her thighs, abdomen, breasts, neck, eyes, nose, head, and hair until the king was described as captive in her tresses. In verse 6 the individual comparisons give way to an assessment of the whole woman: “How beautiful and how pleasant you are, love, for delights!” He has not merely catalogued attractive features. He delights in the woman standing before him.
That word “pleasant” adds something to the language of beauty we have heard throughout the Song. The Hebrew naʿim describes what is delightful, lovely, or pleasurable. He certainly considers her beautiful, but his attraction is not functioning like an art critic appreciating an object from a safe distance. Her beauty gives him pleasure because he desires her. The military imagery of the previous chapter already told us that her eyes could overwhelm him, and 7:5 pictured the king held captive by her hair. Now the poetry stops pretending that the effect is merely aesthetic.
Her stature reminds him of a palm tree, and her breasts of its clusters. Then he tells her what he wants to do about it:
“I will climb up into the palm tree.
I will take hold of its fruit.”
There are passages where responsible interpretation requires considerable caution before identifying sexual imagery.
This is not one of them.
The man has just spent several verses describing the woman’s body from her feet upward. He has explicitly mentioned her breasts, immediately compares them again with the fruit of the palm, and then announces his desire to climb the tree and take hold of its fruit. The metaphor is poetic, but it is not obscure. He is expressing sexual desire for the woman he loves.
That matters because Christian interpretation has sometimes become uncomfortable precisely where Song of Songs refuses to become uncomfortable. We can affirm that marriage is good. We can affirm that husbands and wives should love one another. We can even survive the goats. But when the poetry becomes openly erotic, there is a temptation either to hurry past the language or to replace its ordinary meaning with something supposedly more spiritual.
The text does not need to be rescued from its own subject.
God created human beings as embodied creatures. Genesis places sexual differentiation and the one-flesh union before the fall, not after it. Sin profoundly distorts sexuality, as it distorts every other good thing God made, but Scripture never responds by declaring the body itself to be the problem. Song of Songs can therefore speak openly about sexual desire because marital desire does not become holy by ceasing to be sexual.
The man wants this woman physically, and the Song considers that worth celebrating.
Yet the context prevents his desire from becoming mere consumption. The woman whose body he wants is the same woman whose eyes overwhelm him, whom he calls his love, and whom he has described as uniquely precious among women without number. Physical desire operates within particular affection. The body matters enormously, but it is the body of someone who matters.
The woman’s role throughout the Song makes this even clearer. She has never been presented merely as the passive recipient of male desire. In fact, the first explicit expression of desire in the book came from her:
Song of Songs 1:2 (WEB)
Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth;
for your love is better than wine.
Before the man described her body, she wanted his kisses.
Before he announced his intention to climb the palm tree, she had already become faint with love, searched for him, praised his body from head to foot, called him the best among ten thousand, and identified him as both beloved and friend. The Song has allowed female desire to speak just as openly as male desire.
That history matters here because the man’s declaration does not leave us with a picture of sexuality in which he wants and she merely permits.
She answers him.
The transition between the speakers is especially beautiful because the imagery itself seems to carry us across it. The man compares her mouth to “the best wine,” and the woman appears to pick up his sentence:
“that goes down smoothly for my beloved,
gliding through the lips of those who are asleep.”
The Hebrew at 7:9 is difficult, and translations differ over the final expression. The WEB has the wine “gliding through the lips of those who are asleep,” while other translations understand it as flowing gently over lips and teeth. More important for following the poem is the apparent change of voice. The man began by comparing her mouth with excellent wine, but suddenly the wine is flowing “for my beloved.” Unless he has unexpectedly begun calling himself my beloved, the woman has taken over the speech.
That creates an intimate transition. He describes her mouth as the finest wine, and she finishes the image from her side.
His desire does not simply terminate upon her; she receives it and responds to it. The poem moves almost imperceptibly from his description of what he wants to her declaration of where she stands in relation to him:
“I am my beloved’s.
His desire is toward me.”
We have heard the first half of that statement before, but never quite like this.
Song of Songs 2:16 (WEB)
My beloved is mine, and I am his.
He browses among the lilies.
Later she reversed the order:
Song of Songs 6:3 (WEB)
I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.
He browses among the lilies.
Now the formula changes again:
“I am my beloved’s.
His desire is toward me.”
The progression is worth noticing without turning it into a rigid psychological scheme the poet never gives us. The repeated declarations clearly belong together, but their changing form allows different aspects of mutual belonging to come forward. In 2:16 she begins with his belonging to her. In 6:3 she begins with her belonging to him. Here she declares herself his and then says something more specific about him: his desire is directed toward her.
That final word deserves careful attention. The Hebrew noun translated “desire” is teshuqah, a rare word in the Hebrew Bible. Outside Song of Songs, it occurs only twice, both in Genesis.
Genesis 3:16 (WEB)
To the woman he said,
“I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth.
In pain you will bear children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you.”
The second occurrence comes immediately afterward in God’s warning to Cain:
Genesis 4:6–7 (WEB)
Yahweh said to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why has the expression of your
face fallen? If you do well, won’t it be lifted up? If you don’t do well, sin crouches at the door. Its desire is for you, but you are to rule over it.”
Genesis 3:16, Genesis 4:7, and Song of Songs 7:10 constitute our entire biblical dataset for the noun. That alone should make us cautious about claims that teshuqah automatically carries one highly specific meaning.
The literary relationship between Genesis 3:16 and 4:7 is unmistakable. The constructions are strikingly similar: desire is directed toward someone, followed by language involving rule. Because sin’s desire for Cain in Genesis 4 is clearly hostile, some interpreters understand the woman’s desire in Genesis 3 as a desire to control or master her husband, answered by his sinful domination of her. Others argue that teshuqah itself does not mean “desire to control” and understand Genesis 3:16 as describing the woman’s continuing desire for her husband within a relationship now distorted by painful rule. With only three biblical occurrences, the noun itself cannot settle that debate.
Song of Songs does settle one narrower question: teshuqah is not inherently hostile.
Here the context is unmistakably positive. The woman has just heard the man describe how beautiful and desirable she is. He wants to climb the palm tree and take hold of its fruit. She responds, “I am my beloved’s. His desire is toward me.” Whatever nuances the word carries in Genesis, there is no plausible reason to interpret his desire here as an attempt to dominate her. She delights in it.
That observation does not magically solve Genesis 3:16. Words receive their particular meaning from context. Genesis 4 places teshuqah in a dangerous context; Song of Songs places it in a romantic and sexual one. We should therefore resist reasoning backward as though Song of Songs proves Genesis 3 must describe romantic attraction, just as we should resist reasoning forward as though Genesis 4 proves that teshuqah always means hostile domination. What Song of Songs gives us is a valuable canonical comparison: the word can describe desire directed toward another person without carrying an intrinsically negative meaning.
Within this passage, the direction of that desire matters. She does not merely say that her beloved experiences sexual desire or that he finds women attractive.
His desire is toward her.
That is especially significant after the sixty queens, eighty concubines, and young women without number in chapter 6. He had already declared that among them all his dove was one. Now she speaks from inside that security: “I am my beloved’s. His desire is toward me.” She is not wondering whether she has his attention. She knows where his desire is directed.
And she wants him too.
“Come, my beloved, let’s go out into the field.
Let’s lodge in the villages.
Let’s go early up to the vineyards.”
The man has said what he wants. Now she begins making plans.
Her invitation deliberately returns us to imagery that has followed the lovers from near the beginning of the Song. Only a few verses earlier, in 6:11, she went down into the grove to see “whether the vine budded, and the pomegranates were in flower.” Now she invites her beloved to come with her and look at those same signs of growth. What she explored alone becomes the setting she deliberately chooses for the two of them together.
Her invitation also reverses the invitation of chapter 2. There the man announced that winter had passed, flowers had appeared, figs were ripening, and vines were blossoming before saying, “Rise up, my love, my beautiful one, and come away.” Here she returns the invitation: “Come, my beloved.” She chooses the destination, proposes that they spend the night away, and suggests that they rise early together to visit the vineyards.
The symmetry matters. The Song has never treated romantic initiative as belonging exclusively to the man. He pursues her, and she pursues him. He invites her, and she invites him. He expresses sexual desire for her, and she expresses sexual desire for him. Their intimacy is not portrayed as something one person seeks while the other reluctantly supplies. Both lovers want one another.
Then she tells him exactly what she intends:
“There I will give you my love.”
The Hebrew dodim, translated “love,” has appeared from the opening lines of the Song, where she declared that his love was better than wine. Depending upon context, the word can refer to expressions of love, caresses, or lovemaking. Here, immediately after the palm-tree imagery and her declaration that his desire is toward her, there is little reason to drain the phrase of its erotic force.
Notice the verb.
She will give him her love.
That fits the sexual ethic the Song has been constructing through imagery rather than legal commands. Her sexuality belongs neither to the crowd that wanted to gaze at her nor simply to the man because he desires her. The locked garden of chapter 4 opened because she invited her beloved into it. Here again intimacy is something willingly offered.
The distinction between desire and entitlement matters. His declaration, “I will climb up into the palm tree,” is immediately followed by her voice, and her answer is joyful invitation. She knows his desire is toward her and responds, “Come, my beloved.” Read together, the two speeches portray sexual intimacy as mutual desire moving toward mutual participation. Remove her desire from the passage, and we no longer have the relationship the poem is describing.
The landscape becomes increasingly fragrant as she continues:
“The mandrakes produce fragrance.
At our doors are all kinds of precious fruits, new and old,
which I have stored up for you, my beloved.”
Mandrakes immediately bring another biblical relationship into view.
Genesis 30:14–16 (WEB)
Reuben went in the days of wheat harvest, and found mandrakes in the field,
and brought them to his mother, Leah. Then Rachel said to Leah, “Please give me some of your son’s mandrakes.”
She said to her, “Is it a small matter that you have taken away my husband? Would you take away my son’s mandrakes, also?”
Rachel said, “Therefore he will lie with you tonight for your son’s mandrakes.”
Jacob came from the field in the evening, and Leah went out to meet him, and said, “You must come in to me; for I have surely hired you with my son’s mandrakes.”
He lay with her that night.
Mandrakes were associated in the ancient world with fertility and sexuality, which makes their appearance in both passages understandable. Yet the relational settings could hardly be more different. Jacob’s household is fractured by rivalry between sisters, competition over children, divided affection, and sleeping arrangements that can literally be negotiated with mandrakes.
Song of Songs places the plant in a very different world. The Shulammite is not purchasing a night with a husband whose affection is divided among competing women.
She invites her beloved herself.
There is no rival competing for tonight, no transaction determining who receives him, and no mandrake-based scheduling system required.
The contrast is useful because Scripture does not confuse sexuality merely occurring with sexuality flourishing. Genesis records what happened in the patriarchal households without asking us to pretend that jealousy, favoritism, rivalry, surrogacy, and divided marriages represent the created ideal. Here the atmosphere is radically different. She knows whose desire is toward her, and she desires the same man.
Then come “all kinds of precious fruits, new and old,” which she has stored for her beloved. The language continues the garden imagery surrounding her sexuality throughout the Song. In chapter 4 the man described her enclosed garden as containing choice fruits, pomegranates, spices, myrrh, aloes, and flowing water. She responded by inviting him into “his garden” to eat its precious fruits. Here those fruits appear again, but now she describes them as things she has stored for him.
“New and old” suggests abundance. Their relationship contains pleasures already known and pleasures still fresh. We do not need to assign individual sexual practices to particular fruits; that would turn poetry into an instruction manual the text never intended to provide. The point is richness. Familiarity has not eliminated discovery.
And the final words keep that abundance intensely particular:
“which I have stored up for you, my beloved.”
For you.
The passage began with the man looking at the woman he loves and declaring what he wants. It ends with the woman telling the man she loves what she has willingly reserved to give him. Between those two declarations stands the sentence that explains them both:
“I am my beloved’s.
His desire is toward me.”
That is the emotional center of the passage. The palm tree, breasts, wine, vineyards, mandrakes, and fruit make the sexuality impossible to miss, but the deepest pleasure being celebrated is not simply sexual appetite. It is the pleasure of being wanted by someone you want.
That combination helps explain why exclusivity has intensified rather than diminished the erotic character of the Song. Modern culture often treats sexual freedom as the multiplication of possible partners, as though more options necessarily produce greater fulfillment. The Song moves in the opposite direction. Its language becomes increasingly particular as intimacy deepens: my beloved, my love, my dove, my garden, I am his, he is mine, his desire is toward me, I have stored these things for you.
The vocabulary narrows because love has chosen someone.
This mutual belonging does not erase either lover’s agency. The Shulammite can say that she belongs to him in the same breath with which she chooses the destination, initiates the encounter, and promises to give him her love. Belonging has not made her passive. She remains unmistakably herself.
That brings us back to Genesis. Whatever exact nuance teshuqah carries in Genesis 3:16, that verse belongs to the judgment following the fall, where pain and rule enter a relationship that Genesis 2 had described very differently.
Genesis 2:21–25 (WEB)
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.
The biblical story of human sexuality begins not with shame but with recognition, union, nakedness, and the absence of shame. The one-flesh relationship is bodily without being merely bodily. Sexual union belongs within a new relationship of mutual belonging.
Song of Songs inhabits that created world while fully aware that human beings live on the other side of Genesis 3. Its lovers experience absence, vulnerability, frustration, social pressure, and pain. Yet when desire is flourishing, the Song repeatedly gives us glimpses of embodied love without shame. The woman can want kisses. The man can want her breasts. She can invite him away and tell him where she intends to give him her love. Neither person has to disguise desire to make it acceptable Scripture.
The absence of shame should not be confused with the absence of boundaries. The Song has repeatedly warned against awakening love before its proper time, and it described the woman’s garden as locked and her spring as sealed. Sexual openness within the relationship exists alongside sexual exclusivity outside it. The boundary protects a good thing; it does not prove that the thing behind the boundary is bad.
And the garden does not remain locked forever.
That is easy to miss if Christian sexual ethics becomes almost entirely a theology of saying no. There are circumstances in which no is precisely the faithful answer, but abstinence cannot be the final biblical vision of sexuality. Genesis gives us one flesh and nakedness without shame. Song of Songs gives us desire overflowing into mutual delight. The purpose of guarding love was never to keep love permanently asleep.
There is an until in the warning.
Here love is very much awake.
The vineyards are budding.
Blossoms are opening.
Pomegranates are flowering. Mandrakes are fragrant. The man states his desire plainly, and the woman answers just as plainly. The imagery that once accompanied anticipation now surrounds fulfillment.
This is also why the Song so often describes sexuality through the language of living things rather than consumption. Vines bud, blossoms open, fruit ripens, mandrakes give fragrance, and gardens produce what has been growing within them. These are living things whose enjoyment involves season, readiness, cultivation, and time. We should not turn every botanical image into an allegory of consent, but the pattern fits remarkably well with the Song’s repeated insistence that love should not be awakened before it desires.
Fruit cannot be bullied into ripening.
A blossom cannot be ordered open.
Love is powerful and pleasurable, but the Song never imagines that its proper enjoyment can be separated from willingness.
That is important when biblical language about marital belonging is applied pastorally. Paul speaks strongly about mutual bodily belonging in marriage, but notice how carefully he makes the language reciprocal.
1 Corinthians 7:3–5 (WEB)
Let the husband render to his wife the affection owed her, and likewise also
the wife to 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.
Paul does not establish a one-directional right of a husband over his wife. He mirrors every statement. The husband has obligations toward his wife, and the wife toward her husband. Her body belongs to him, and his body belongs to her. Even temporary abstinence is described in terms of mutual agreement. Whatever difficult pastoral questions may arise in applying the passage, it cannot legitimately be turned into biblical vocabulary for coercion.
Song of Songs shows us the joyful side of that reciprocity. The man wants the woman, and the woman wants the man. His desire does not silence her voice; it is followed immediately by her voice. His announcement that he wants the fruit of the palm is answered by her announcement that she intends to give him her love.
Desire meets desire.
We should be equally careful, however, not to turn that beautiful mutuality into another burden.
Real marriages are not poems, and spouses will not always experience desire simultaneously or with equal intensity. Desire changes with age, stress, exhaustion, pregnancy, children, health, medication, hormones, conflict, emotional closeness, and countless other circumstances. Song of Songs is celebrating mutual desire, not prescribing a synchronized hormonal schedule.
A beautiful description becomes cruel when turned into an obligation. A husband cannot quote the Shulammite to demand that his wife desire him. A wife should not conclude that something is necessarily wrong with her marriage because her husband does not communicate desire with the intensity of the palm-tree speech. The Song shows us a good gift in full bloom. Wisdom receives the gift without weaponizing it against people living through another season.
What the passage does show us is the character of healthy desire when it flourishes. It is attentive, particular, reciprocal, and expressed. Neither lover is left to infer everything from marital status. He tells her that he wants her. She tells him that she knows his desire is toward her, and then she tells him what she wants.
There is vulnerability in that openness. Saying “I want you” gives another person the opportunity to receive that desire, but also the possibility of rejection. Couples can gradually stop speaking about sex even while remaining sexually active because assumptions replace conversation and initiation becomes loaded with fear. The Song does not provide a counseling manual for those situations, but it does show us something worth noticing: these lovers make their desire knowable.
That is one reason the eroticism of Song of Songs differs so profoundly from pornography even when its language becomes explicit. Pornography detaches sexual display from the knowledge and mutual self-giving of the persons being viewed. Song of Songs moves in precisely the opposite direction. The more sexually explicit the poem becomes, the more insistently particular its vocabulary becomes: my beloved, my love, his desire toward me, for you I have stored these things.
The difference is not that one notices bodies while the other does not. Song of Songs has been noticing bodies enthusiastically for several chapters. The difference is what the body means. This is not anonymous material for appetite. It is the body of someone known, chosen, and loved.
That also explains why the Shulammite can enjoy being desired without being reduced to being desirable. She has a voice, memory, fears, initiative, imagination, frustration, and desires of her own. The man can intensely desire her body without the poem pretending her body is all she is. Likewise, she can describe his body in almost absurd detail and still conclude, “This is my beloved, and this is my friend.” The Song refuses to make physical attraction and personal affection competitors.
By the end of chapter 7, the integration is impossible to miss. He sees the woman he loves and wants her. She knows she is wanted and delights in it. She wants him in return and invites him away. The vineyards are flowering, the mandrakes are fragrant, and precious fruits are waiting.
Nothing about the passage is embarrassed by sexual desire.
Nothing about it treats desire as sufficient by itself.
The desire is good because love has given it a home.
The Shulammite’s words are therefore much more than passive permission. “Come, my beloved,” “let’s go,” “let’s lodge,” “let’s go early,” and “there I will give you my love” form a sequence of deliberate invitations. Nothing about her initiative threatens his masculinity, and nothing about his strong desire requires her passivity. He can want her intensely enough to describe climbing a palm tree, and she can answer by effectively planning the romantic getaway.
There is a time not to awaken love.
There is also apparently a time to wake up early and go check the vineyards.
The Shulammite knows exactly which time this is.
Conclusion
Song of Songs 7:6–13 takes the mutuality present throughout the book and makes it impossible to miss. The man looks at the woman he loves and expresses unmistakable sexual desire for her. She receives that desire with delight because she wants the same man. His desire moves toward her, and hers moves toward him.
That is what gives “I am my beloved’s. His desire is toward me” its force. The rare Hebrew word teshuqah deserves comparison with Genesis 3:16 and 4:7, but its context here is clear. She is not describing a threatening desire she needs to resist. She rejoices in knowing that the man to whom she belongs wants her, and her next words show that his desire is returned: “Come, my beloved.”
The vineyards, blossoms, pomegranates, mandrakes, and precious fruits gather imagery the Song has been developing from its opening chapters. What was once budding has matured. What was guarded can now be given. The woman who was described as a locked garden does not remain locked forever. She chooses whom she welcomes: “There I will give you my love.” Her boundaries and her sexual freedom belong together because both express the particularity of her love.
The passage therefore gives us a picture of sexuality that cannot be reduced either to prohibition or appetite.
Desire is good, but desire has found a particular person.
The body is celebrated, but the body belongs to someone known and loved. Intimacy is exclusive without becoming cold and passionate without becoming indiscriminate. The man expresses what he wants, the woman expresses what she wants, and neither person’s desire erases the other’s voice.
The Song began with this woman wanting her beloved to kiss her. Seven chapters later, she is still not embarrassed that she wants him. What has changed is the depth of the relationship surrounding that desire. She can now say not only that she wants him, but that she knows where she stands with him:
“I am my beloved’s.
His desire is toward me.”
She knows she belongs.
She knows she is wanted.
And she wants him too.
Prayer
Father, thank you for creating human beings as embodied people and for making marriage a place where affection, friendship, faithfulness, and sexual desire can belong together. Forgive us for the ways sin has distorted sexuality into selfishness, exploitation, shame, comparison, and consumption.
Teach husbands and wives to desire one another as whole persons rather than treating one another as bodies from which something is owed. Give marriages the safety to communicate affection and desire honestly, the tenderness to hear one another well, and the patience to navigate seasons when desire does not come equally or easily.
Help us understand the goodness of boundaries without treating sexuality itself as dirty. Teach us to guard what should be guarded and to give freely what is ours to give within the relationship for which it was intended. Let faithfulness be more than avoiding other people; cultivate particular delight in the person we have chosen to love.
Protect marriages from comparison and from anything that trains desire away from the beloved. Where insecurity has grown, give reassurance. Where intimacy has been wounded, give patience, honesty, repentance, forgiveness, and healing. Where affection has become difficult to express, help spouses learn again how to make their love known.
Thank you for the simple joy contained in the Shulammite’s words: she belongs to the man she loves, she knows his desire is toward her, and she desires him in return.
May our love for one another be faithful, generous, and freely given.
In Jesus’ name, amen.