Song of Solomon8chapter 8

Song of Solomon 8:1-4

The bride wishes her beloved were as her brother, not to lessen the love but to free it: a brother could be kissed in the street without shame and brought openly into the mother's house, where the poem's love keeps returning (3:4, and here with who would instruct me). The wish measures the distance between love's privacy and the public world, as the bench reads it. The adjuration to the daughters of Jerusalem falls for the last time at 8:4, the fourth in the poem's frame (2:7, 3:5, 5:8, 8:4): stir not up, nor awake my love, until he please, love's timing kept sovereign to the end.

Song of Solomon 8:5

Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness repeats the question that met the wedding procession at 3:6, and this time the answer is two figures and a posture: leaning upon her beloved, which every tradition of reading has taken for its own summary of the book. The apple tree returns from 2:3, now the place of awakening and birth, the poem folding its own images back on themselves as it closes. The allegorical lines read the wilderness ascent of Israel with her God and of the church with Christ; those readings are theirs by name, and the picture itself, dependence walking home, is text.

Song of Solomon 8:6-7

The poem's theology arrives in its own voice: set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm, the signet worn against the body that answers for its owner, love asking to be identity and not ornament. Love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the two unarguable powers are made love's measure, and the Hebrew behind a most vehement flame, shalhebethyah, carries what many read as the book's one fragment of the divine name, a flame of Yah; the readings (an intensive form of flame; the name itself, so Delitzsch weighs and much of the bench holds) are named without a verdict. Many waters cannot quench love completes it with the unpurchasable clause: all the substance of a man's house offered for love would utterly be contemned, love the one good outside every market, which is the verse each tradition of reading claims and each is given with its holders.

Song of Solomon 8:8-10

We have a little sister: The brothers' voices return from 1:6 with a council about the little sister not yet grown: if she be a wall, a palace of silver built upon her; if she be a door, boards of cedar to inclose her, steadfastness honored and openness guarded, as the commentators read the figures. The bride answers for herself, I am a wall, her own kept integrity stated without apology, and then was I in his eyes as one that found favour, the poem's word for the peace her faithfulness reached. The allegorical line hears the church's care for those not yet mature; that reading is named as its holders'.

Song of Solomon 8:11-12

Solomon's vineyard at Baal-hamon, let out for a thousand pieces of silver a keeper, stands beside the bride's own: my vineyard, which is mine, is before me. Thou, O Solomon, must have a thousand reads differently under the poem's two castings, and both are named: with Solomon the bridegroom, the lines are playful largess, his wealth conceded while her one vineyard, herself, is given freely; under the shepherd reading held by part of the nineteenth-century bench, they are a refusal, the leased estate against the unpurchasable love of 8:7. The verse's own arithmetic carries either way: what is let out for money is exactly what love is not.

Song of Solomon 8:13-14

The poem ends in two voices calling to each other, not in an arrival: the beloved asks to hear her voice, cause me to hear it, and she sends him running, make haste, my beloved, and be thou like to a roe or to a young hart upon the mountains of spices, the gazelle figure of 2:9 and 2:17 released once more. The ending is open on purpose, desire still in motion at the last line, and the commentators mark it: the church's reading heard in make haste its own even so, come (Rev 22:20), a hearing named as theirs, while the poem itself closes the way love lives, still calling.