The Song of Solomon is a love song between lovers and for lovers. Perhaps it was a play or designed to be dramatically played before others. Perhaps it was designed for the king's courtiers as entertainment. Perhaps it is a record of poems between two lovers. However we explain its original context, its rhetoric and poetry evoke even to this day what love is.
I thought I'd record some initial suggestions today about what love is like from this great Song of Songs.
First, love leads lovers to poetic expression. Simply saying "I love you" isn't always enough -- sometimes the poetic fire flashes and the lover must erupt into evocative language: "Tell me, my soul's beloved, where do you graze?" (1:7) Now she could have asked "What is your address?" No, she evokes his earthy vocation along with his sexual energy and we are left wondering what she means. That's poetry.
Second, love leads lovers to delight in one another. As I read the Song I am continually impressed with their delight in one another -- they've got something between them no one else knows and something no one else can share. Their eyes are attached; their hearts yearn for and know one another; what they share is theirs and theirs alone. They bring one another deep pleasures and joys.
Third, love leads lovers to playfulness with one another. If you get too serious and too reverent with the Song of Songs you'll ruin it -- it records delightful linguistic play between two lovers. I love the question of 1:7 because of the response it gets in 1:8 -- and I tend to think the response is said by the women of Jerusalem -- they women/chorus say what is obvious: "You want to know where your man will be at midday? Well, think about it Ms. Beautiful. He's a shepherd. He'll be where the sheep are." I think this is playful; it's not directions for a lost lover.
Fourth, love leads lovers to trustful words. She sticks her neck out; he does too. The choir participates in the trusting relationship. They say things to one another that are vulnerable, risky, and heart-felt -- for words like this to work the listener must not only delight in such words, but the listener must be ready to come back with words as delightfully trustful and vulnerable.
And what to do if you and your lover are not right now capable of
this?
I suggest you ask yourself these questions: Does your love for your loved one evoke imagination of that person's presence? Does your love create dialogues that spar in degrees of admiration? Do you wait for love to mature? Do you see your love as delightful?
1. The evocative power of imagination. This woman is intoxicated with her love for her shepherd-lover. His absence leads her to dream about him and to imagine his embraces. She imagines him as myrrh and henna blossoms and she imagines lying with him in a verdant wooded location, and she imagines herself as a rose and lily -- and his love as sweet fruit. We are unsure when we read this section if the woman is in the presence of the man or if she only imagines him.
2. The need for admiration dialogues: they banter back and forth between themselves almost vying for who can say the nicest line or create the most poetic expression for the other. "Look at you!," he says, "Your eyes are doves." She relishes this and echoes back, "Look at you! ... our bed is verdant."
3. The importance of letting love happen: her words to the daughters of Jerusalem are not strict moralistic teaching so much as profound wisdom. Love comes; you can't control that, but you should wait for it, nurture it, be ready, but don't rush it. (So I read 2:7.)
4. Most importantly, we watch -- a bit like voyeurs -- as this couple tenderly, emotively, and erotically toys with one another in loving delight of the person and body of the other.
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Yes. I like this way of reading Song of Songs, simply because I think it's the most natural way to read it. While I think some analogy may be drawn out from it with reference to the relationship of God to God's people, I think this is at heart a celebration of married love.
It just seems a shame that the church has not had much good teaching from this book as you share here, Scot. I see it as an influence of the earlier centuries when "middle Platonism" made it natural to want to allegorize this book.
There's speculation that Song of Songs is Canaanite, with its mother earth / Goddess imagery of fruits, etc. as well as its use of 'dark' to describe beauty (black being a sacred color then, unlike now when it primarily is used to describe evil).
While I wouldn't go so far as to read Songs as allegorical as much of Church history has, I do think there is a theology of intimacy to be drawn from its pages, particularly along the ideas of Garden, Shame, and Intimacy. It presents us with the "healing of sex".
Thank God for the "other" wisdom books.
The Song of Songs is something that restores marriages that have been violated by the overwhelming problem of pornography. Having dealt with this in my own marriage and recovering from it, I remind myself that sex was meant to be something beautiful, as the Song of Songs describes. I reclaim my marriage and the purity of the marriage bed and how God is a God of restoration and hope and He alone can heal what has been fractured/broken/devastated/polluted. I am my beloved's and he is mine.
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