Song of Songs 1:2–4 (WEB)
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, we spent an entire first study establishing how we were going to read Song of Songs, and the woman has rewarded our patience by immediately asking to be kissed.
There is probably no better place for the Song to begin. Before we encounter vineyards, shepherds, royal processions, gardens, gazelles, towers, spices, or any of the other imagery that will eventually require some explanation, we encounter desire in language that requires almost none. She wants him near her. She wants his mouth on hers. Whatever uncertainties surround some of the Song’s later metaphors, we do not need a Hebrew lexicon to determine whether “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth” expresses romantic attraction.
We should also notice that the woman receives the first substantial voice in the Song. She is not introduced as an object being admired by a man while remaining silent about her own desires. She desires him, speaks about him, wants him to take her away, and describes his affection as better than wine. As the Song continues, she will search for him, praise him, invite him, and speak about his body with the same poetic enthusiasm he will eventually direct toward hers. Song of Songs will not permit us to imagine female desire as an unfortunate side effect of the fall.
Her comparison—“your love is better than wine”—emphasizes pleasure. The Hebrew word translated “love” here can refer to expressions or acts of affection, while wine naturally evokes delight and celebration. His affection gives her greater pleasure still. The sensory language continues with fragrance. His oils smell good, and then his very name becomes like oil poured out. In the ancient world, fragrant oils were valuable and associated with beauty, hospitality, celebration, and intimacy. The wordplay allows his literal fragrance and his reputation to blend together. She likes how he smells, but she also likes who he is.
That keeps the opening from becoming merely physical appetite. She certainly finds him physically desirable—the request for kisses eliminated any doubt about that—but attraction throughout the Song encompasses the beloved as a whole person. His touch, fragrance, reputation, presence, and affection belong together. She does not want an anonymous male body. She wants him.
“Take me away with you. Let’s hurry” gives that desire movement. We should resist constructing more narrative than the passage supplies. The Song does not provide stage directions telling us precisely where everyone stands, whether every reference to “the king” should be identified directly with Solomon, or how each scene fits into a strict chronology. The emotional movement is much clearer than the geography: she desires him, delights in him, and wants to be with him.
Then, almost immediately after expressing that confidence, she tells us something else about herself.
Dark and Lovely
Song of Songs 1:5–6 (WEB)
I am dark, but lovely,
you daughters of Jerusalem,
like Kedar’s tents,
like Solomon’s curtains.
Don’t stare at me because I am dark,
because the sun has scorched me.
My mother’s sons were angry with me.
They made me keeper of the vineyards.
I haven’t kept my own vineyard.
There is vulnerability beneath the desire. The woman knows others are looking at her, and she knows what they see. She describes herself as dark and lovely, then explains that the sun has darkened her skin because she has been working outside. Whatever questions the wording may raise for modern readers, the text itself identifies the immediate cause: “the sun has scorched me.” Her complexion bears the marks of labor.
That could carry social implications in an agricultural society. Someone wealthy enough to avoid prolonged outdoor labor could maintain lighter skin, while sun-darkened skin could reveal that a person worked outside. Her concern is therefore not that dark skin is inherently unattractive. She appears conscious that her appearance reveals something about her circumstances and perhaps differs from an ideal associated with women who had the luxury of avoiding such labor.
The tents of Kedar probably intensify the image. Kedar was associated with nomadic peoples whose tents were made from dark goat hair. Yet she balances the comparison immediately: she is dark and lovely, comparable also to Solomon’s curtains. She does not deny what others see, but neither does she accept the conclusion that it makes her undesirable.
Her explanation becomes more painful when she mentions her brothers. “My mother’s sons were angry with me.
They made me keeper of the vineyards.” Calling them her mother’s sons rather than simply her brothers may carry a note of emotional distance, although we should not build too much upon the phrasing alone. What is clear is that she has been required to tend vineyards belonging to others, leaving her unable to tend her own. The vineyard will become increasingly important as the Song develops, so we should not rush to assign a sexual meaning to every occurrence. Here the literal sense already explains her appearance: she has spent her time caring for other vineyards and has been unable to care for herself as she would have preferred.
The experience is painfully recognizable even across thousands of years. A person can know she is lovely and still be conscious of the feature she assumes everyone else notices first. She can say, “I am lovely,” and almost immediately explain why she worries people are staring.
The Song does not answer that insecurity by pretending appearance does not matter.
Her beloved is about to tell her what he sees.
Song of Songs 1:7–8 (WEB)
Tell me, you whom my soul loves,
where you graze your flock,
where you rest them at noon;
for why should I be as one who is veiled
beside the flocks of your companions?
Friends:
If you don’t know, most beautiful among women,
follow the tracks of the sheep.
Graze your young goats beside the shepherds’ tents.
Her attention turns from how others see her toward the man she loves. She wants to know where he will be. The shepherding language places the scene among flocks and tents, though we should be cautious about building an entire biography for the man from a poetic scene. What is unmistakable is her desire to find him.
“You whom my soul loves” also deserves attention. The Hebrew nephesh, often translated “soul,” does not require us to imagine a detachable spiritual component declaring its affection independently of her body. In Hebrew usage it commonly refers to the person, life, or self. She loves this man with herself. The woman who wanted his kisses now calls him the one whom her nephesh loves. The Song sees no contradiction between those statements. Her description of herself as “one who is veiled” is more difficult. Translations vary, with some conveying wandering or straying rather than veiling. The precise idiom is uncertain, but the basic movement of the passage is not: she does not want to wander among the flocks of his companions trying to find him. She wants to know where he is.
The response calls her “most beautiful among women.” That lands immediately after she has told the daughters of Jerusalem not to stare at her because the sun has darkened her. The woman conscious of her appearance is answered with language affirming her beauty.
Then the man begins speaking.
And this is where modern husbands should remember that ancient Hebrew love poetry occasionally requires explanatory footnotes before practical application.
Pharaoh’s Steed
Song of Songs 1:9–11 (WEB)
I have compared you, my love,
to a steed in Pharaoh’s chariots.
Your cheeks are beautiful with earrings,
your neck with strings of jewels.
We will make you earrings of gold,
with studs of silver.
“You remind me of one of Pharaoh’s steeds.”
There are sentences that probably require historical context before trying them on your wife.
To modern ears, comparing a woman to a horse can sound less like romance and more like the beginning of an argument. That reaction demonstrates why historical context matters. Poetry communicates through a shared world of images, and if we assume an ancient comparison carries exactly the associations it would carry in our culture, we can misunderstand the compliment while understanding every individual word.
Egyptian chariot horses represented beauty, prestige, strength, wealth, and royal splendor. Pharaoh’s chariotry was not populated by worn-out farm animals dragging carts through the mud. These were prized animals associated with the military and royal power of one of the great civilizations of the ancient world. That setting fits what the man says immediately afterward: he notices the ornaments along her cheeks, the jewels around her neck, and imagines gold and silver adornment. The whole description is one of magnificence.
There may be another layer. The Hebrew noun susati is feminine—a mare. Egyptian chariot teams are commonly understood to have used stallions, leading some interpreters to suggest the image of a mare among Pharaoh’s stallions: beautiful, conspicuous, and extremely capable of getting their attention. The suggestion is intriguing and fits the Song’s celebration of attraction, but it remains a historical reconstruction rather than something the verse explicitly explains. We do not need the theory to understand the compliment.
Whatever precise associations the original audience heard, the surrounding lines make it extremely unlikely that the man has interrupted his love poetry to compare his beloved with agricultural equipment.
That is why the image for this study works so well. The husband imagines that he has compared his wife to something magnificent, regal, captivating, and beautifully adorned. The wife hears, “Apparently I should be harnessed to a chariot.”
Same words. Completely different cultural associations.
Translation can tell us what an image says; historical context helps us understand what the image does. Replacing Hebrew words with English words is not enough if we then import modern associations back into an ancient metaphor.
More importantly, notice where his compliment occurs. The woman has just drawn attention to the feature of her appearance about which she feels conspicuous. She sees what the sun and labor have done to her. He finds her striking.
Whether we should treat every word of his praise as a direct answer to her insecurity is uncertain, but the literary juxtaposition is difficult to miss. She describes herself through the marks of hard work; the poem answers with beauty, jewelry, gold, silver, and royal splendor. The Song is not offering the shallow promise that insecurity disappears whenever somebody says something flattering. It is showing us that we do not always see ourselves as the person who loves us sees us.
She sees the sun.
He sees beauty.
And she is about to return the favor.
Fragrance, Beauty, and Mutual Delight
Song of Songs 1:12–17 (WEB)
While the king sat at his table,
my perfume spread its fragrance.
My beloved is to me a sachet of myrrh,
that lies between my breasts.
My beloved is to me a cluster of henna blossoms
from the vineyards of En Gedi.
Behold, you are beautiful, my love.
Behold, you are beautiful.
Your eyes are like doves.
Behold, you are beautiful, my beloved, yes, pleasant;
and our couch is verdant.
The beams of our house are cedars.
Our rafters are firs.
The conversation has become reciprocal. He praises her, and she answers by describing what he is to her. Once again the language is intensely sensory: perfume, myrrh, henna blossoms, sight, fragrance, and physical proximity. Attraction in the Song is experienced rather than merely discussed. Myrrh was an expensive aromatic resin used in perfumes, cosmetics, burial preparations, and other settings throughout the ancient world. A sachet or bundle could be worn against the body so that its fragrance remained close. When she compares her beloved to myrrh resting between her breasts, the image is intimate because the location is intimate. He is precious to her, pleasing to her, and desired close to her body.
We do not need to allegorize that into something safer, nor do we need to make it more explicit than the poet does. The poetry manages the balance perfectly well.
It is sensual without becoming clinical.
Bodies belong naturally within its celebration of human love without becoming the entirety of that love.
Henna blossoms continue the imagery of fragrance and beauty. En Gedi was a fertile oasis along the western shore of the Dead Sea, conspicuously lush against the surrounding Judean wilderness. The comparison evokes something fragrant and delightful flourishing amid a harsh landscape. His presence is refreshing to her.
He answers, “Behold, you are beautiful, my love.
Behold, you are beautiful. Your eyes are like doves.” The dove comparison could evoke beauty, gentleness, softness, color, or some combination of associations. Poetry often works through a cluster of impressions rather than a one-toone symbolic equation, so there is little benefit in pretending we can decode the exact feature of a dove he has in mind.
The repetition is clearer: “You are beautiful” comes twice.
The woman who began by asking the daughters of Jerusalem not to stare at her is now being looked at by someone whose attention she wants. His gaze is not portrayed as threatening because of the relationship between them. She wants this man to see her, and he likes what he sees.
She immediately answers: “Behold, you are beautiful, my beloved, yes, pleasant.” The mutuality continues. This is not a man evaluating a woman while she waits for his verdict. She looks right back and finds him beautiful too.
Then the scenery becomes intriguing: “our couch is verdant. The beams of our house are cedars. Our rafters are firs.” The adjective translated “verdant” or “green” has led many interpreters to see an outdoor setting in which vegetation becomes their couch and trees become the beams and rafters of an imagined house. Whether that reconstruction is exact or not, the effect is unmistakable. Their love is surrounded by a living world of fragrance, flowers, trees, animals, fruit, precious metals, and perfume.
Given that the biblical story of man and woman begins in a garden, that imagery is worth noticing without turning every plant into a coded reference to Eden. At minimum, the Song situates human love within the goodness and abundance of creation.
The imagery continues immediately.
Song of Songs 2:1–3 (WEB)
I am a rose of Sharon,
a lily of the valleys.
As a lily among thorns,
so is my love among the daughters.
As the apple tree among the trees of the wood,
so is my beloved among the sons.
I delighted to sit in his shade.
His fruit was sweet to my taste.
The exact flowers behind “rose of Sharon” and “lily” are uncertain, and botanical precision is unnecessary for following the poetry. What matters is what happens to her comparison. She calls herself a flower; he immediately distinguishes her from every flower around her: “As a lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.”
The poem is obviously not making an objective botanical assessment of every other woman. Love has changed the field. One woman matters differently because this woman is his beloved.
She answers in kind. If she is the lily among thorns, he is the apple tree among ordinary forest trees. She wants his shade and enjoys his fruit. He stands apart among other men because he is the man she loves. Attraction and exclusivity are developing together. The Song does not celebrate generic desire moving indiscriminately from one beautiful person to another. Its attention continually narrows.
Among the daughters, her.
Among the sons, him.
And beneath the shade of that apple tree, the poetry becomes considerably warmer.
Faint With Love
Song of Songs 2:4–7 (WEB)
He brought me to the banquet hall.
His banner over me is love.
Strengthen me with raisins,
refresh me with apples;
for I am faint with love.
His left hand is under my head.
His right hand embraces me.
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 movement is natural. She has described sitting beneath his shade and tasting his sweet fruit; now she describes being brought into the “banquet hall,” or more literally something like the “house of wine.” The precise setting is debated, but the emotional atmosphere is not. Longing has become proximity, and proximity is becoming overwhelming.
The familiar line “his banner over me is love” comes from here, although the Hebrew is more difficult than the popularity of the English phrase might suggest. The noun degel normally refers to a banner, standard, or something prominently displayed. Whatever nuances remain uncertain, context should prevent us from detaching the phrase and immediately turning it into a generic slogan about God’s love. A woman intensely attracted to her beloved is describing his love toward her.
The larger biblical marriage pattern remains real, but this particular banner belongs first to these particular lovers.
Then apparently things become so overwhelming that refreshments are required.
“Strengthen me with raisins, refresh me with apples; for I am faint with love.”
There is our snack tray.
The word translated “faint” can describe weakness or sickness, which explains the familiar rendering “sick with love.” She is not announcing a medical emergency. Love poetry frequently describes longing as physically overwhelming, and that is what happens here. Her desire is so intense that she poetically calls for food to sustain her. Raisin cakes and apples become the emergency provisions of biblical romance.
For husbands determined to apply the passage with excessive literalism, keeping raisins and apples nearby is considerably safer than beginning with the Pharaoh’s-steed compliment.
The humor should not obscure the point.
Desire here is embodied. The Song does not divide an acceptable inner emotional love from an embarrassing physical response. She experiences longing as a whole person. She wanted his kisses, delighted in his fragrance, sought his presence, rested in his shade, tasted his fruit, and now describes herself as faint with love. Emotional affection, physical attraction, sensory pleasure, and personal attachment continually overlap.
The next verse makes the intimacy unmistakable: “His left hand is under my head. His right hand embraces me.”
Precisely how far the scene progresses sexually is not stated, and we should resist both sanitizing it and supplying details the poet chose not to give us. The Song can create erotic tension without narrating sexual activity mechanically. Its poetry is sensual without becoming voyeuristic.
Then, at precisely the point where desire has become most intense, the woman turns toward the daughters of Jerusalem and gives us the first great refrain of the Song.
Do Not Awaken Love
“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 Song will repeat essentially the same words in 3:5 and again in shortened form in 8:4. Repetition matters in poetry, especially when it occurs at significant moments. Whatever the refrain means, the Song clearly wants us to remember it.
Its precise meaning is not as simple as some popular treatments suggest. The final Hebrew phrase, ʿad sheteḥpats, can be rendered along the lines of “until it pleases,” “until it desires,” or “until the proper time.” Because “love” can be grammatically feminine in Hebrew, love itself may be personified as the thing that desires. Some translations instead make the reference more personal: “until she desires.” The unusual oath by the gazelles and does of the field raises additional questions. Various explanations have been proposed, including wordplay involving divine names and associations with beauty, fertility, love, and the countryside. We have possibilities rather than certainty.
What the refrain clearly does is place restraint beside desire.
That matters because of where it occurs. The woman has just described herself as nearly overwhelmed by love. The Song is not warning us against something it has spent the previous verses portraying as shameful. It is warning us about something it has portrayed as powerful.
This verse is sometimes converted immediately into a command to teenagers: don’t have sex before marriage. Scripture gives Christians ample grounds elsewhere for reserving sexual union for marriage and condemning sexual immorality. We do not need to make an uncertain phrase in Song of Songs carry more weight than it can bear merely because the resulting conclusion happens to be biblical.
The refrain gives us something broader: love and desire should not be manipulated or forced ahead of their proper time. Attraction cannot be coerced. Intimacy should not be driven forward simply because one person wants it to move faster. Something powerful enough to leave this woman “faint with love” deserves more respect than casual experimentation. That becomes especially significant when we remember how mutual everything has been. She wants him, and he wants her. She praises him, and he praises her. She seeks his presence, and he embraces her. Their desire answers desire.
The refrain therefore places a boundary around the very thing the Song celebrates. Biblical wisdom does not require us to choose between desire is dangerous, suppress it and desire is natural, obey it. It gives us something considerably wiser.
Desire is good enough to celebrate and powerful enough to respect.
Conclusion
The opening movement of Song of Songs has already shown us what kind of love this poem intends to explore. The woman wants the man’s kisses because she wants the man. His fragrance, reputation, presence, affection, and embrace belong to the same attraction. When he responds, he sees a woman conscious of how labor has affected her appearance and calls her beautiful. She answers by distinguishing him from every other man around her. Their attraction is physical without being impersonal, mutual without being indiscriminate, and increasingly exclusive.
That is why the refrain belongs exactly where it does. The Song does not warn us about awakening love because everything preceding the warning has been shameful. It warns us because everything preceding it has shown us why love should not be treated casually. This woman is “faint with love.” Desire has reached into her whole experience of the beloved. Something capable of creating that kind of attachment is not a toy.
Our culture can be extraordinarily casual about awakening desire while being remarkably poor at understanding what to do with it afterward. Sexual imagery is used to sell almost anything. Attraction can be deliberately cultivated without any intention of faithfulness. People can create emotional and physical intimacy while simultaneously being told not to expect permanence from it, and then discover that deep attachment cannot always be switched off without consequence.
Song of Songs begins somewhere different. Desire is neither dirty nor trivial. God’s boundaries around sexuality make sense precisely because bodies, faithfulness, intimacy, and people matter. The biblical answer to sexuality’s corruption is not to despise sexuality but to order it according to the purposes of the God who created it.
The way these lovers see one another gives us another glimpse of that order. The woman sees the sun and the work she has been forced to do. Her beloved sees someone magnificent enough to compare with Pharaoh’s royal splendor. Among all the daughters, he sees her; among all the sons, she sees him. Marriage does not require pretending every other human being has somehow become objectively unattractive. Something deeper is happening. One person has become uniquely precious.
There may be many flowers in the field, but one is my love. There may be many trees in the forest, but one is my beloved. Desire becomes attached to relationship, and relationship gives desire somewhere to belong. Song of Songs can therefore say without embarrassment, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,” and only a few verses later say with equal seriousness, “Do not stir up, nor awaken love, until it so desires.” Those statements belong together.
Enjoy the gift without being ashamed of it, and respect the gift enough not to treat it casually.
And if you decide to tell your wife that she reminds you of one of Pharaoh’s steeds, perhaps explain the historical context first.
Prayer
Father, thank you for creating us as embodied people and for giving good gifts that can be received with gratitude rather than shame. Thank you for love, affection, attraction, companionship, and marriage, and for giving us Scripture that speaks honestly about these things instead of pretending they are outside your concern.
Teach us to see your gifts according to your wisdom. Where our culture has taught us to treat desire casually, teach us to respect its power. Where fear or shame has taught us to despise what you created as good, correct our thinking through your Word. Give us wisdom not to awaken love carelessly and self-control to keep our desires within the boundaries you have given for our good.
For those who are married, teach us to delight in the person we have been given rather than allowing familiarity to make us careless. Help husbands and wives speak affection generously, see one another with kindness, remain faithful in thought and action, and cultivate intimacy that is mutual, patient, and loving. When insecurity makes another person’s affection difficult to receive, help us listen. When selfishness makes us more interested in being desired than in loving well, correct us.
For those who are unmarried, give contentment without requiring indifference. Help them honor desires that may be good without allowing those desires to rule them, and guard them from believing romantic love is necessary to make a human life complete.
Above all, teach us that your commands and your gifts come from the same good God. Give us hearts that neither reject what you call good nor pursue it apart from the wisdom you have given.
In Jesus’ name, amen.