Song of Solomon · Interpretation History · Featured Study
Two Traditions, One Song
No book of the Bible has been read two more different ways for two thousand years without either reading ever losing ground. One tradition hears a real man and a real woman, God's good gift of married love, needing no rescue to belong in Scripture. The other hears — in the very same words — the love-language between God and his people. MannaFest holds both open, attributed, against the same verses, and refuses to adjudicate between them.
The Same Verses, Read Two Ways
— facing pages — neither reading erases the otherSong 2:16 — “My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth his flock among the lilies.”
The natural reading
A woman describing her lover in pastoral terms her culture's love poetry shared with its neighbors — mutual, exclusive desire, spoken in the vocabulary of shepherding because that was the vocabulary at hand.
The allegorical / typological reading
The mutual-possession formula read as covenant language: “I am my beloved's” answers the covenant formula God speaks over Israel elsewhere (Hos 2:19–20) — the soul's own claim on, and claim by, God.
Song 8:6 — “Set me as a seal upon thy heart… for love is strong as death.”
The natural reading
Love's own case for itself, made without appeal to anything outside itself — the strongest thing a person can say about desire, offered as the book's closing argument for love on its own terms.
The allegorical / typological reading
Bernard of Clairvaux and the tradition behind him hear here Christ's own love for his bride proven exactly where the text puts it: a love that goes down into death and is not quenched by it — the cross, in the book's own vocabulary.
“Let me have a place in thy heart, an interest in thy love.” This is that which all those desire above any thing that know how much their happiness is bound up in the love of Christ. “Let me never lose the room I have in thy heart; let thy love to me be ensured, as that deed which is sealed up not to be robbed.”
Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710), on Song of Solomon 8:6 — public domain
The Honest Middle
— Delitzsch's “typical” readingFranz Delitzsch, in his 1885 commentary, offered a third way that is not a compromise but a different claim entirely: the Song is a real love story, and Scripture — by placing it in the canon and by everywhere else making marriage the deliberate metaphor of God's covenant love (Hosea, Isaiah 54 and 62, Ezekiel 16, Ephesians 5, Revelation 19, 21–22) — makes that real love a legitimate type of divine love, without requiring the interpreter to decode every garden and vineyard as a cipher.
This is the reading MannaFest leans toward when a lean is unavoidable — not because the allegorical tradition is wrong to hear Christ in the Song, and not because the natural reading needs defending against the charge of impropriety, but because “type” lets both claims stand: the love is real, and the love is also a pattern of a greater love, and neither fact cancels the other.
Nineteen Centuries, Two Readings
— the interpretation history, in order- c. 90 ADRabbi Akiva
Defends the Song's canonicity at the Council of Jamnia — “the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies” (Mishnah Yadayim 3:5) — evidence the allegorical reading already anchored the book's place in the canon.
- 3rd c.Origen
Founds the Christian allegorical reading in his Commentary and Homilies — the Bride as both Church and the individual soul, the Bridegroom as the divine Word.
- 1st c. AD (trad.)The Targum to the Song of Songs
Reads the whole book as Israel's covenant history, Exodus to the Messianic age — the fountainhead of the Jewish allegorical tradition (Gollancz tr. 1908).
- 12th c.Bernard of Clairvaux
86 sermons that never progress past chapter 2 — the devotional peak of bridal mysticism, the soul's romance with Christ (Eales tr. 1895).
- 18th c.Gill, Wesley, Henry
Carry the allegorical, Christ-and-the-church reading into accessible English exposition, verse by verse.
- 1857Christian D. Ginsburg
Argues the natural, dramatic reading at length and gives the fullest fair history of how the two traditions diverged.
- 1885Franz Delitzsch
The mediating “typical” position: real human love that Scripture's own placement and marriage-metaphor pattern makes a legitimate type of divine love — no word-for-word allegory required.
- 1977–2005Pope, Murphy, Longman, Garrett, Hess
Modern scholarship, largely natural-reading, with the evangelical wing (Longman, Garrett, Hess) still finding real theological resonance in the canon's broader marriage metaphor.
A Living Branch of the Old Tradition
— the deeper-life devotional readingThe allegorical tradition did not end with the Puritans. Its nearest living voice on MannaFest's own roster is A. W. Tozer — not a Song commentator, but a theologian of the soul's active pursuit of God, whose language of the soul's “gaze” toward God (The Pursuit of God, 1948) pairs thematically with the Song's night-search (3:1–4; 5:2–8): the bride rising in the dark to seek the one who has, for a season, withdrawn. It is a resonance the devotional tradition draws, not a direct exposition of this book — held here honestly as that, and no more.
MannaFest's Ruling
MannaFest does not adjudicate between the natural and allegorical readings of the Song of Solomon. The plain sense stands on its own: a real celebration of a real man's and a real woman's love, God's good gift, requiring no allegorical rescue to belong in Scripture. And the church's oldest continuous reading tradition — Akiva to Origen to Bernard to Wesley — heard in the very same words the fullest, most intimate voice of the marriage the whole canon uses for God's covenant love. Both traditions are presented here, attributed, at full strength; a reader is free to stand in either, or, with Delitzsch, in both at once.