Song of Songs

Iain M. Duguid

• Publisher: P Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781596389496
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

People debate whether Song of Songs is an allegory or a romantic manual. Duguid goes beyond this, showing a focus on Christ that has profound gospel application for all Christians.

1

DESIRE AND SATISFACTION

Song of Songs 1:1–4

¹ The Finest of Songs, about what is Solomon’s.¹

Woman
² Oh, that he would kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!
For your caresses are better than wine.
³ As for the scent of your oils, it [too] is better.
Your name is flowing oil.
No wonder the eligible young women love you!
⁴ Carry me off with you, hurry!
Oh, that the king would bring me [to] his chambers!

Daughters of Jerusalem
We will exult and rejoice in you!
We will celebrate your caresses more than wine.

Woman
Rightly they adore you!

It is common for books to have an introduction, in which they set the scene, introduce the main characters, and orient you to the action that will follow. Thus, in Charles Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, the author follows his famous first line, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” with a lengthy description of the state of society and affairs in England and France that provides the backdrop for the ensuing action. Other authors, however, prefer to launch right into the action. Novelist Iain Banks begins his book The Crow Road like this:

It was the day my Grandmother exploded. I sat in the crematorium, listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony to Bach’s Mass in B Minor, and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallanach.²

KISS ME!

The Song of Songs belongs very much to the latter category of composition. It plunges right into its subject matter without introducing the characters, setting the stage, or anything else, with the breathless declaration of the woman: “Oh, that he would kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!” (Song 1:2). Like love itself, the Song of Songs catches us in the midst of life and steals our breath away. The very first words are words of want, of aching desire—for this is what the Song is really about.³ The Song of Songs is not primarily a book about sex, or a manual of dating tips, or an “agony aunt” column of relationship advice. It is a book about desire from beginning to end—desire stirred, desire frustrated, desire satisfied, desire frustrated again—but above all, desire. The woman wants something—or rather someone—with a passionate and breathless desire.

What she wants from the man is spelled out rather clearly: she longs for the kisses of his mouth. What other kinds of kisses are there, you may ask? Well, apparently Egyptians indulged in rather more formal “nose kisses,” which would perhaps be comparable to the “kiss on the cheek” greeting that happens in some cultures.⁴ Needless to say, that is not what the woman has in mind.

Indeed, her thoughts become clearer still when she declares, “Your caresses are better than wine” (Song 1:2). English translations often translate “caresses” rather coyly as “love,” but there is no question about what kind of love she has in mind. When this Hebrew word (dôd) occurs in the plural, as it does here, sexual intimacy is in view. In Ezekiel 16:8, a young woman who has reached sexual maturity is ready for “love” (dôdîm). Likewise, in Proverbs 7:18, the adulteress seduces the young man with the words: “Come, let us take our fill of love [dôdîm] till morning.” It is thus a particular kind of “love” that she desires from the man: sexual love. Yet at the same time, the word also connotes a particular kind of sex: passionate sex, not simply an act of procreation. She wants the man for himself (and for herself), not just so that she can bear his children. That kind of love, she says, would be better than wine—a symbol of a rich and fulfilling life.

From the taste of his kisses, she moves on to the aroma of his anointing oils (Song 1:3). Scents have a remarkable power to stimulate memories. Whether it is the smell of overcooked cabbage, which brings back years of abominable school meals, or the fragrance of rosewater that reminds you of your grandmother, a single whiff can bring flooding back a raft of associations, good or bad. In this case, when she recalls the aroma of his distinctive cologne, the associations are all good. Even though the man isn’t present with her right now—for there is no dialogue in this section—the mere memory of his scent can bring him to be with her in a way that comforts her aloneness.

THE SOUND OF HIS NAME

Yet the woman’s attraction to the man is not merely physical. What draws her to him as much as the man’s touch or his scent is his name, which she compares to oil that has been poured out (Song 1:3), releasing its fragrance. It isn’t simply that her knees grow weak whenever someone says “Fred,” or “Jonathan,” or “Maher-shalal-hashbaz,” or whatever his name happened to be. What makes her feel excited is what that name represents, which is his character. The man is not just a sweet-smelling, good-looking hunk who also happens to be a good kisser; he is reliable and responsible, respected and admired by others in the community as a man of integrity and character.

This is the man whom she loves—and whom she is convinced that everyone else ought to love as well. This is, of course, characteristic of love. It demands to be shared. When your sister or daughter falls hard for the adorable fellow student that she met at college, expect to spend the next several weeks hearing about him. A lot. His cute little habits, the curl in his hair, the summer he spent volunteering in an African orphanage, the picture he has on his cell phone of his beautiful younger sister . . . oh, and did I mention his hair? Nor will she be content until you acknowledge that he is indeed rather a dish. So, too, in the Song, the woman is convinced that her view of the man is shared by all the ‘alāmôt (Song 1:3). These are not strictly “virgins,” as the ESV translates it, but rather young women who have recently reached the age of sexual maturity and are thus ready for marriage,⁵ the people who in every culture tend to be the arbiters of what constitutes male desirability.

Such powerful desire seeks satisfaction. The woman longs for her beloved to sweep her off her feet, and to carry her off swiftly to the privacy and intimacy of his chambers (Song 1:4), where she can finally experience the kisses and caresses for which she so longs. She wants to be able to say those classic lines from the novel Jane Eyre, “Reader, I married him.” Deep sighs of satisfaction all around as the credits roll. Indeed, in this poem, as the camera fades away from this image of the happy couple, we hear the endorsement of the community on their affection. A plural voice, perhaps representing the daughters of Jerusalem, adds its benediction to their love story, affirming that the approbation of the eligible young women is correct: his caresses are indeed better than wine, and their relationship is truly something to be celebrated. Notice what has not yet transpired, however. The man is not actually present in this scene, except as the object of the woman’s desire. He does not actually kiss her, nor do they yet make love. It is not yet clear at this stage whether her longing for a relationship with him is even reciprocated, let alone whether it will ever be consummated.

RESHAPING OUR VIEWS OF GENDER

So what does this short poem have to teach us about our own relationships? Immediately, it is clear that the Song intends to challenge and reshape our views of sex, gender, and marriage, whether we have formed those views from the culture around us or from the Christian subculture in which we grew up. Wisdom literature always provides “beams” and “bombs”—the sturdy beams that are the building materials of a Christian worldview and the powerful bombs that explode the false worldviews that we so easily substitute for it.

How does this poem do that? To begin with, the woman is neither a feminist nor a traditionalist. In contrast to our wider culture, which depicts women as equally sexually aggressive as men, she does not dream of grabbing her man, planting a kiss on his lips, and dragging him behind her into her bedroom. She wants him to kiss her, and him to sweep her off her feet. Yet neither is she a shrinking violet who will pine away in silence, waiting for the man to figure out her interest in him. She expects and longs for the man to provide the leadership in their relationship, while at the same time she is not shy about communicating her own hopes and desires. This contrasts dramatically with much that passes for wisdom within our Christian subculture, which depicts the woman’s role in seeking a romantic relationship in purely passive terms.

Likewise, the woman in the Song is neither independent of her community nor completely subject to her family’s wishes. She is a strong woman who knows her own mind and what she is seeking in a man. Unlike some young people whom I have counseled, she doesn’t need her father’s permission before she is able to have a cup of coffee with a young man “alone” (along with six hundred other people!) in a college cafeteria. Yet at the same time, contrary to the trend in our culture, it matters in the Song what the community thinks of their relationship. Love is not its own sufficient reason, regardless of what others think. The woman wants her relationship to be publicly accepted and celebrated by those around her.

RESHAPING OUR VIEWS OF SEX (AND HOW TO PRESENT THEM)

Equally, the vision of sexuality that is presented in the Song is a long way both from the picture in our culture and from the image that has often been presented in the church. In our culture, any kind of sexual love between any two consenting adults is regarded as good and proper, something to be celebrated whatever their gender or relationship. You don’t have to be married or even to be in a long-term committed relationship to engage in intercourse: sex is just sex. Nor is sex just for men and women in our culture: it can be for men and men or for women and women. That is not the perspective that the Song celebrates, as we will see. It glorifies as the ideal human relationship a single-hearted, lifelong, devoted, and exclusive relationship between one man and one woman.

Typically, when Christians talk about why premarital sex, adultery, easy divorce, or homosexuality is wrong, we go straight to the legal passages of the Bible and point to the thou shalt nots. Of course, those laws are true and biblical, the loving commands of our heavenly Father, who knows the destructive power of sexual sin in our lives. Yet the Song of Songs reminds us that sometimes it might be better for us to spend more time referencing the thou shalts as well. In the garden of Eden, when Satan asked Eve, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” (Gen. 3:1), she recounted to him the law about not eating from the forbidden tree, even adding some extra regulations about not touching the tree, just to be on the safe side. But in her focus on the commandment about not eating from one special tree, she downplayed what God had said first: “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden” (2:16). She mentioned the permission, to be sure (3:2), but she missed the emphatic nature of God’s command to eat (“You may surely eat . . .”), as well as its comprehensive breadth (“. . . of every tree of the garden”). Those key omissions set her up to believe Satan’s lie that God was a restrictive and hard taskmaster rather than a kind and generous Father, and therefore that his law is repressive rather than liberating.

The church has often done the same thing with sex. We have focused on all the ways in which the Bible tells us not to have sex, even adding some extra regulations of our own. The early and medieval church glorified virginity and celibacy as higher spiritual states than marriage. Yet when the woman in the Song dreams of her boyfriend, she does not imagine them sharing an inductive Bible study and praying together, but thinks about his kisses and caresses. It is precisely this desire that her community celebrates and rejoices in. Such thoughts are not aberrant and dirty, but good and right. Sex is not merely permissible under the proper circumstances; it is a wonderful and glorious gift in the context for which God designed it, which is within marriage. It is therefore good and right for us to long for it. After all, God himself crafted all the relevant body parts and the various biochemical reactions that make sex such fun. We should celebrate and rejoice in that fact! Even when our desires for sex are unable to be satisfied or are disordered in their object, the desire itself is something that God made good.

This also speaks to the way in which we address those who are struggling with the temptation to engage in premarital sex or with same-sex attraction. It is not enough for us to say that the Bible says that premarital and homosexual sex is wrong, although it does. The law cannot change our hearts. In fact, by itself, the law can only condemn us, often leaving us feeling guilty and dirty, and sometimes driving us away from God rather than toward him. In contrast, the Song paints a glorious picture of the marriage relationship between a man and a woman that is so rich and deep that we should all long to have a relationship just like that. To be sure, as a result of the fall, we all have disordered desires. For some, given their particular makeup and background, that disordered desire will be same-sex attraction. For others, it may be a desire to possess and use members of the opposite gender to serve their own lust, whether that desire is ever acted on or remains concealed in their minds. For still others, the disorder may be a complete suppression of ...