Song of Solomon

What This Book Is

An unembarrassed collection of love poems between a woman and a man, and the only book of the Bible given entirely to romantic love.

Overview

The Song is a sequence of poems in which two lovers speak, mostly to each other and sometimes to a chorus of onlookers. There is no plot in the ordinary sense, no miracle, and no mention of the law. God is not named directly anywhere in it.

The woman speaks first and speaks most, which is remarkable for its era. She initiates, she desires, she searches the city for him at night, she describes him in detail. The mutuality is one of the striking features of the book: each belongs to the other, and both say so.

The imagery is agricultural and sensory, drawn from vineyards, gardens, spices, flocks, and orchards. Some of it lands strangely on modern ears, since comparing a beloved's hair to a flock of goats was a compliment then and would not be now. Read with that allowance, the poems are tender, playful, and frankly physical.

A restraint runs through it. Three times the woman charges the daughters of Jerusalem not to awaken love before it pleases, a caution about timing that sits inside the celebration rather than against it.

Interpretive traditions differ considerably here, and it is worth naming that plainly. Jewish readers have long read the Song as picturing God's love for Israel; many Christians have read it as Christ's love for the church; many readers in both traditions take it first as what it appears to be, poetry about human love, and find no conflict in also hearing echoes of the greater love.

The climax in chapter 8 is the closest the book comes to a thesis: love is strong as death, and rivers cannot drown it.

Structure

• Chapters 1 to 2: LongingTwo voices, mutual desire, and springtime imagery.
• Chapters 3 to 5: Searching and celebrationA night search through the city, and a wedding procession.
• Chapters 5 to 7: Absence and praiseA missed moment, a second search, and long poems of admiration.
• Chapter 8: The sealLove as strong as death, and a love that cannot be bought.

Themes

Why It Matters

The Song's presence in Scripture is itself the message. Desire, delight, and physical love between two people are treated as good, not as an embarrassment to be managed. It provides language for tenderness and longing that the rest of the Bible does not, and it insists that love cannot be purchased. Whichever interpretive tradition a reader stands in, the book resists reducing love to either duty or appetite.

How to Read It

• Read it aloud if you can. It is poetry and it was meant to be heard.
• Allow for the distance in imagery; the compliments belong to another culture.
• Notice how much of the book the woman speaks, and how mutual the desire is.
• Hold the interpretive traditions loosely. Sincere readers have differed for millennia.

Key Verse

Did You Know?

• The woman speaks considerably more of the book than the man does.
• God is never named directly in the Song, one of only two books where this is the case.
• It is read annually at Passover in many Jewish communities.

Where to Start Reading