Song of Solomon3chapter 3

Song of Solomon 3:1-2

By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth opens a night search, the clause him whom my soul loveth repeated four times across five verses and driving the passage's urgency. I sought him, but I found him not sends her out of the bed and into the city itself: I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him, an action the ancient world would have read as reckless for a woman alone after dark. Henry reads the search as love unwilling to rest until it finds what it seeks, whether taken as the plain courtship of the poem or, in the church's line of reading, as the soul seeking Christ through a night of his seeming absence.

Song of Solomon 3:3-4

The watchmen that go about the city found me continues the search into an encounter with the city's night guard, to whom she puts the same question, saw ye him whom my soul loveth. It was but a little that I passed from them, but I found him whom my soul loveth turns the search short and sudden, and I held him, and would not let him go pictures a grip refused to loosen until she had brought him into my mother's house, and into the chamber of her that conceived me, the mother's house named rather than the father's, a detail the bench notes without settling why. Delitzsch reads the mother's house as the customary place a betrothal was concluded in that world.

Song of Solomon 3:5

The second of the poem's adjuration refrain falls here, word for word as at 2:7 and again at 5:8 and 8:4: I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please. Its return right after the night search closes that scene the way the first closed the banqueting scene, love found and then left to rest in its own time rather than forced toward its next stage. Wesley reads each return of the charge as the poem's own restraint, teaching patience at the very moments desire runs highest.

Song of Solomon 3:6

Who is this that cometh out of the wilderness like pillars of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, with all powders of the merchant opens the wedding procession as a question from onlookers, smoke rising from incense carried before the party across open country toward the city. The wilderness names the real approach a procession would make from outside Jerusalem, and the perfumes name an actual trade, myrrh and frankincense both carried by merchant caravans out of Arabia. Gill reads the question as spoken by the same daughters of Jerusalem who received the adjuration, now startled by the approaching company.

Song of Solomon 3:7-8

Behold his bed, which is Solomon's names the ceremonial couch or litter carried in the procession, threescore valiant men are about it, of the valiant of Israel, sixty picked men rather than an ordinary household guard, a number the bench reads as deliberately public and honorific. They all hold swords, being expert in war, every man hath his sword upon his thigh because of fear in the night describes real armed escort, since a wedding party moving after dark through open country needed genuine protection, not ceremony alone. Clarke reads the guard as historically plausible for a king's procession rather than poetic ornament only.

Song of Solomon 3:9-10

King Solomon made himself a chariot of the wood of Lebanon names cedar, the same wood used in the temple and in Solomon's own house, a material chosen for status rather than mere availability. The pillars thereof of silver, the bottom thereof of gold, the covering of it of purple, the midst thereof being paved with love, for the daughters of Jerusalem catalogues real royal materials, purple dye among the costliest goods of the ancient world, and ends on the one immaterial item in the list, love, set into the litter alongside silver and gold. Delitzsch reads the description as the poem borrowing the vocabulary of Solomon's actual court to dress a wedding no less rich than a king's own.

Song of Solomon 3:11

Go forth, O ye daughters of Zion, and behold king Solomon with the crown wherewith his mother crowned him in the day of his espousals, and in the day of the gladness of his heart closes the procession by naming Bathsheba's part, a mother crowning her son on his wedding day, a custom the text records without further explanation. The day of his espousals and the day of the gladness of his heart name the wedding day twice over, gladness the note the whole procession has been building toward. Henry reads the mother's crown as the highest honor a king's own family could add to the day, the procession's public splendor closed by one private, family act.