The Song of Solomon

An Invitation to Intimacy

Douglas Sean O'Donnell, R. Kent Hughes

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781433523489
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Our culture holds the megaphone when it comes to talking about sex today. Yet the church has maintained a reputation for keeping quiet, hesitant to teach people about this sacred aspect of life. The Song of Solomon, however, holds nothing back as it sings loudly about the holy practice of sexuality and pushes us into the conversation with godly theology.

While this biblical text has been subject to a broader range of interpretation probably than any other book in the Bible, Wisdom Literature expert Doug O'Donnell offers this comprehensible guide to help uncoil its complexities and solve its riddles. He explores the poetry, themes, and wisdom of this song from a Christocentric perspective, and gives us a profound, rich, and witty reflection that encourages right thinking and behavior.

Showing how this "song of songs" is meant to teach us about biblical sexuality and God's heart for his people, O'Donnell elucidates on the greatest subject of all time—love.

Part of thePreaching the Wordseries.

1

Understandest Thou What Thou Readest?

THE SONG OF SOLOMON 1:1

The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s.

1:1

UNDERSTANDEST THOU WHAT THOU READEST? is the King James version of Acts 8:30b.

Acts 8:26–39 tells the story of the conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch. In the middle of that story, the evangelist Philip overhears this man reading from the prophet Isaiah:

Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter

and like a lamb before its shearer is silent,

so he opens not his mouth.

In his humiliation justice was denied him.

Who can describe his generation?

For his life is taken away from the earth. (Acts 8:32, 33, quoting

and like a lamb before its shearer is silent,

Philip asked him, “Do you understand what you are reading?” (v. 30), or as the King James Version phrases it, “Understandest thou what thou readest?” The eunuch replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?”¹

Like the book of Isaiah, the Song of Solomon (or the Song of Songs, as I will call it throughout this commentary) can be a difficult book to comprehend. The ninth-century Jewish rabbi Saadia likened the Song to “a lock for which the key had been lost.”² The nineteenth-century German Lutheran Hebraist Franz Delitzsch wrote, “The Song is the most obscure book of the Old Testament. Whatever principle of interpretation one may adopt, there always remains a number of inexplicable passages.”³ More recently, Marvin Pope comments, “[N]o composition of comparable size in world literature has provoked and inspired such a volume and variety of comment and interpretation as the biblical Song of Songs.”⁴ Daniel Estes adds, “Scholars vary widely on nearly every part of its interpretation. . . . Virtually every verse presents challenges in text, philology, image, grammar or structure.”⁵

My favorite example of perspicuity angst comes from Christopher W. Mitchell, who begins his commentary, published in 2003, by reviewing the history of his study of the Song: “My fascination with the Song of Songs began in 1978 . . . when I took a graduate class on its Hebrew text at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. That fascination grew under the tutelage of my doctoral advisor, Professor Michael V. Fox.” Mitchell goes on to talk about how he has read commentaries and articles, preached and taught, and since 1992 worked earnestly on his 1,300-page commentary on the Song. He has worked almost thirty years on the Song, but then he writes in his preface about his desire to spend another decade to “delve more deeply into . . . this most difficult book of sacred Scripture.”⁶

Scholars who disagree on much of the Song all agree it’s a tough text. Thus the need for a guide to uncoil its complexities, solve its riddles, and find that lost key to unlock its door. In this first study I seek to offer some basic directions to help us navigate through the often dark (but so beautiful) waters of Solomon’s Song. By means of setting four guideposts in place, I hope to open God’s Word, as Philip did, and “beginning with this Scripture,” teach you “the good news about Jesus” (Acts 8:35), revealing to you something of the meaning of the “mystery” of marriage (Ephesians 5:32).

Guidepost One: This Is a Song . . .

We start with the first guidepost: This is a song.

Our text begins, “The Song . . .” (1:1a). The significance of this simple observation is that it identifies the genre. This is not a letter, gospel, law book, prophecy, or apocalyptic revelation. This is a song. And a song (this is what I’ve learned after many years of study) is written to be sung. (Aren’t you glad I’m your guide?)

Perhaps this Song was originally written to be sung during the seven-day marriage festival.⁷ We know that Israelite wedding celebrations lasted this long from Genesis 29:27 and Judges 14:12 and from extra-Biblical Jewish history; and we know from Jeremiah that singing was part of these festivities—“the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride” (Jeremiah 7:34).⁸

Thus, following the lead of Duane Garrett,⁹ I envision the following scenario: Just as there were professional singers and musicians for temple worship (e.g., 2 Chronicles 29:28), so I envision professional singers and musicians poised to sing and play for these week-long weddings. And each day as the bride and groom come out of their chambers, the wine is served, the music begins, and the singers sing. The soprano starts, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine” (1:2). Then, over the sweet strum of the harp, the tenor softly serenades, “Behold, you are beautiful, my love” (1:15). And throughout the song, as the soprano and tenor call back and forth, from time to time other voices join in—like a chorus in a Greek play or a choir in an oratorio. These voices are comprised of the young maidens, “the daughters of Jerusalem” as our text calls them.

That’s what I envision day after day for seven days, a perfect celebration of the new creation of man and wife as one. Whether or not you envision precisely what I envision matters little. What matters most is that you see the Song as a song, which means music and singing and implies some sort of public celebration.

This also means that this song is not primarily intended to be preached in church or taught in a classroom, but to be sung; and the fact that we don’t sing it (or some paraphrase of it) is only to our shame. This is a God-inspired love song! So I suggest we start some new traditions. Let’s write songs about the Song. Let’s sing those songs at Christian weddings. Let’s sing them during the reception. Let’s sing them as the couple is whisked away to their honeymoon. Let’s follow them to the hotel and serenade them for seven days! This is a song!

Furthermore, when you think song you must think poem or lyric poetry. “This is a song” is the same as saying, “This is a poem set to music.” This is obvious everywhere,¹⁰ even in the first verse. Our song begins with a poetic device called consonance: “The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s.” Do you hear the repeated s sound in the initial consonants: Song . . . Songs . . . Solomon. In Hebrew, a similar sh sound is heard: shir hashirim asher lishlomoh.¹¹

Herein the potential danger lies. We can read and teach the Song, forgetting or neglecting its poetry and quickly run from alliterations to applications. The cry for practical propositions beckons the preacher. It is important that we learn real-life lessons from each poetic pericope. But it is likewise important (nay, necessary) to first understand and feel the power and play of words, what only poetry can do to the human heart and imagination. For there is a difference between saying,

She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

And all that’s best of dark and bright

Meet in her aspect and her eyes.

Thus mellowed to that tender light

Which heaven to gaudy day denies.¹²

and saying,

A woman in a black dress with shiny beads looked pretty when she walked by.

There’s a difference between saying,

Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold,

Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old;

Some like it hot, some like it cold,

Some like it in the pot, nine days old.

and saying,

If the pea pudding has been in the pot for nine days, no thanks, I’ll pass.¹³

If you turn that simple nursery rhyme into a statement, it loses its punch. Take the poetic structure out—8 syllables, 9 syllables, 8 syllables, 9 syllables—the poetic devices—alliteration (the p-words), assonance (the o-sound), and the rhyme scheme (hot/pot . . . cold/old)—and you take away the point of the poem: to make you laugh.

The Song of Songs is a song. Thus, as we study each poetic section, I will ask, what is the poetry doing? And together we will try to feel the poetry before we act upon its message.¹⁴ I’ll ask you, in a sense (and with your senses), to smell the myrrh, frankincense, and aloes, to touch the polished ivory, to taste the wine and apples, to hear the flowing streams, to see the gazelles leaping over the mountains . . . yes, to feel the flashes of fire, the very flame of the Lord.

Guidepost Two: . . . a Song about Human Love

That’s the first guidepost: this is a song. Here’s the second guidepost: this is a song about human love set in the context of marriage.

I’ll deal with the second part of that sentence first. I’ve already said that this is a wedding song (also called an epithalamium), but let me now defend that claim. We know it’s a wedding song from the cultural context—the sexual revolution of the 1960s hadn’t yet reached Jerusalem in 960 B.C. In that place and time, there were only two kinds of love: truly free love between a man and a woman in marriage, and sexual slavery, which is found in adultery and fornication.¹⁵

So we know this is a wedding song from the cultural context (i.e., in Israel only sex within marriage was celebrated), but also from the language of the Song itself. After the word “wedding” is used in 3:11 (as the wedding day of Solomon is used as a foil), the word “bride” is used of the young woman six times in the next seventeen verses, in chapters 4 and 5. This is the heart of the Song, the section that undoubtedly describes sexual relations.¹⁶ Further support for this marriage-song thesis is found in the language of a permanent pledge, such as “set me as a seal upon your heart” (8:6) or “my beloved is mine, and I am his” (2:16a; cf. 7:5; 8:4).¹⁷

Thus this is a wedding song that is naturally about what weddings celebrate—human love. On the back cover of Tom Gledhill’s excellent commentary we read these words:

At first reading the Song of Songs appears to be an unabashed celebration of the deeply rooted urges of physical attraction, mutual love and sexual consummation between a man and a woman. Tom Gledhill maintains that the Song of Songs is in fact just that—a literary, poetic exploration of human love that strongly affirms loyalty, beauty and sexuality in all their variety.

If you didn’t know and weren’t influenced by the history of the interpretation of the Song and simply read the Song as is, you would likely surmise—with phrases like “kiss me,” “his right hand embraces me,” “your two breasts are like two fawns,” and so on—that this is erotic poetry set within the ethical limits of the marriage bed.¹⁸ However, the near consensus of both Jewish and Christian interpretation for at least 1,600 years was that the Song of Songs is not about human love (at all), but divine love. That is, it sings of God’s love for Israel and/or Christ’s love for the Church or the individual Christian soul.

The reason for this seems to be the presupposition that human sexual love is an inappropriate topic for Scripture. Nicholas of Lyra (1270–1349) could speak of the love between a bride and groom as “proper” but not the proper subject of Scripture and thus not of this Song. Such fleshly love even within marriage has, in his words, “a certain dishonorable and improper quality about it.”¹⁹ Similarly, Theodoret of Cyrus (c. 393–c. 457) wrote that those who give the Song a “corporeal [fleshly] interpretation” have committed an “awful blasphemy.”²⁰

This explains why—from Origen of Alexandria to Charles Spurgeon of London, from the medieval mystics to the American Puritans—Christians allegorized every jot and tittle of the Song, each thigh and breast and kiss and consummation. For example, one commentator said that the phrase “while the king was on his couch” (1:12) referred to “the gestation period of Christ in the womb of Mary,” and the “sachet of myrrh that lies between [the bride’s] breasts” (1:13) symbolizes “...