Song of Solomon5chapter 5

Song of Solomon 5:1

eat, O friends: The bridegroom answers his own invitation of 4:16 in the poem's own words, I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse, and what follows, myrrh, spice, honeycomb, wine and milk gathered and enjoyed, names the fullness the courtship movement of chapters one through four has been building toward. The address then widens past the two lovers alone, eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved, inviting the wedding company to share the joy rather than only witness it. Delitzsch reads the verse as marking the marriage's consummation and the close of the poem's first movement; Gill reads the same invitation of Christ feasting his church.

Song of Solomon 5:2-3

The second night scene opens with a state the poem states in its own words, I sleep, but my heart waketh, love keeping watch where sleep does not. The beloved's voice comes at the door asking to be let in, my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night, marking a real night spent outdoors before he came. The bride answers with two questions rather than an open door, I have put off my coat, how shall I put it on, I have washed my feet, how shall I defile them, a hesitation the commentators read as the poem's own picture of a heart grown slow to rise for a love it does possess.

Song of Solomon 5:4-6

My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him: the gesture itself moves her before any word is spoken, and she rises at last, her hands and fingers dripping myrrh onto the very handles of the lock. She opens too late; my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone, and what the hesitation cost is stated plainly, my soul failed when he spake, I sought him but I could not find him, I called him, but he gave me no answer. Henry and Gill both read the sequence as the poem's own picture of delay in love, a withdrawal met after the moment for opening had passed, without naming it a punishment.

Song of Solomon 5:7-8

The watchmen who guided her safely to the bridegroom in 3:3 now meet her in the night search and smite her, wound her, and take away her veil, a reversal the commentators read two ways: some see the real danger of a woman abroad alone at night, and some read the wounding as what love can cost among an unsympathetic world. Still wounded, she charges the daughters of Jerusalem in the same adjuration form used at 2:7, 3:5 and 8:4, but bent now to a message, if ye find my beloved, that ye tell him, that I am sick of love. Delitzsch notes the refrain is altered here to carry a message rather than a warning, since in this scene it is the beloved who is sought rather than love that is being asked to wait.

Song of Solomon 5:9

The daughters answer the charge with a question of their own, what is thy beloved more than another beloved, that thou dost so charge us, asked twice in the one verse as though testing whether the claim can be backed with substance. The question does what her grief alone could not: it draws out of her the portrait that follows, turning loss into praise rather than only lament. Henry reads the daughters' question as the poem's own hinge, the point where description becomes the answer no argument alone could give.

Song of Solomon 5:10-12

My beloved is white and ruddy, the chiefest among ten thousand answers the daughters with rank and radiance together, and it opens the one place in the poem where the bride praises the bridegroom in the same descriptive form he had used of her four times over. His head is as the most fine gold, his locks are bushy, and black as a raven pictures royal wealth and youthful strength in one image, and his eyes as the eyes of doves by the rivers of waters, washed with milk, and fitly set returns the dove language he had given her at 1:15 and 4:1, now given back. Delitzsch reads the returned image as the poem's own proof that praise in this book runs both directions; Gill's allegorical line hears the church confessing Christ's beauty in the same words.

Song of Solomon 5:13-14

His cheeks are as a bed of spices continues the portrait downward, his lips like lilies, dropping sweet smelling myrrh, and the description keeps the rule the poem already established for its praise songs, images built for impression rather than outline, as Delitzsch's reading of chapter four's catalogue holds here too. His hands are as gold rings set with the beryl, his belly is as bright ivory overlaid with sapphires moves the portrait into royal and priestly materials, gold, beryl, ivory and sapphire together, a garment of preciousness rather than a report of shape. Gill's allegorical reading hears in the gathered materials a king clothed for his people to admire, a reading he holds and states as his own.

Song of Solomon 5:15-16

His legs are as pillars of marble finishes the downward portrait with strength and stature, set upon sockets of fine gold, and his countenance is as Lebanon, excellent as the cedars closes it with the same northern grandeur the poem has used throughout for what is high and lasting. The description ends in taste rather than sight, his mouth is most sweet, and then in the two lines the church has read longest and most often as its own confession: yea, he is altogether lovely, this is my beloved, and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem. Those two lines have stood at the center of the church's reading of the whole book across the centuries, Bernard's sermons and Gill's exposition chief among them, taken as words the church could say of Christ even while the verse itself is the bride's own praise of her bridegroom.