Song of Solomon4chapter 4

Song of Solomon 4:1-5

The chapter opens the poem's first full praise song, an ordered description from the eyes downward, and the form is stated once: the images compare the bride to the best of a shepherd's world, a flock of goats streaming dark down Gilead, shorn ewes white from the washing with never a lamb lost, a thread of scarlet, the tower of David hung with the shields of mighty men. The comparisons are of impression rather than outline, as Delitzsch insists: the teeth are not like sheep in shape but in matched whiteness and completeness, the neck not like a tower in size but in adorned dignity. The exposition reads the frankness of verse 5 as the married love it celebrates, with the site's surface kept plain and the poem's own decorum trusted.

Song of Solomon 4:6-8

the mountain of myrrh: Until the day break, and the shadows flee away repeats the bride's own phrase from 2:17, now in his mouth, the poem's voices borrowing from each other as the love matures. Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee is the praise poem's summary line, and the older writers hear the church's cleansing in it (Eph 5:27, not having spot); that hearing is named as theirs. The call from Lebanon, from Amana, Shenir and Hermon, from the lions' dens and the mountains of the leopards, calls her away from real northern heights with real predators, the poem's geography carrying its point: come down from what is high and dangerous to what is loved.

Song of Solomon 4:9-11

My sister, my spouse enters here and rules the chapter, five occurrences beginning at verse 9: the pairing joins permanence to passion, kinship's unbreakable bond laid under marriage's chosen one, which is how the commentators read the double name. Thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck: a glance and an ornament suffice, love undone by the least of the beloved. The praise of verse 10 returns the poem's opening comparison (thy love better than wine, 1:2) now spoken back by the bridegroom, and honey and milk are under thy tongue sets the promised land's own formula in her speech.

Song of Solomon 4:12-15

A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed: the poem's most quoted figure, chastity as a garden kept for one, water sealed against every other claim. The catalogue that follows plants the garden with the ancient world's whole spice trade, camphire, spikenard, saffron, calamus, cinnamon, frankincense, myrrh and aloes, most of them imports from Arabia and India, which the material-culture rows carry; the catalogue is read once as abundance rather than item by item. The figure turns at verse 15: the sealed fountain is at the same time a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, closed to strangers and flowing for its own, and the older writers set the living-water vocabulary beside Jer 2:13 and John 4:10 by name as their reading.

Song of Solomon 4:16

Awake, O north wind: The bride answers the garden praise in one verse that changes its ownership: awake, O north wind, and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out, and then, let my beloved come into HIS garden. What was my garden in her invitation becomes his in her gift, the possessive doing the poem's work, as the bench notes. The allegorical lines hear the Spirit's wind on the church's graces and carry Bernard's long meditations here; those readings are named as theirs, and the verse's own movement, praise answered by welcome, is text.