Old Testament · Book 22 of 66

Song of Solomon

Love poetry in eight chapters: the Bible's most surprising book. A chiastic structure; a bride and bridegroom alternating in dialogue; and a three-school interpretive tradition the site surfaces without adjudication.

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The Meeting of Isaac and Rebekah — Gustave Doré, Doré's English Bible (1866), public domain

8
Chapters
Chiastic
4:16–5:1 as center
Megillot
Read at Passover

“He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love.”
Song of Solomon 2:4

All 8 chapters

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

1–8The bridegroom and his bride

If you only read a few chapters

Wisdom · Song of Solomon

Love Strong as Death

The Song of Songs is the Bible's one book of pure love poetry: no narrator, no moral, no address to God at all until a single compressed divine name surfaces at its very climax (8:6). Two lovers long for, seek, lose, find, and are united to one another in covenant love, their desire described without embarrassment in the vocabulary of gardens, vineyards, and the body. And because this book sits inside a canon that elsewhere makes marriage the deliberate metaphor of God's covenant love, the church has never been able to leave it at that: from Rabbi Akiva to Bernard of Clairvaux to today, readers have heard in it the love-language between God and his people, without the plain sense ever being erased.

Summary

This guide walks the Song in its own six-movement shape, from longing to the wedding to loss and reunion, then tracks the book's two refrains and its two-thousand-year question of what the book is really about.

The garden path breaks the book into six movements, each with its own hue and its center at 4:16-5:1
Two refrains, one about love's timing and one about mutual possession, mark the book's own formal seams
8:6's 'love is strong as death' is the theological climax, the one place God's name surfaces in the whole book
The allegorical and natural readings are held side by side, never adjudicated, with a dedicated study page
A voices roster, contested points, and a full cast-and-places index round out the workbench

The Garden Path

six movements, walked in order: every chapter a door

Unlike almost every other book in the canon, the Song gives no narrator, no heading beyond its title, and no plot summary: only two voices (and a chorus) moving through longing, search, wedding, loss, reunion, and a closing seal. Reading it as a single flat poem misses the shape; reading it as a path, walked toward a center and away again, is the first correction.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Mutual Admiration and LongingInvitation and the Night SearchThe Wedding Procession and the GardenLoss, the Night Search Resumed, and ReunionRenewed Praise and Mutual PossessionThe Ascent and the Seal of Loveadjuration gatethe garden center (4:16–5:1)

Three of the six seams fall inside a chapter rather than at its edge, which is why the movement ranges above and the chapter ribbon do not line up exactly: the ribbon assigns each chapter to the movement that holds most of it.

Song of Solomon in a Nutshell

Two lovers seek, lose and find each other through eight chapters of poetry, and the book stakes everything on one claim: love is strong as death, and no flood can put it out.

The book opens with a woman already talking and already wanting, and nobody stops to explain who she is.

01
The title calls it the Song of songs, the best of the thousand and five Solomon wrote. There is no scene set and no narrator. A woman speaks first: let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for thy love is better than wine. She is sunburned from keeping her brothers' vineyards while her own went unkept, and she says she is black but comely. She does not know where her shepherd feeds his flock. The two of them trade first praises, and she charges the daughters of Jerusalem not to stir up love before it pleases.
02
Then he calls her out into the spring. The winter is past, the rain is over and gone, the flowers appear on the earth, and the time of the singing of birds is come. Rise up, my love, and come away. She asks that the little foxes that spoil the vineyards be caught. Night follows with no warning. She looks for him on her bed and does not find him, gets up, walks the city, asks the watchmen, and when she finds him she says, I held him, and would not let him go.
03
A wedding procession comes up out of the wilderness like pillars of smoke. Solomon rides in his litter with sixty armed men around it, on the day of the gladness of his heart. The groom praises her from head to foot: doves' eyes behind her veil, lips like a thread of scarlet, a neck like David's tower. He calls her a garden shut up, a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. She answers by opening it, and asks the north wind to blow. He comes into his garden, and the guests are told to eat and drink.
04
Then the Song's hardest turn. She is asleep, but her heart is awake. He knocks, and she puts him off over small things, and by the time she opens the door he has gone. She goes out looking, and this time the watchmen who keep the walls strike her and take away her veil. The book names the wound and does not explain it away. When the daughters ask what makes him worth all this, she answers with her own praise of him: white and ruddy, the chiefest among ten thousand, altogether lovely.
05
She finds her footing by faith rather than sight. My beloved is gone down to his garden, she says, and I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine. His praise of her rises again, foot to head this time, and she answers with the whole of herself: I am my beloved's, and his desire is toward me. Chapter four's line, thou art all fair, my love, and there is no spot in thee, is the line the church has sung ever since of Christ and his bride.
06
The book crests in two verses. Set me as a seal upon thy heart, as a seal upon thine arm, for love is strong as death, and jealousy is cruel as Sheol, and the flashes thereof are flashes of fire, a very flame of Jehovah. Many waters cannot quench love, and floods cannot drown it, and a man who offered everything he owned for love would only be despised. A short family argument over a vineyard follows, and the last word is hers: make haste, my beloved.

Written from the book's own text (ASV) and MannaFest's chapter summaries of Song of Songs; the shape follows the guide's movements.

Structure

Song of Solomon in 1 part. Each card opens one focused stretch of the book — what it is for, the verse it turns on, and where Christ stands in it. Roughly five minutes each.

01 · 1–8
The bridegroom and his brideThe bride's longing; the bridegroom's praise; the pastoral and urban imagery that frames the book's love-poetry register.Christ in this partRead by the church as the love-song between Christ and his bride — the deepest typological reading of human love.

Also in this book

What Song of Solomon Alone Teaches

Love as strong as death

The book argues nothing for seven chapters and then states its case in two verses. 'For love is strong as death; Jealousy is cruel as Sheol; The flashes thereof are flashes of fire, A very flame of Jehovah' (8:6). The last phrase renders a Hebrew form ending in the syllable yah, and readers divide over it: some hear the shortened divine name, making this the one place in the book where God is named, and others hear an intensifying ending, a blaze of superlative force. Either way the claim stands at the same height. 'Many waters cannot quench love, Neither can floods drown it: If a man would give all the substance of his house for love, He would utterly be contemned' (8:7). Love is set beside death and Sheol as a power of the same order, and it cannot be bought.

Song of Solomon 8:6 · Song of Solomon 8:7

The garden, and the echoes of Eden

The garden is the book's controlling image. 'A garden shut up is my sister, my bride; A spring shut up, a fountain sealed' (4:12), and the invitation follows: 'Let my beloved come into his garden, And eat his precious fruits' (4:16), answered at once with 'I am come into my garden, my sister, my bride' (5:1). Those two lines fall at the book's midpoint, verses 61 and 62 of its 117. The Hebrew word for garden here, gan, is the same word Genesis uses thirteen times for the garden in Eden, and the Song's picture of a man and a woman together without shame runs along the same grain as Genesis 2:25. The Song never quotes Genesis; the echo is in vocabulary and image.

Song of Solomon 4:12 · Song of Solomon 5:1

Mutual belonging

A refrain states the book's center of gravity three times, and it moves each time it returns. 'My beloved is mine, and I am his: He feedeth his flock among the lilies' (2:16). After the night search and the wound in the street, the clauses reverse and her claim comes second: 'I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine' (6:3). At the third turn the pastoral picture drops away entirely: 'I am my beloved’s; And his desire is toward me' (7:10). The word rendered desire there occurs three times in the whole Old Testament, at Genesis 3:16, Genesis 4:7, and here, and its arrival at the end of this refrain is one of the book's quietest surprises.

Song of Solomon 2:16 · Song of Solomon 6:3 · Song of Solomon 7:10

The refrain to the daughters of Jerusalem

Three times the woman turns from her beloved to the chorus and puts them under oath: 'I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, By the roes, or by the hinds of the field, That ye stir not up, nor awake my love, Until he please' (2:7, repeated at 3:5, and shortened at 8:4). The book that speaks most openly about desire is also the book that three times tells its listeners to leave desire alone until its own hour comes. Read as wisdom literature, the refrain teaches that love has a proper time and that hurrying it damages it, which is why the caution is spoken by the woman who has the most to say in the book's favor.

Song of Solomon 2:7 · Song of Solomon 8:4

The dignity of the body and of married love

Three praise poems describe the beloved from head to foot (4:1-7, 5:10-16, 7:1-9), each built from the ordinary furniture of Israel's world: flocks on a hillside, a tower, a pomegranate, a stand of cedar. The praise runs both directions, and the woman's description of the man is as full as his of her, ending in 'he is altogether lovely' (5:16). The text treats the body of a husband and of a wife as good and worth praising out loud, in the same canon that gives Genesis 2:24 and Proverbs 5:18-19. That posture is the reason the book has been used at weddings for as long as there are records of its use.

Song of Solomon 4:7 · Song of Solomon 5:16

Christ in Song of Solomon

TypologyThe bridegroom and his bride. A reading older than the church hears in this book the love between God and his people. The Aramaic Targum to the Song takes the whole poem as Israel's covenant history from the exodus to the age to come, and Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, 1040-1105, Troyes) read it as God's love for Israel in exile while holding the plain sense of the Hebrew in view. In the church Origen (Commentary and Homilies on the Song of Songs, third century) founded the Christian form of that reading, with the Bride as the church and the individual soul and the Bridegroom as the divine Word, and Bernard of Clairvaux preached eighty-six sermons on the book between 1135 and his death in 1153 without ever reaching chapter three. This is the tradition's own claim, presented at its strength and in its own terms. Song of Solomon 2:16
TypologyThe friend of the bridegroom. The bridegroom picture that the Song works out at book length turns up in the Gospels on Jesus' own account. John the Baptist takes the smaller part in it gladly: 'He that hath the bride is the bridegroom: but the friend of the bridegroom, that standeth and heareth him, rejoiceth greatly because of the bridegroom’s voice' (John 3:29). Jesus uses the same picture of himself when he is asked why his disciples do not fast (Mark 2:19-20). John 3:29
TypologyThe marriage of the Lamb. Scripture ends where the bridegroom picture ends: 'the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready' (Revelation 19:7), and the last chapters describe a bride prepared and a city where the water and the tree of life stand open again. Hosea, Isaiah 54 and 62, Ezekiel 16, and Ephesians 5 build the same figure across the canon, so a reader who hears the Song inside that pattern is following a line the rest of Scripture draws. Revelation 19:7
TypologyWhere the pattern stops. The Song's own words remain love poetry from beginning to end. The book names no covenant, quotes no law, and mentions God once at most, in the disputed ending of 8:6. No New Testament writer quotes it. Everything above belongs to the typological tradition's reading of the book rather than to a claim the book makes about itself, and the honest form of the tradition says so: real human love, which Scripture's own settled use of marriage as the figure of covenant love makes a pattern of a greater love. Franz Delitzsch (1885) put that middle position in print, and it is the shape in which the typology is carried here. Song of Solomon 8:6

The Argument

the whole book in three sentences

Title: Shir ha-Shirim: “the Song of Songs,” a Hebrew superlative (“best of songs”)
Attribution: Solomon (1:1), traditional, 10th c. BC
Genre: Hebrew love poetry: dialogue, no narrator, no didactic frame
Shape: 8 chapters · 6 movements · 3 refrain-gates

1
Two lovers, a bride, traditionally called “the Shulammite” (6:13), and her beloved, long for, seek, lose, find, and are joined to one another, their desire described in the unashamed vocabulary of gardens, vineyards, spices, and the body.
2
The book has no stated occasion and no narrator's comment; it is lyric, not narrative, and stands among the Wisdom books not because it shares their genre but because Israel's wise ordering of creation was understood to include the ordering of love.
3
The desire the book describes is not incidental to its message: it is the message, driven to its own theological limit in the closing movement: love is a power set alongside death itself, and it cannot be bought, quenched, or drowned.

The Adjuration Refrain

three gates: the closest thing the book has to formal division

Song 2:7 →

“O daughters of Jerusalem, I adjure you by the gazelles and does of the field: Do not arouse or awaken love until the time is right.”

Closes the opening movement: love, sworn by the wild things of the field, has its own proper hour.

Song 3:5 →

“O daughters of Jerusalem, I adjure you by the gazelles and does of the field: Do not arouse or awaken love until the time is right.”

The identical oath, closing the invitation-and-search movement: repetition as a formal seam, not carelessness.

Song 8:4 →

“O daughters of Jerusalem, I adjure you: Do not arouse or awaken love until the time is right.”

The refrain's third and final appearance drops the “roes… of the field” oath-clause: the book's own small variation on its own formula, closing the book's longest movement.

A wisdom-literature caution embedded inside a love poem: desire has its own proper time, not to be forced or hurried into being, the Song's own version of the Preacher's “a time for every purpose under heaven” (Ecc 3:1).

The Mutual-Possession Refrain

the same claim, spoken three times, escalating

Song 2:16

“My beloved is mine and I am his; he pastures his flock among the lilies.”

First statement: mutual, but hers comes first.

Song 6:3

“I belong to my beloved and he belongs to me; he pastures his flock among the lilies.”

The clauses reverse, she names her claim on him first, spoken directly after the wounding and the search.

Song 7:10

“I belong to my beloved, and his desire is for me.”

The pastoral image drops away and his desire is named outright: the refrain's furthest point.

A small but real literary progression: the claim runs from a shared, generic statement (2:16) through a reversal that puts her claim on him first (6:3, spoken directly after the wound and the search) to his desire named outright and the pastoral image dropped altogether (7:10).

Love Strong as Death

8:6–7: the theological climax the whole book has been building toward

Song 8:6 →

“Set me as a seal upon thy heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as Sheol: the flashes thereof are flashes of fire, a very flame of Jehovah.”

The book never once names God directly, until this line. The Hebrew compresses a shortened form of the divine name onto the end of “flame,” and the ASV renders it explicitly: a very flame of Jehovah. The one place the name of God surfaces in the whole Song is the one place love is called stronger than death.

Song 8:7 →

“Mighty waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot sweep it away. If a man were to give all the wealth of his house for love, his offer would be utterly scorned.”

Love, on this book's own terms, cannot be bought at any price: the verse the bridal-mysticism tradition has always heard as the surest description of a love that went, in fact, all the way down into death (see Christ in the Song, below).

Where Song of Solomon Points to Christ

the plain sense stands; the canon's marriage-metaphor tradition is not silenced either

Solomon, son of David → the greater Son of David1:1, 5; 3:7, 9, 11; 8:11–12 → Matt 22:2; Rev 19:9

Solomon (Shelomoh, from shalom, “peace”) whose kiss and banqueting-house his bride desires (1:2, 4) sits in the direct typological line to the true Prince of Peace, whose own wedding feast the Gospels and Revelation describe explicitly. Traditional reading, not an explicit New Testament citation: held as typology, not asserted as the text's plain sense.

Open the door →

The garden-consummation center → Eden and the garden-city4:16–5:1 → Gen 2:23–25; Rev 21–22

The Song's garden, entered by invitation and unashamed, echoes Eden's original marriage and anticipates the tree, the river, and the curse undone in Revelation's garden-city. The Song sits, on this reading, as the human-love station between the canon's two other gardens.

“Love is strong as death” → the cross8:6–7

The bridal-mysticism tradition running from Origen through Bernard of Clairvaux reads the book's theological climax as Christ's own love for his bride, proven exactly where the text puts it: love that goes down into death and is not quenched. A devotional and traditional reading, presented at full strength on the dedicated study page, not asserted as the plain sense.

Open the door →The night search → the soul's pursuit of Christ3:1–4; 5:2–8

The Puritan “espousal” writers and the deeper-life devotional tradition have long paired the bride's search through a sleeping city with the soul's pursuit of God through seasons of his felt absence: a thematic resonance, not a direct exposition of this book, of the kind Tozer's own language of the soul's “gaze” toward God supplies.

Open the door →

Themes

five load-bearing lines through the book

Love as a good gift, unashamed

Song 1:2–4; 4:1–7; 7:1–9

The plain sense is a married couple's mutual desire, celebrated as part of a good creation: Genesis 2's “one flesh” and Proverbs 5:18–19's “rejoice in the wife of thy youth” worked out at full length, needing no allegorical rescue to belong in Scripture.

Mutuality

Song 2:16; 6:3; 7:10

The book's center of gravity is a refrain, not a plot event: desire that is reciprocal, exclusive, and covenantal rather than possession running one direction only.

Love as strong as death

Song 8:6–7

The theological high-water mark: love set beside death and Sheol as a rival cosmic power, unpurchasable at any price. The verse the whole book has been building toward.

The garden and the vineyard

Song 1:6; 2:15; 4:12–5:1; 8:11–12

The garden (gan) as the bride's own guarded person, entered by invitation; the vineyard (kerem) as both her self-keeping and, elsewhere in the Prophets, Israel herself. Private love and public covenant share one vocabulary.

Love has its own proper time

Song 2:7; 3:5; 8:4

The adjuration refrain is a wisdom-literature caution against forcing or hurrying desire: the Song's own version of Ecclesiastes' “a time for every purpose.”

Author: Traditional: Solomon (1:1 ''the song of songs, which is Solomon's''). Critical: the ''of Solomon'' construction allows ''about Solomon'' or ''to Solomon'' and opens the authorship question. Most readings keep the Solomonic association.
Date: Solomonic reading: c. 965–930 BC. Critical reading: later editorial compilation.
Audience: The covenant community at marriage; in Jewish tradition read at Passover; in Christian tradition a devotional and (per school) allegorical anchor.

As the earliest witnesses report them; positions and holders under Who Wrote It.

The world behind this book

The book of Song of Solomon

Where

The countryside of Israel — the cedar slopes of Lebanon, the springs of Engedi above the Dead Sea, the fields of Sharon, the vineyards and walled gardens — and Jerusalem, where the wedding procession arrives.

The history, and what it meant to them

The history

A wedding in ancient Israel was a public week. The groom went in procession to bring his bride home, guests joined the parade, and the feasting ran for days. Song 3:6–11 shows exactly that scene — the traveling couch of King Solomon coming up out of the wilderness in a cloud of myrrh and frankincense, ringed by sixty armed men, with the crown his mother set on his head on his wedding day.

The long head-to-foot praise poems in chapters 4, 5, and 7 follow a known ancient form. Love poetry across Egypt and Mesopotamia used the same device, praising the beloved part by part in images drawn from the land — flocks, towers, pools, orchards. The Song's first hearers recognized the form instantly, the way we recognize a love ballad.

The perfumes named in the poems were serious money. Nard came from the Himalayas, cinnamon and calamus from farther east still, frankincense and myrrh up the caravan roads from Arabia. Solomon's trade network reached all of it, which is why a poem written in his court can casually stack spices from three continents in a single verse.

The Song's place in the Bible was discussed and then firmly settled. Rabbi Akiva, around the end of the first century AD, argued that all the writings are holy but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies. Jewish tradition read it as God and Israel; the early church read it as Christ and His bride; and both traditions have been carried alongside its plain meaning as a love poem ever since.

What it meant to them

To Israel, the Song said that married love — desire, delight, the body, the longing to be near one person — is God's idea and is not something to blush about. It sits in the wisdom section of the Bible on purpose: the God who ordered the seasons and the harvest also ordered this, and living wisely includes living well here.

It also gave them a picture big enough to carry more than itself. When the poem says love is strong as death, that jealousy is cruel as the grave, and that many waters cannot quench love, Israel heard the language its prophets used for the covenant — the LORD as the husband of a people He would not let go. That is why they sang it at Passover, the feast of being brought out and brought home.

Sources cited

Franz Delitzsch, Commentary on the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes
John Gill, An Exposition of the Song of Solomon
Charles H. Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit
Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible

Every work MannaFest builds on →

Who Wrote It, and When

Author: The book opens with its own title, 'The Song of songs, which is Solomon’s' (1:1). Behind the English possessive stands a single Hebrew letter, the prefix lamed, which across biblical Hebrew can mean by, for, belonging to, concerning, or in the manner of. The same prefix carries the psalm headings that English renders 'of David.' Which sense the title intends is the whole authorship question, and the two readings below answer it differently.
Date: Two words carry most of the dating argument. At 4:13 the woman's garden is called an orchard, Hebrew pardes, a word that occurs three times in the whole Old Testament (here, Ecclesiastes 2:5, and Nehemiah 2:8) and is generally traced to Old Persian. At 3:9 Solomon's carriage is an appiryon, a word that occurs once in Scripture and nowhere else, which some derive from Greek. Both arguments rest on a very small sample, and the positions below weigh that fact differently.
Audience: No audience is named outside the poem. Inside it the woman speaks to the daughters of Jerusalem seven times (1:5, 2:7, 3:5, 3:10, 5:8, 5:16, 8:4), and they answer her twice with questions of their own (5:9, 6:1). They function as the chorus, the listeners the book gives itself, and the reader hears the poem over their shoulder.
Occasion: The text states no occasion. The wedding procession at 3:6-11, with Solomon crowned by his mother 'In the day of his espousals,' is the nearest thing to one the book supplies. J. G. Wetzstein's 1873 report of Syrian village weddings, which Delitzsch attached to his own commentary as an appendix, described a seven-day wedding week in which the couple were treated as king and queen and songs praised the bride part by part, and generations of commentators have read it as a living parallel to the praise poems at 4:1-7, 5:10-16, and 7:1-9. A nineteenth-century village custom shows how such songs work; it does not fix the setting of this one.

The Years of Song of Solomon

Song of Solomon timeline

c. 970-931 BC
Solomon reigns in Jerusalem; 1 Kings 4:32 credits him with a thousand and five songs.
The book's setting
A woman and the man she loves, the daughters of Jerusalem as chorus, and a royal wedding procession out of the wilderness.
Song of Solomon 3:6
c. 900-880 BC
Tirzah serves as Israel's royal seat, the city set beside Jerusalem as a standard of beauty at 6:4.
Song of Solomon 6:4
Fifth to third century BC
The date the linguistic argument proposes, resting on pardes at 4:13 and appiryon at 3:9.
Song of Solomon 4:13
c. 100 BC to AD 50
The Qumran copies are made, the earliest surviving witnesses to the Hebrew text.
Early second century AD
Rabbi Akiva defends the book's place among the holy writings, the saying later preserved at Mishnah Yadayim 3:5.
c. AD 240
Origen writes his commentary and homilies, founding the Christian allegorical reading.
AD 553
The Second Council of Constantinople condemns Theodore of Mopsuestia, whose reading of the book as a plain wedding song had refused the allegory.
AD 1135-1153
Bernard of Clairvaux preaches eighty-six sermons on the Song, stopping in chapter two at his death.
1857 and 1885
Ginsburg argues the natural reading and Delitzsch the typological middle, the two positions modern commentary still works between.

The Voices on Song of Solomon

each in his own words, on a verse of this book

Thy neck is like the tower of David Builded for an armory, Whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, All the shields of the mighty men.Song of Solomon 4:4
He was a man of war, preparatory to the reign of Solomon, the king of peace. So warfare in the case of Jesus Christ and His saints precedes the coming rest. Each soul won from Satan by Him is a trophy gracing the bride (Lu 11:22); (each hangs on Him, Isa 22:23, 24); also each victory of her faith.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, 1871, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible
If thou know not, O thou fairest among women, Go thy way forth by the footsteps of the flock, And feed thy kids beside the shepherds’ tents.Song of Solomon 1:8
If - This is Christ's answer. Go - Observe and follow the paths which my sheep have trodden before thee, my faithful servants, Abraham, and others. For the church in all ages is one and the same, and there is but one way for the substance, in which all the saints from the beginning of the world walk, Christ being the same yesterday, and to day, and forever.
John Wesley, 1765, Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament
As the apple-tree among the trees of the wood, So is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, And his fruit was sweet to my taste.Song of Solomon 2:3
The trees - Which are barren. I sat - I confidently reposed myself under his protection. His fruit - The benefits which I received by him, remission of sins, faith, grace, and assurance of glory.
John Wesley, 1765, Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament
He made the pillars thereof of silver, The bottom thereof of gold, the seat of it of purple, The midst thereof being paved with love, From the daughters of Jerusalem.Song of Solomon 3:10
THIS portion of the Song describes the royal bridegroom as traveling up from the wilderness in an eastern palanquin, attended by his bodyguard and by those who bear torches and burn perfumes. We have a description of the sumptuous chariot-bed in which this great monarch traveled, describing it as being made of cedar, with pillars of silver, a bottom of gold, curtains of purple, and within it a patterned floor, with pavement, not of precious stones, but of priceless love. Metaphor is suddenly dropped in this last item and the result is a complicated, but very expressive form of speech.
Charles Spurgeon, 1873, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 1134: “Paved With Love” (lightly modernized text, CCEL edition)
I am come into my garden, my sister, my bride: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice; I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk. Eat, O friends; Drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved.Song of Solomon 5:1
No sooner does the spouse say, "Let my Beloved come into His garden," than her Lord answers, "I am come into My garden." "Before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear." When we desire our Lord Jesus to come to us, He has already come, in a measure—our desire is the result of His coming! He meets us in all our desires, for He waits to be gracious. Our, "Come," is no sooner uttered than it is lost in His, "Behold, I come quickly!"
Charles Spurgeon, 1887, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 1943: “Love Joying In Love” (lightly modernized text, CCEL edition)
I have put off my garment; how shall I put it on? I have washed my feet; how shall I defile them?Song of Solomon 5:3
When, all too late, the bride did arise, she seems to have been more concerned to anoint herself with the liquid myrrh than to speedily welcome her waiting Lord.
Hudson Taylor, 1893, Union and Communion; or, Thoughts on the Song of Solomon
I am a rose of Sharon, A lily of the valleys.Song of Solomon 2:1
Christ is the rose of Sharon, where probably the best roses grew and in most plenty, the rose of the field (so some), denoting that the gospel salvation is a common salvation; it lies open to all; whoever will may come and gather the rose-buds of privileges and comforts that grow in the covenant of grace.
Matthew Henry, 1710, Commentary on the Whole Bible
Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; Thine eyes are as doves behind thy veil. Thy hair is as a flock of goats, That lie along the side of mount Gilead.Song of Solomon 4:1
But Christ, beholding his church, for whom he himself, as you find in the book of the prophet Zechariah, had put on filthy garments, now clothed in white raiment, seeing, that is, a soul pure and washed in the laver of regeneration, says, "Behold, you are fair, my love, behold you are fair, your eyes are like a dove's," in the likeness of which the Holy Spirit descended from heaven. The eyes are beautiful like those of a dove, because in the likeness of a dove the Holy Spirit descended from heaven.
Ambrose of Milan, 4th century, On the Mysteries 7:37
The Song of songs, which is Solomon’s.Song of Solomon 1:1
The “Song of songs,” i. e., the best or most excellent of songs. Which is Solomon’s - literally, “to” or “for Solomon,” i. e., belonging to Solomon as its author or concerning him as its subject. In a title or inscription, the former interpretation is to be preferred.
Albert Barnes, 1798–1870, Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832-1869)
Solomon had a vineyard at Baal-hamon; He let out the vineyard unto keepers; Every one for the fruit thereof was to bring a thousand pieces of silver.Song of Solomon 8:11
The vineyard which, it says, was given to the spiritual Solomon is surely the church. And we have already said that Baal-hamon means "in believers." For who believed, apart from those who accepted his commandments?
Cyril of Alexandria, 5th century, FRAGMENTS IN THE COMMENTARY ON THE SONG OF SONGS 8:11
Go forth, O ye daughters of Zion, and behold king Solomon, With the crown wherewith his mother hath crowned him In the day of his espousals, And in the day of the gladness of his heart.Song of Solomon 3:11
The church forged from the Gentiles says this: "Go forth and see." But what it calls the day of his wedding is the day of his passion, when he married the church by his blood.
Cyril of Alexandria, 5th century, FRAGMENTS IN THE COMMENTARY ON THE SONG OF SONGS 3:11
I went down into the garden of nuts, To see the green plants of the valley, To see whether the vine budded, And the pomegranates were in flower.Song of Solomon 6:11
You wish to know the place? He says in the Canticles, "I came down to the nut garden"; for it was a garden where he was crucified.
Cyril of Jerusalem, 4th century, Catechetical Lecture 14:5

More works on Song of Solomon

2 works this site reads

Tremper Longman III, Song of Songs (New International Commentary on the Old Testament, 2001)
Michael V. Fox, The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs (1985)

Original Language

the love-vocabulary the whole book is built from

דּוֹד

dôd

beloved: the book's central love-name, used some 26 times; the root behind the name “David”

אַהֲבָה

ʾahăbah

love: the theological climax word of 8:6, “love is strong as death”

אָהַב

ʾahab

to love: the verb behind “thy love is better than wine” (1:2, 4)

גַּן

gan

garden: the enclosed-garden image for the bride's guarded person, entered only by invitation (4:12)

כֶּרֶם

kerem

vineyard: the self-keeping and covenant-keeping image (1:6; 8:11–12)

חוֹתָם

ḥôtām

seal: “Set me as a seal upon thy heart” (8:6); the same word-family used of covenant signets elsewhere

רָעָה

rāʿâh

to feed, shepherd, pasture: “he feedeth his flock among the lilies” (2:16; 6:3)

The book's most distinctive literary device is not a keyword but a form: the wasf (an Arabic term borrowed by modern scholarship, not a Hebrew word in its own right), a cascade of praise cataloguing the beloved's body head to foot, built entirely out of emblematic parallelism (4:1–7; 5:10–16; 6:4–10; 7:1–9). It is the single best in-canon teaching case for that poetic device outside the Psalms. A small number of the book's other terms (the bride's title “Shulammite” (6:13), the “garden shut up” of 4:12, the royal “palanquin” of 3:9, and the “orchard” of 4:13) carry disputed or unsettled etymologies in the scholarship and are described here in prose rather than linked as confirmed Strong's entries.

Further Reading on Song of Songsthe interpretation-history roster: the specific work named, so you can go to it

Franz Delitzschpublic domain

Commentary on the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes (ET 1885)

The mediating “typical” reading: a real human love story that Scripture's own placement and marriage-metaphor tradition makes a legitimate type of divine love, without imposing a word-for-word allegory.

Christian D. Ginsburgpublic domain

The Song of Songs (1857)

The best public-domain history of how the allegorical and natural traditions diverged, written by a scholar who himself argued the natural, dramatic reading and first laid out the shepherd-hypothesis's textual weaknesses.

Origenpublic domain

Commentary and Homilies on the Song of Songs (3rd c., ANF fragments)

Founded the Christian allegorical reading: the Bride understood as both the Church and the individual soul, the Bridegroom as the divine Word.

Bernard of Clairvauxpublic domain

Sermons on the Song of Songs (86 sermons, Eales tr. 1895)

The devotional peak of the allegorical, bridal-mysticism tradition: sermons that never progress past chapter 2, reading the book as the soul's romance with Christ.

The Targum to the Song of Songspublic domain

(Gollancz tr. 1908)

The fountainhead of the Jewish allegorical reading: the whole book taken as Israel's covenant history from the Exodus to the Messianic age.

John Gillpublic domain

An Exposition of the Song of Solomon (1728)

Sustained verse-by-verse allegorical exposition in accessible public-domain English.

Matthew Henrypublic domain

Exposition of the Old and New Testaments, on the Song

Reads the book throughout as Christ's love for the church, in Henry's characteristic warm, practical idiom.

A. W. Tozerbrief quote

The Pursuit of God (1948)

No dedicated Song exposition survives in his catalog, but his theology of the soul's active pursuit and “gaze” toward God supplies the load-bearing deeper-life bridge to 3:1–4 and 8:6, carried as thematic resonance, not exposition.

Charles Spurgeonpublic domain

Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit (63 vols.)

Preached extensively and Christologically from Song texts across his sermon corpus, in the line of Bernard's bridal-devotional tradition. The general fact is well attested; specific sermon titles await a citation pass.

Chuck Misslerbrief quote

the whole-Bible expository project

the founder's formative teacher; carried here only for his general typological-method posture (Christ anticipated in every text) applied to the book's garden-center design. A dedicated Missler treatment of this book is not yet confirmed.

Tremper Longman IIIbrief quote

Song of Songs (NICOT, 2001)

An evangelical natural reading that still finds real theological resonance with Scripture's broader marriage metaphor, without requiring a word-for-word allegory.

Michael V. Foxbrief quote

The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs (1985)

Demonstrated the Song's close formal kinship with Egyptian New Kingdom love poetry: the standard comparative-literature datum for the book's genre and possible cultural milieu.

The historical hinge-quote of the whole allegorical tradition

Rabbi Akiva defended the book's place in the canon in the strongest terms rabbinic literature has for any book of Scripture: a primary rabbinic text, not a commentator's opinion, and the fountainhead of the reading that the Song's language was never merely erotic to the tradition that preserved it.

Rabbi Akiva, Mishnah Yadayim 3:5, 2nd century.

An honest gap, worth naming so nobody goes looking: no confirmed dedicated Song of Songs treatment from R. C. Sproul was located for this dossier, so his voice is not represented above. Within a tier, All voices are equal.

Contested Points

presented at full strength, and where the readings meet

Allegorical or natural: what is this book actually about?

The allegorical / typological reading

Israel's rabbis and, from Origen onward, the church's mainstream reading for some seventeen centuries heard the Song as God's love for his people or Christ's love for his church, voiced in the most unguarded human language Scripture owns. Rabbi Akiva's famous defense of the book's canonicity (“all the Writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies”) is itself evidence the erotic surface was never read as merely erotic by the tradition that preserved it.

The natural / plain-sense reading

The text names no allegory, gives no interpretive key, and reads, verse by verse, as real desire between a real man and a real woman: skin, garden, vineyard, wine, body. Reading a text this concrete as a cipher for something else, without the text's own signal to do so, is imported meaning, however reverent the intent.

Where the readings meet — Neither reading is adjudicated here: the plain sense is a real celebration of married love, God's good gift, needing no allegorical rescue to be Scripture, and the Song sits inside a canon that elsewhere and repeatedly makes marriage the deliberate metaphor of God's covenant love, a tradition running from Hosea to Revelation. Both readings are presented, attributed, on the dedicated study page, along with Delitzsch's mediating “typical” view: real love that Scripture's own pattern makes a legitimate type of divine love.

The full case, presented at full strength and attributed →

Solomonic authorship and dating

The traditional case

The title (1:1) names Solomon, and 1 Kings 4:32 reports he composed 1,005 songs; the book's flora and fauna catalogue, its geographic range from Lebanon to Engedi to Jerusalem, and its evident royal wealth fit a united-monarchy setting.

The linguistic late-dating case

A probable Persian loanword (pardês, 4:13) and a possibly Greek-derived term (appiryôn, 3:9) are read by some scholars as evidence of a post-exilic date, alongside grammatical features some class as Late Biblical Hebrew.

Where the readings meet — Loanwords can enter a language through trade far earlier than a wholesale post-exilic date requires (Solomon's own trade network reached Arabia and beyond), and the etymology of both disputed words is itself contested even among critical scholars. The traditional Solomonic reading remains the widely held position; the debate is noted, not flattened.

The “shepherd hypothesis”: two lovers, or three?

The three-character reading

A minority position (associated with Heinrich Ewald and later proponents) holds that the bridegroom is not Solomon but a country shepherd, the Shulammite's true beloved, with Solomon appearing as a rival king who tries and fails to win her into his harem, the shepherding language of 1:7–8 and 2:16 read as a literal occupation distinct from the king.

The two-character reading

The text nowhere clearly signals a change of speaker to a third male character; the shepherd language is pastoral love-imagery common across the whole genre of ancient Near Eastern love poetry, not evidence of a separate profession, and the three-character plot has to be imported rather than read off the page.

Where the readings meet — The two-character reading (bride and bridegroom, whether “Solomon” names the historical king or functions as a royal literary convention for the beloved) is presented as the majority and default reading; the shepherd hypothesis is presented at full strength as a real minority position with its textual basis noted, not dismissed.

Drafted from MannaFest's research brief on Song of Solomon — public-domain interpretation-history voices (Origen, Bernard, the Targum, Gill, Henry, Delitzsch, Ginsburg, Spurgeon) and the founder's approved-voices roster, with modern voices briefly quoted.

Key Words, with Doors

The Hard Questions, Honestly

The places a careful reader stops, with the readings named and their holders.

Who is speaking, and how many people are in this book?

The Hebrew text carries no speaker labels. Gender and number in the verbs and pronouns are the only guide, which is why English editions supply headings that differ from one another.

The evidence, and the readings

Most of the book divides cleanly between one woman and one man, with the daughters of Jerusalem answering at 5:9 and 6:1, but the shepherd language at 1:7-8 and 2:16 has led some readers to find a third figure.

Two speakers: the woman and her beloved, with a chorus
held by the majority reading, held by Delitzsch (1885), Longman (NICOT, 2001), and Duane Garrett (Song of Songs, Word Biblical Commentary, 2004), who take the shepherding language as ordinary pastoral love-imagery of the kind the whole genre uses
Three characters: a shepherd, the woman, and Solomon as a rival king
held by Heinrich Ewald, who set out the dramatic reading in the 1820s, and Christian D. Ginsburg (The Song of Songs, 1857), who developed it at length
On this reading the woman stays faithful to a country shepherd while Solomon tries to win her into his court, and 8:11-12 is her closing refusal of the king's terms. The reading has to supply the plot, since the text nowhere announces a change of male speaker.

How did a book with no mention of God enter the canon?

Mishnah Yadayim 3:5, compiled around AD 200, preserves a dispute among the sages over whether the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes 'defile the hands,' the rabbinic idiom for a book being holy Scripture. Rabbi Akiva, teaching in the land of Israel in the early second century AD, settled the question about the Song in the strongest terms available: all the Writings are holy, and the Song of Songs is the holy of holies. His answer is evidence that the tradition which preserved the book never read its surface as merely erotic, and it remains the centerpiece of the book's reception history. The Song is also one of the Five Megilloth, the scrolls read at the festivals, and Jewish practice reads it at Passover, which pairs it with the exodus and matches the covenant-history reading the Targum gives it.

How should this book be read?

Three broad traditions have run alongside one another for two thousand years, and each has held ground the others could not take. The positions are named here with the voices who hold them, so that a reader knows what the argument is about before entering it.

The natural reading: married love celebrated as God's good gift
held by Theodore of Mopsuestia (c. 350-428), who read the book as a wedding song and was condemned for it at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553; Ginsburg (1857); and most modern commentators, including Longman (2001) and Garrett (2004)
The text names no allegory and supplies no key, and it reads verse by verse as desire between a real man and a real woman.
The allegorical reading: God and his people, Christ and his church
held by the Aramaic Targum to the Song, which most scholars date to the seventh or eighth century AD, and Rashi (1040-1105) in the Jewish tradition; Origen (third century) and Bernard of Clairvaux (eighty-six sermons, 1135-1153) in the church's
For most of the book's history this was the ordinary way to read it, in both traditions, and it is the reading under which the book was preserved and taught.
The typological middle: real human love that also patterns the covenant
held by Franz Delitzsch (1885), and the evangelical commentators who follow his shape
The love is real, and Scripture's own habit of using marriage for covenant love from Hosea to Revelation makes it a legitimate pattern of a greater love, with no requirement to decode each garden and vineyard as a cipher.

Two Traditions, One Song→

What has the church done with the book's frankness?

The Song describes bodies and desire more openly than any other book of Scripture, and readers have handled that in three ways. Origen reports in his prologue that Jewish practice reserved the book for readers of mature years, a custom the church took over in places. The allegorical tradition read the surface as a figure of divine love, which let the book be taught freely in any congregation. The natural reading takes the frankness as the point, since Genesis 2:24 and Proverbs 5:18-19 already treat a husband's and wife's delight in each other as good. What the book never does is treat the body as shameful or desire as dirty, and any teaching of it that leaves a reader with that impression has lost the text. The wound in the street at 5:7, where the watchmen strike the woman and take her mantle, is the book's one act of violence, and the text names it and moves on without resolving it.

The Proverbs 31 Woman→

The Text and the Spade

The Masoretic Textc. AD 900 (Leningrad and Aleppo Codices)
The standard Hebrew text behind English translations, and the fullest form of the book. Its 117 verses in eight chapters are the text every other witness is measured against.
The Qumran copies (4QCant-a, 4QCant-b, 6QCant)c. first century BC to first century AD
Three fragmentary copies from Caves 4 and 6. Both Cave 4 manuscripts skip stretches the Masoretic Text carries, and Emanuel Tov proposed reading them as abbreviated or excerpted copies made for a particular use rather than as a rival edition of the book (Journal of Jewish Studies, 1995). Their presence at Qumran shows the book was being copied well before the rabbinic discussion of its status.
The Septuagint (LXX)c. second to first century BC
A very literal Greek rendering, close enough to the Hebrew word order to be awkward Greek. It is the text Origen worked from and the channel through which the book's vocabulary entered Christian devotional writing.
The Targum to the Song of Songsmost scholars date it to the seventh or eighth century AD
An Aramaic version that expands the poem into a running account of Israel's history from the exodus to the age to come. It stands as reception rather than as a witness to the Hebrew wording, and it is the fountainhead of the Jewish allegorical reading.

En-gedi (Tel Goren and the oasis, western shore of the Dead Sea)Iron Age settlement, seventh century BC and later
The oasis named at 1:14, 'a cluster of henna-flowers In the vineyards of En-gedi,' is a real place with permanent springs in otherwise waterless country, and excavation found a settled Iron Age town with installations connected to the perfume industry the site was later famous for. The verse's picture of vineyards and fragrance in the desert is geography rather than invention.
Tirzah (Tell el-Farah North, excavated by Roland de Vaux, 1946-1960)occupied through the Iron Age; Israel's royal seat in the early ninth century BC
At 6:4 the woman is 'fair, O my love, as Tirzah, Comely as Jerusalem,' which sets her beside two named cities. Excavation confirmed Tirzah as a substantial northern city that served briefly as Israel's capital before Omri built Samaria (1 Kings 16:23-24). The name itself is built on a Hebrew root meaning to be pleasing, so the line works as both a place and a play on the word.
The South Arabian incense routeattested archaeologically from roughly the eighth century BC onward
The spice list at 4:13-14 names frankincense, myrrh, saffron, calamus, cinnamon, and spikenard, which grew nowhere near Israel and arrived by caravan across Arabia or by sea from further east. The trade network is well attested, though scholars differ over how early it reached the volume the list assumes, and that disagreement feeds the dating question above.

The Egyptian love songs (Papyrus Chester Beatty I, Papyrus Harris 500, the Cairo love songs, and the Deir el-Medina ostraca)

Egyptian, New KingdomRamesside period, c. 1300-1100 BC

The parallel

Lovers who call each other brother and sister as terms of endearment, praise of the beloved's body part by part, gardens and orchards as the setting for meeting, love as a sickness the beloved alone can cure, and a lover kept outside a door.

Read honestly

The closest formal parallels to the Song anywhere in the ancient world, set out by Michael V. Fox (The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs, 1985). The kinship is one of genre and convention: 'my sister, my bride' at 4:9-12 and 'I am sick from love' at 2:5 use the shared vocabulary of the form. The differences are real too. The Egyptian pieces are loose collections of separate poems with no frame, while the Song holds one pair of voices across eight chapters, moves toward marriage, and was received into a canon.

The Sumerian Dumuzi and Inanna songs

Sumerian and Babylonianc. 2100-1700 BC in the surviving copies

The parallel

Courtship poetry exchanged between a divine bridegroom and a divine bride, used in the sacred-marriage rite in which a king enacted the union.

Read honestly

Theophile Meek argued in the 1920s that the Song stood behind an Israelite version of such a cult, and Samuel Noah Kramer set out the Sumerian material at length (The Sacred Marriage Rite, 1969). Few defend the cultic derivation now, for a plain reason in the text: the Song has no deity in it, no priest, no rite, and no temple, and the lovers are a man and a woman rather than gods. The shared vocabulary of courtship poetry is real; the ritual frame is absent.

The Pulpit on Song of Solomon

Fragrant Graces
The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 3480: “Fragrant Graces” (lightly modernized text, CCEL edition)
Charles SpurgeonSong of Solomon 1:12
Paved With Love
The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 1134: “Paved With Love” (lightly modernized text, CCEL edition)
Charles SpurgeonSong of Solomon 3:10
The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 2475: “"My Garden"—"His Garden"” (lightly modernized text, CCEL edition)
The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 2475: “"My Garden"—"His Garden"” (lightly modernized text, CCEL edition)
Charles SpurgeonSong of Solomon 4:16
Love Joying In Love
The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 1943: “Love Joying In Love” (lightly modernized text, CCEL edition)
Charles SpurgeonSong of Solomon 5:1
Spices, Flowers, Lilies and Myrrh
The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 2479: “Spices, Flowers, Lilies and Myrrh” (lightly modernized text, CCEL edition)
Charles SpurgeonSong of Solomon 5:13
Altogether Lovely
The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 1001: “Altogether Lovely” (lightly modernized text, CCEL edition)
Charles SpurgeonSong of Solomon 5:16
The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 1794: “"Return, Return, O Shulamite; Return, Return!"” (lightly modernized text, CCEL edition)
The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 1794: “"Return, Return, O Shulamite; Return, Return!"” (lightly modernized text, CCEL edition)
Charles SpurgeonSong of Solomon 6:13
The Bridegroom's Parting Words
The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 1716: “The Bridegroom's Parting Words” (lightly modernized text, CCEL edition)
Charles SpurgeonSong of Solomon 8:13

Where Song of Solomon leads

The heaviest chapters, the distinctive words, and the studies that cite Song of Solomon

1,204 cross-references flow out of its 5 heaviest chapters · 8 words are distinctively its own · 3 featured studies cite it.

Counted from this book's own cross-references, its words, and the studies that cite it.

Heaviest chapter

Song of Solomon 1Sends 267 cross-references outward: the most connected chapter in the book.

Distinctive word

עֹפֶר“a fawn (from the dusty color)” (H6082): 5 of its 5 occurrences in all of Scripture fall in this book (100%).

רַעְיָהdarling9 of its 9 uses are in Song of Solomon
מֹרmyrrh8 of its 12 uses are in Song of Solomon
דּוֹדbeloved39 of its 61 uses are in Song of Solomon
שׁוּשַׁןlily8 of its 13 uses are in Song of Solomon

Featured study

Song of Solomon — the Study GuideCites Song of Solomon directly, one of 3 featured studies that walk through this book.

Every study that reaches into Song of Solomon

6 studies, grouped by shelf

The numeral beside each title is how many passages of Song of Solomon that study works from.

The Symbolism of Scripture, The World and the People In Itthe whole shelf →

The Watchman1×The Wilderness1×

Also cited here4 more studies that reach into Song of Solomon

The Virgin Birth2×The Seal & the Signet1×Two Traditions, One Song — Song of Songs Interpretation History1×Typology of Christ1×

The Cast

five voices and the places their song moves through

The Bride (“the Shulammite,” 6:13)Her voice opens and closes the book and carries the majority of its lines: the most extensively voiced woman in Scripture.

The BridegroomAddressed throughout as “my beloved” and identified with Solomon at 1:1, 3:7, 9, 11, and 8:11–12; whether literally or as literary convention is exactly the shepherd-hypothesis debate above.

The Daughters of JerusalemA chorus who question, echo, and are three times adjured by the bride: the closest thing the book has to a narrative audience.

The bride's brothers1:6; 8:8–9: protective, and possibly antagonistic, toward their sister; they set her to keep the vineyards and later debate her worth like property to be walled or doored.

The watchmen of the city3:3; 5:7: who strike her and take her veil in the night search, a jarring wound the text names and never resolves.

The geography the lovers move through

JerusalemThe poem's implied setting and the daughters' home.Damascus7:4: a beauty-comparison for the bride's features, at the edge of the book's geographic range.

Lebanon4:8, 11, 15; 7:4: repeated backdrop of cedars, snow, and scent.

Engedi1:14: the oasis vineyards by the Dead Sea.

Sharon2:1: the coastal plain, source of “a rose of Sharon.”

Mount Gilead4:1: the goats on its slopes, one of the wasf's body-images.

Tirzah6:4: paired with Jerusalem as a beauty-comparison; Israel's capital before Samaria.

Kedar1:5: the Arabian desert tribe, a dark-tent comparison for the bride's sun-darkened skin.

Where Song of Solomon Leads

every study that opens out of this book

Two Traditions, One SongAllegorical and natural, side by side and presented at full strength: the church's two-thousand-year argument over what this book is really about Wisdom and the PoetsThe five-book wisdom shelf this garden path closes

Song 1 Song 2 Song 3 Song 4 Song 5 Song 6 Song 7 Song 8

Open the Song reader: all 8 chapters →

All 8 chapters

Love Strong as Death

The Garden Path

Song of Solomon in a Nutshell

Structure

What Song of Solomon Alone Teaches

Love as strong as death

The garden, and the echoes of Eden

Mutual belonging

The refrain to the daughters of Jerusalem

The dignity of the body and of married love

Christ in Song of Solomon

The Argument

The Adjuration Refrain

The Mutual-Possession Refrain

Love Strong as Death

Where Song of Solomon Points to Christ

Themes

Love as a good gift, unashamed

Mutuality

Love as strong as death

The garden and the vineyard

Love has its own proper time

The world behind this book

The history, and what it meant to them

The history

What it meant to them

Who Wrote It, and When

The Years of Song of Solomon

The Voices on Song of Solomon

More works on Song of Solomon

Original Language

Contested Points

Allegorical or natural: what is this book actually about?

Solomonic authorship and dating

The “shepherd hypothesis”: two lovers, or three?

Key Words, with Doors

The Hard Questions, Honestly

Who is speaking, and how many people are in this book?

The evidence, and the readings

How did a book with no mention of God enter the canon?

How should this book be read?

What has the church done with the book's frankness?

The Text and the Spade

The Pulpit on Song of Solomon

The heaviest chapters, the distinctive words, and the studies that cite Song of Solomon

Every study that reaches into Song of Solomon

The Cast

Where Song of Solomon Leads

More Doors from Song of Solomon