Song of Songs 5
At the end of Song 4, the Beloved has invited her Lover into her garden to “taste its choice fruit”, and he is extolling her spices, honey, and wine as Song 5 begins.
And at this point Friends chime in, urging them to “Eat, O friends, and drink; drink your fill, O lovers.”
So let’s pause. What do you think? Are you enjoying reading through Song of Songs? Because as two of us were discussing it at church today, someone else exclaimed it was the “least favorite book of the Bible.” I wonder why. Does it make us uncomfortable, perhaps because it can be very erotic? Do we feel it is not a serious or useful book? I have the feeling that this person would gladly dig through Romans…
What then? I will make a case for embracing the Song, embracing it in all its beauty and glorious imagery, thankful for the permission it gives us to enjoy LIFE, to submit to the rapture and blessings of love between one another, and in our relationship to our Lord. And thankful for what it teaches us about what these relationships should be like: intimate, intense, delightful, exclusive, powerful—what a gift!
Okay, back to Song 5:
Song 5:2-8 gives us an odd episode: one night the Lover knocks at the door, but she is reluctant at first to rouse and open up. When she does, he’s gone. She goes out into the streets to look for him, but doesn’t find him, and is beaten by the city watchmen. As a metaphor for our relationships, it is a cautionary tale—don’t wait when your lover comes knocking (second chances don’t always come).
Song 5:10-16 finishes the chapter with our only lengthy description of the Lover: his radiance, his hair, his face, his body—all are described using gold and precious gems, cedar trees, and lilies. You get the picture…
I’m glad to be reading it with others and I believe there is something to learn in the book, but dang if I can discover what that is. I’ve been reading at the beginning to our daily reading and still perplexed! Maybe next year when we approach this book again God will speak.
If I may continue my “fantasy” on the King vs. Shepherd idea. (Recall, I didn’t bring it up; Carol saw the item in a commentary. It’s an interesting twist.) So today, Song 5. As this “fantasy” plays out I can see the Shepherd as the Beloved knocking in Song 5:2, knocking at the window or the door of his Lover (the NASB has “through the opening” in Song 5:4, not “to the latch” as in the ESV). She, however, is now married to the King. It is love lost forever for the Shepherd, although some level of passion endures. His better sense takes hold and by the time the Lover comes to the door the Shepherd is gone off into the night. I cannot offer a metaphorical explanation for this “fantasy”, not just yet.
Carol, you raise some good questions about our apparent discomfort with Song of Solomon. Why do we have such difficulty with it? I think my own discomfort comes primarily because I find it confusing. Part of that is because English obscures gender and number (singular vs. plural), both of which may be clear in the Hebrew, and so we are entirely dependent on the translators to provide extra headings to tell us who is speaking (e.g., “She”, “He”, and “Others” in the ESV). And, of course, that confusion is compounded by the abrupt switching between those speakers, and the fact that various translators can’t actually agree on who is speaking when. As I mentioned the other day, the simple fact that it is poetry makes it more challenging for me personally, so that is another factor that contributes to my confusion, but I don’t think that’s the main issue, as I don’t seem to have any particular difficulty in that regard with the Psalms. (I am perfectly comfortable reading “The LORD is my Shepherd…”, for example.)
But for most of us, I think our biggest discomfort with Song of Solomon is the eroticism. We Christians are just plain prudish about sex — all sex, including perfectly legitimate sex within marriage. And that prudishness is so unhealthy that I am absolutely convinced that it is the work of the Enemy. Please don’t misunderstand me; we should indeed be thoroughly opposed to all forms of illicit sex: any extramarital sex and all forms of sexual perversion, as all of that is most definitely the work of the Enemy. But we have allowed our opposition to illicit sex to taint our view of perfectly legitimate marital sex, so that we still view it as somehow “dirty”. We can’t bring ourselves to speak about sex straightforwardly, and so we fail to have “the talk” with our kids and thereby doom them to a likewise unhealthy perspective. And in our failure to truly celebrate God’s gift of sex within marriage, we end up finding all that illicit sex all the more alluring. It’s a crazy irony, but I think that’s the truth.
We also have a tremendous tendency to “spiritualize” everything. Rather than taking Song of Songs at face value as a (pretty erotic) celebration of love between a man and a woman, we turn it into an allegory about either God’s love for Israel or Christ’s love for the Church — and, of course, our love for Him. Mind you, both of those allegorical interpretations are ancient, which tends to lend them a good deal of legitimacy, and rightly so. (By the way, just about any human story can be viewed through a similar lens, because everything should point us to God if we are paying attention.) But in our “spiritualizing” we should not lose sight of the original, down-to-earth, man-and-woman romance. When we do, we are sure to miss something.
So, if we find Song of Songs uncomfortable, I think it is a good idea to think long and hard about why that is and what that says about us.