The Song of Songs

The title is a Hebrew superlative: Shir haShirim (שִׁיר הַשִּׁירִים), the Song of Songs, the way "holy of holies" means the holiest place and "King of kings" means the highest king. Of all the songs, this is the best one, "which is Solomon's" (Song 1:1), and the book stands in the wisdom shelf beside Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, Solomon's other associations, because Israel understood love as a matter of wisdom, something that can be handled well or badly, honored or cheapened. What follows the title is poetry with almost no narration: two voices, a woman and a man, with a chorus called the daughters of Jerusalem, singing desire, delight, absence, and reunion. The woman speaks first and speaks most, which is itself remarkable in the ancient world; her voice opens the book, "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine" (1:2), and closes it (8:14).

The imagery is agricultural, seasonal, and unhurried: vineyards and henna blossoms, a gazelle on the mountains, a garden locked and a fountain sealed, lilies and pomegranates, the winter past and the rain over and gone, "the flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land" (2:11-12). The lovers praise each other at length and in detail, and the praise is never sneering or consuming; each treats the other's body and presence as a wonder to honor, "You are altogether beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you" (4:7), and she of him, "This is my beloved and this is my friend" (5:16), lover and friend in one person, which is the Song's quiet definition of marriage. Three times the woman turns to the chorus with the book's one repeated command: "I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem... that you not stir up or awaken love until it pleases" (2:7; 3:5; 8:4). Desire is a fire worth having, and precisely because it is fire, it has a right time. The Song refuses both the ancient temptation to make desire a god and the religious temptation to make it a shame.

Twice the Song turns from delight to ache. In chapter 3 the woman lies awake: "On my bed by night I sought him whom my soul loves; I sought him, but found him not" (Song 3:1). She rises, circles the city, asks the watchmen, and the finding is quick and glad: "Scarcely had I passed them when I found him whom my soul loves. I held him, and would not let him go" (3:4). In chapter 5 the ache runs deeper. The beloved knocks at night, "Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my perfect one, for my head is wet with dew" (5:2), and she hesitates over small comforts, her garment already off, her feet already washed, and by the time she rises and opens, "my beloved had turned and gone" (5:6). This time the seeking costs her; the watchmen strike her; and her answer to the chorus's question, what is your beloved more than another?, is not a complaint but the Song's longest praise of him, head like finest gold, eyes like doves beside streams of water, "distinguished among ten thousand" (5:10-16). Love in the Song is not a possession that cannot be lost track of; it is a person who can be grieved by slowness, and whose absence teaches the heart what his presence was worth.

Generations of readers have recognized their own spiritual history in those two nights, the seasons when the soul's beloved seems withdrawn and the seeking itself becomes the love song. The poetry holds a wisdom any marriage and any life of faith learns eventually: delight is not a steady state, love includes pursuit, and the beloved who seems lost is found by the one who gets up and looks. The reunion scenes never scold the ache; they crown it. "I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine" (6:3), the Song's central exchange, is spoken on the far side of a night of seeking, and it deliberately echoes the covenant formula that runs through the prophets, I will be their God and they shall be my people.

From very early, the Song has been read two ways, and the Sanctum gives both without forcing a choice. The plain reading takes the book as what it appears to be: inspired poetry celebrating covenant love between a woman and a man, Scripture's own witness that the marriage bed and the delight of lovers are God's good creation, not a concession. On this reading the Song answers Genesis: what Adam sang over Eve, "bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh" (Genesis 2:23), before the fall, the Song sings at full length in a fallen world, love pursued through obstacles, guarded by right timing, and crowned in mutual belonging. Proverbs commands the husband to rejoice in the wife of his youth (Proverbs 5:18-19); the Song is that command set to music.

The older reading, carried by both synagogue and church, hears in the lovers the covenant itself: YHWH and Israel, Christ and his church. That reading did not come from embarrassment; it came from the Bible's own habit of speaking this way. The prophets cast Israel as YHWH's bride, betrothed in the wilderness (Jeremiah 2:2), wooed back after unfaithfulness, "And I will betroth you to me forever" (Hosea 2:19-20), and Isaiah promises, "as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you" (Isaiah 62:5). The New Testament finishes the pattern: John the Baptist calls Jesus the bridegroom (John 3:29), Jesus calls himself that (Mark 2:19-20), Paul reads marriage itself as a mystery that "refers to Christ and the church" (Ephesians 5:31-32), and the Bible ends at a wedding, "the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready" (Revelation 19:7). If human covenant love is designed as a picture of that love, then the Song's two readings are not rivals; the plain sense is the picture, and the covenant sense is what the picture was always of.

The Song saves its theology for the end, and gives it in one blazing stanza: "Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm, for love is strong as death, jealousy is fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of the LORD. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. If a man offered for love all the wealth of his house, he would be utterly despised" (Song 8:6-7). A seal (chotam, חוֹתָם) in the ancient world was identity and ownership, worn on a cord at the chest or bound at the arm; the woman asks to be carried where the heart beats and where the arm works, permanently, the way a signet is never lent out. Love here is measured against the strongest things the Old Testament knows, death and Sheol, and holds its ground: death claims everyone, and love refuses to let go anyway.

The stanza's center hides the book's one open reference to God. The word rendered "the very flame of the LORD" is shalhevetyah (שַׁלְהֶבֶתְיָה), a flame carrying the divine name Yah in its ending, love's fire traced back to its source. And the last lines price love beyond purchase: all the wealth of a house offered for it would be despised, because covenant love is given, never bought, which is also the gospel's economics. The New Testament states plainly what the Song sings: "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13), and at the cross the love strong as death went through death and came out the other side still holding on. For Sanctum of Spiritborn, the Song of Songs anchors the marriage lane and the covenant lane at once, the book that dignifies human love as YHWH's good gift and lets it point, without strain, at the Bridegroom who set his people as a seal upon his heart.

Solomon, the Figure, the king whose name the best of songs carries.

Sanctum Marriage, covenant love from Eden to the wedding of the Lamb.

Sanctum Love, ahavah and agape in full biblical scope.

Sanctum Wisdom, the shelf the Song sits on.

Sanctum Covenant, the belonging formula the lovers echo.

Sanctum The Church, the Bride the pattern points to.

Bible Reader, the Song of Songs in Hebrew and English.