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, study the Bible, memorize the Bible, and insist that every word of Scripture is profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, and 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 Song of Songs has acquired its own special category: inspired Scripture that we would prefer God had not asked us to read out loud.
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, desire, kissing, 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.” Before deciding what Song of Songs means, however, we need to do something much simpler.
Come back. Sit down.
We’re going to read the book.
Let the Song Introduce Itself
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, 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 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 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 correctly recognized that Scripture uses marriage to describe God’s covenant relationship with his people and eventually describes Christ and the Church as bridegroom and bride. Those connections are real, important, and worth following. But a genuine 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 with the revolutionary observation that she would like him to kiss her.
Historically, interpreters have sometimes performed extraordinary feats to avoid precisely that conclusion. Kisses became divine revelation. Breasts became the Old and New Testaments. Fragrances became virtues. Bedrooms became mystical communion. Individual details were assigned spiritual counterparts until the lovers themselves nearly disappeared beneath layers of symbolism. Some of those interpreters were thoughtful Christians sincerely attempting to understand how this unusual book belonged within Holy Scripture, and we should not caricature them.
Their mistake was not recognizing that human marriage can point toward something greater. Their mistake was allowing the greater reality to make the human reality disappear. Our normal rules of interpretation cannot suddenly be suspended because a passage makes us blush. We begin with the author, the text, and the kind of literature we are reading. Song of Songs announces itself as a song— indeed, the “Song of songs,” a Hebrew expression indicating the greatest or finest song. We are reading poetry. Imagery will be dense, comparisons imaginative, speakers will move in and out, and scenes will not always behave like straightforward historical narrative.
When the woman says, “My beloved is to me a cluster of henna blossoms from the vineyards of En Gedi” (1:14), nobody needs to investigate whether the man has undergone an unfortunate botanical transformation. When he 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. Poetry communicates through comparison.
That becomes especially important once we reach descriptions that sound bizarre to modern ears: hair like goats, teeth like sheep, a neck like the tower of David.
If you try some of these lines on your spouse tonight without explanation, BenMarkel.com accepts no responsibility for what happens next. Ancient Hebrew love poetry was not written with twentyfirst-century American romantic vocabulary. Our question is not whether the comparisons would work on a Valentine’s Day card from Walgreens, but what they communicated within the world of the Song.
Once we allow the poetry to speak in its own language, something remarkably ordinary and beautiful emerges: a man delights in a woman, a woman delights in a man, and neither appears ashamed of that delight. 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.
Naked and Not Ashamed
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, and before there is a temple, priesthood, 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 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 final sentence deserves more attention than we usually give it. They were naked, and they were not ashamed. Immediately after the fall, the same man and woman become conscious of their nakedness and cover themselves. Shame, alienation, and hiding enter the story after sin and affect the relationship between man and woman along with everything else. Christianity therefore begins with a radically different understanding of the body from the idea that physical things are dirty while spiritual things are holy. God made bodies, sexuality, and marriage. He 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 good. Scripture condemns adultery, sexual exploitation, incest, lust, and sexual immorality. Human desire cannot become its own moral authority simply because we experience it. But there is an enormous difference between saying sexuality can be corrupted by sin and saying sexuality is itself a corruption. Scripture says the first. Christians have sometimes behaved as though it says the second.
That can produce a strange form 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—all warnings with legitimate biblical foundations. Then they marry, and 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.
It also gives us Song of Songs.
The Song shows us desire that does not need to apologize for existing. These lovers admire one another, want proximity to one another, speak enthusiastically about one another’s bodies, and enjoy being wanted. Significantly, that desire runs in both directions. The woman is not scenery in a man’s romantic fantasy. She speaks first. She expresses desire, searches, invites, praises his body, and repeatedly describes their mutual belonging.
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. The Song is not embarrassed about sex, but neither is it merely about sex. These lovers do not simply desire bodies. They desire one another.
Eventually that love will be described in the strongest language of the entire poem:
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: toward love that cannot be purchased, desire belonging within exclusive devotion, and a relationship in which two people give themselves to one another so completely that the poet reaches for death, fire, flood, and wealth to describe its strength.
Allegory or Biblical Theology?
If Song of Songs genuinely celebrates the love of a man and woman, what should we 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. There really 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 another way.
An allegorical reading assumes that the apparent subject of the Song is actually a coded representation of something else. The man represents God or Christ, the woman represents Israel or the Church, and their kisses, bodies, fragrances, gardens, bedrooms, and movements acquire spiritual counterparts whose true significance lies beyond the human relationship. Once that method is used without textual controls, almost anything can become almost anything.
Biblical theology works differently. It allows a passage to mean what it means in its own context and then asks how that reality participates in patterns Scripture itself develops elsewhere. Marriage unquestionably becomes one of those patterns.
God repeatedly describes his covenant relationship with Israel through marriage. 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.
Isaiah can describe Yahweh as Israel’s husband because everyone already understands the human institution being used as the metaphor. Marriage possesses realities—exclusive belonging, faithfulness, intimacy, love, and covenant loyalty—that make it capable of communicating something about God’s relationship with his people. The prophets can therefore describe Israel’s idolatry as adultery for the same reason. The metaphor depends upon human marriage having a real meaning of its own.
The New Testament carries that pattern forward. Paul writes:
Ephesians 5:25–32 (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 of the assembly.
Paul quotes Genesis 2.
He does not tell us that Adam and Eve were never really about Adam and Eve or that one-flesh marriage was secretly about Christ in a way that makes human marriage irrelevant. Instead, the relationship works 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 safer way to approach Song of Songs. We can allow a husband to be a husband, a wife to be a wife, a kiss to be a kiss, and a garden to function as erotic poetry when the context tells us that is what the poet is doing. Then 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 that begins with marriage in Eden, repeatedly uses marriage to describe God’s covenant with his people, identifies Christ as the bridegroom and the Church as his bride, and eventually arrives at the marriage supper of the Lamb. That larger pattern matters. It just does not require us to turn every kiss, vineyard, gazelle, and body part into a secret theological code.
Sometimes biblical interpretation requires us to stand close enough to examine the brushstrokes. Sometimes biblical theology requires us to back up and see the mural. Stand too far away and we miss what the individual passage actually says. Stand with our nose against the wall and we may never recognize that the details belong to something larger.
Throughout these studies, we are going to do both.
We will examine who is speaking, how the poetry works, what Hebrew words mean when they affect interpretation, how ancient imagery would have functioned, how phrases repeat, and how desire, separation, intimacy, and belonging develop throughout the Song. Then we will back away and ask how what we have seen belongs within the larger biblical story. We will not use the mural to erase the brushstrokes.
Desire Needs a Home
Recognizing sexuality as a created good does not remove God’s boundaries around it. In fact, Song of Songs helps us understand why those boundaries exist. Biblical sexual ethics are not built upon the proposition that desire is disgusting. They are built upon the proposition that desire is powerful enough to require a proper home.
Proverbs makes that point while warning a young man against adultery:
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?
The father does not answer illicit desire by telling his son that bodies do not matter. 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.
That is very close to the world of Song of Songs, where the lovers’ enthusiasm exists alongside a repeated warning:
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 it carefully when we encounter it in context, but already it tells us something important. The Song refuses to treat love as something to force into existence or manipulate casually.
Christian teaching about sexuality can fail in two opposite directions. One error removes God’s boundaries and makes desire sovereign: I want this, therefore pursuing it must be right. Scripture rejects that. Human desire is affected by sin and cannot serve as our final moral authority. The opposite error sees how terribly sexuality can be corrupted and begins treating sexuality itself as though it were the corruption. Song of Songs rejects that as well.
The biblical answer is not to despise desire but to order it wisely. That is why the Song can celebrate something it also tells us not to awaken prematurely. The warning and the celebration belong together. Love is worth guarding because love is worth having.
What About Solomon?
Even after agreeing that the Song genuinely celebrates human love, another question remains: exactly what relationship are we reading about? 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 reason to consider Solomon important: “The Song of songs, which is Solomon’s” (1:1). But the Hebrew construction does not settle every question we might like it to settle. It 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. One popular reconstruction, often called the shepherd hypothesis, treats the Song almost like 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, creating a contrast between genuine love and royal excess. The interpretation has some attraction, particularly because Solomon’s enormous collection of wives and concubines makes him an awkward candidate for the model of exclusive marital devotion.
1 Kings 11:3 (WEB)
He had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines. His wives turned his heart away.
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 difficulty 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 often insert labels such as “Beloved,” “Lover,” or “Friends,” but those labels are editorial decisions based largely upon grammatical gender, number, and context. Ancient Hebrew manuscripts did not arrive 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. Others require 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 that does not automatically mean every male speech belongs to the historical Solomon or that the Song is autobiographical.
Nor should we expect the Song to behave like a modern novel. Locations shift rapidly. Lovers imagine situations. Dreamlike scenes appear. Memories, desires, and actual events can be difficult to distinguish. Poetry can arrange 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 desire one another, praise one another, seek one another, and repeatedly describe their relationship through mutual belonging. Whatever uncertainties remain about chronology, authorship, dramatic structure, or Solomon’s precise role, that much is clear.
There is also an interesting tension in having Solomon hovering around a poem like this. The king who possessed extraordinary wealth, power, and access to women is associated with a Song whose great 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.”
Whether the Song intends that as a direct criticism of Solomon is a question 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.
Our method, then, will remain deliberately modest.
We will identify speakers where grammar 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. Where the text is clear, we can speak clearly. Where it leaves room for uncertainty, faithfulness requires us to leave room too. That may be less exciting 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.
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 spiritualized the poetry until the man and woman almost disappear. Neither response is necessary. We can simply read it.
We will read Song of Songs first as the poetry it presents itself to be, allowing its lovers to love one another, its metaphors to function as poetry, and its celebration of physical attraction to remain physical attraction. At the same time, we will not isolate the Song from the rest of Scripture. Marriage begins in God’s good creation and becomes part of a biblical pattern that eventually reaches Christ and his people. We can see that mural without repainting the individual brushstrokes.
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 God answered questions the text leaves open.
Most importantly, we should enter this book without embarrassment over the fact that God created human beings with bodies and gave marriage as a good gift. Sin has distorted sexuality terribly, which is precisely why Scripture gives it boundaries. 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, and we have established how we intend to read it. The woman has been waiting for us since the opening verses anyway. 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, while also helping us see the larger truths your Word reveals through creation, marriage, faithfulness, love, and covenant. Where the text is difficult, give us humility. Where it leaves questions unanswered, give us restraint.
Teach us to receive the bodies, relationships, and desires you created as good gifts without separating those gifts from the purposes and boundaries you have given them. Where sin has distorted our desires, sanctify us. Where shame has taught us to despise something you created as good, correct us 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 marriage without treating marriage or sexuality as the source of human completeness. Above all, teach us to receive every good gift with gratitude while remembering the God from whom every good gift comes. Give us courage to follow your Word wherever it takes us—even when it takes us somewhere we would rather avoid.
In Jesus’ name, amen.