UNLIKE THE BOOK of Ecclesiastes, which is explicitly associated with King Solomon only in the tradition and not in the text, the Song of Songs is clearly connected with this particular king of Israel, not only by way of references to him in the body of the text (1:5; 3:7, 9, 11; 8:11–12), but also by way of the heading to the whole song itself. Song of Songs 1:1 translates literally: “The Song of Songs which is to Solomon.”
It has been the common Jewish and Christian view up until modern times (although it has not been universally held)1 that Solomon indeed wrote this song—something reflected in the NIV’s translation of 1:1 as “Solomon’s Song of Songs.” Yet Solomon only appears in this book in third-person references, and none of the first-person speeches are explicitly connected with him. Even at this level, then, it does not read most naturally as a composition authored by Solomon. Moreover, when the essentially negative character of most of the material mentioning Solomon or “the king” is recognized (see further below), the case for Solomonic authorship is further weakened.
The heading itself certainly does not demand it, for Heb. le, “to,” can also signify that the song was written for Solomon (although it is unlikely that a song critical of Solomon would have been composed for him by a contemporary scribe) or that it concerns Solomon. It is this last possibility that is accepted in this commentary. The Song of Songs is about Solomon to some extent, just as Ecclesiastes also concerns Solomon to some extent. In Ecclesiastes, this king appears as a famous character who represents power and wealth, enabling Qohelet to explore these aspects of human reality and to offer his readers an alternative vision of life to the one Solomon represents. In Song of Songs, the king also appears as a character who represents power and wealth, but the real focus of attention is on his famed possession of women (alluded to in Eccl. 2:8 and described above all in 1 Kings 11:1–8). This feature allows the biblical author to explore important aspects of human reality—on this occasion love and sexual intimacy—and to present to us a particular vision of the world for our consideration. Solomon is the foil for this author’s broader purposes, for Solomon’s relationships with women represent the antithesis of the relationship between a man and a woman that the author wishes us to admire and (implicitly) to imitate.
Our author’s agenda is already announced in the first part of the heading, for the expression “Song of Songs” communicates, like “vanity of vanities” in Ecclesiastes 1:2 and elsewhere, a superlative.2 We are reading, we are told, the very best, the most sublime of songs, as we read of the love between a man and a woman that is expressed here. That is quite a claim when one considers how many songs (Heb. šir) there are in the Old Testament (see the titles, e.g., of Ps. 30, 45, 46, 48, 65).
The identity of this author is unknown, as it is in the case of Ecclesiastes. The date of the composition is likewise uncertain. Although the Song of Songs clearly evokes the Solomonic era, whether in general terms (alluding to the wealth and luxury of Solomon’s court as we hear of it in 1 Kings 2–11; see esp. comments on Song 3:6–11) or in its specific details (e.g., the mention of the city of Tirzah in 6:4, an important city of the time, 1 Kings 14:17), it is not clear whether it does so from near or far, chronologically speaking. The broad connections between the Song of Songs and other ancient Near Eastern literature of a comparable sort do not help us to be precise even about the century or two within which this song might be placed. The language of the book probably indicates a postexilic rather than a preexilic date overall (e.g., the Persian loanword pardes, “orchard,” in 4:13; cf. Neh. 2:8), but that is as far as we may go.3
The usual manner and extent of speculation exists in the commentaries as to whether some parts of the Song of Songs are earlier than others and whether it is really only the final form of the book that is as late as the postexilic period. But since it is only the final form of the book that we have and on which we are commenting, it is a waste of precious time and energy to engage with such discussion. We pass immediately to a much more important matter: How has the Song of Songs been read, and how should we read it now?
The “Original Meaning” of the Song of Songs
HISTORICALLY THERE HAVE been two primary ways in which the Song of Songs has been read by Jews and Christians: (1) as a text that concerns the love and sexual intimacy of human beings, and (2) as a text that uses the language of human love and intimacy to speak of something else—the relationship between God and Israel, perhaps, or between Christ and the church or individual members of the church (including the Virgin Mary). These two ways of reading have commonly been referred to as the literal and the allegorical respectively.
(1) The former way of reading the text is perhaps reflected already in the words attributed to Rabbi Akiba ben Joseph (c. A.D. 40–135) by t. Sanh. 12:10, where he attacks those who chant the Song of Songs “in the banquet house,” which has commonly been interpreted as an ancient tavern.4 It is certainly found later in the writing of the church father Origen (c. A.D. 185–254), who allowed that the Song of Songs might be a marriage song related to Solomon’s marriage to Pharaoh’s daughter (1 Kings 3:1), even though he was more interested in its “higher sense” as it applied to Christ and the church or the individual believer.
It is also alluded to in various other writings of the fathers (e.g., Gregory of Nyssa and Jerome in the later fourth century), albeit usually only in their cautionary or prohibitive statements about how other people should not read the Song of Songs. It is already clear from such allusions that a literal reading was certainly practiced by substantial numbers of Christians in the postapostolic period. We will probably never know how widespread it was, however, since great efforts were expended in suppressing the views of even well-known exponents of such a reading.
It is only from the attacks that others made on it, for example, that we know about Theodore of Mopsuestia’s fourth-century commentary, which interprets the Song as erotic literature sung by Solomon in defense of his love for and his marriage to an Egyptian princess. Jovinian, a Roman monk who made it his business around the same time to attack asceticism in the church and in contrast to Theodore (who opposed the Song’s place in the canon) cited the Song of Songs as a defense of the virtue of marital sexual love, was roundly condemned by both Augustine and Jerome. The Council of Constantinople in 550 famously outlawed the literal reading of the Song of Songs altogether, enshrining the allegorical interpretation henceforth as the only right interpretation. The immediately succeeding centuries provide little evidence of literal reading in our surviving sources (although absence of evidence is not, of course, evidence of absence).
It was in the post-Reformation period that a more literal approach once again surfaced among Christians, although there were many Protestant writers who initially continued to read the text allegorically in the manner of the Targum (see below), understanding it as an account of church history rather than of God’s history with Israel. The literal reading often became in the succeeding period a weapon in the hands of rationalist writers, who wished to exclude the Song of Songs from the canon of Scripture altogether on the grounds that its graphic sexual content was obscene. At the same time, continuing resistance to the literal reading seems often to have been grounded, not so much in any deep initial conviction that the book was originally intended to be read allegorically, but in the belief that the content, if read literally, would indeed be obscene, and therefore problematic for the Christian.5 This latter belief, being culturally rather than biblically rooted, has increasingly come to be questioned as time has passed and as readers have asked why a description of human love and sexual intimacy should trouble a Christian reader. The consequence is that the literal approach has become much more popular among Christian readers in modern times than it ever was (so far as we can tell) in ancient times. The popularity of such a reading is shared among modern Jewish and nonreligious readers of the text.
(2) The allegorical reading of the Song of Songs is probably at least as old as the literal reading. There is no solid evidence that it is older. The LXX translation of our text (dating from around 100 B.C.), for example, reveals no explicit evidence of allegorization. Akiba himself, one of the principal founders of rabbinic Judaism, stands at the origin of the establishment of normative Jewish interpretation of the song as an allegorical account of the history of the relationship between the Shekinah (the divine presence) and Israel from the Exodus to the Exile and beyond, but our sources present Akiba as contributing to an ongoing debate about the interpretation of this song, which is already to be found at his time among the Scriptures.
We have no idea (despite the misleading impression that has sometimes been given on this point) how the Song of Songs came to be regarded as Scripture in Judaism in the first place and which kinds of reading were adopted by those who embraced it as such.6 All we know is that at a certain point toward the end of the first century A.D., a dispute arose in the Jewish community about whether the Song of Songs should indeed be regarded (as it already was) as Scripture and that the issue of how to interpret it was tied up with that dispute. Akiba championed both its scriptural status and its allegorical reading, but we cannot deduce from this that every other first-century Jew who viewed it as Scripture also read it allegorically.
It is certainly the case that after Akiba the allegorical reading predominated among Jews for many centuries (although literal reading was by no means unknown). The Targum, for example, understands the Song of Songs as a history of salvation in five movements (Exodus and Sinai, 1:2–3:6; Solomon’s temple, 3:7–5:1; the monarchy, 5:2–6:1; the return from Exile, 6:2–7:11; the end times, 7:12–8:14). The medieval exegete Rashi (eleventh century) characterized it as speaking of this history in the language of a woman saddened by living as a widow and longing for her love. Some medieval and early modern Jewish readers read it as referring to the union of individual body and soul, or of the active and passive intellects, or of Solomon and his “bride” Wisdom.
Christian interpreters have tended on the whole to follow the Jewish lead, beginning with Hippolytus (c. 200) and then Origen. The real focus of the dispute between Jews and Christians in the postapostolic period was not, indeed, on whether the Song of Songs should be read as an allegory (this was widely agreed) but on the true reference of the allegory. Whereas Jews predominantly read the book as concerning God and Israel, Christians naturally read it as concerning God or Christ, on the one hand, and the church or the individual Christian, on the other. Bernard of Clairvaux (twelfth century), for example, wrote voluminously on this book as a text concerning the Word of God and the human soul in a love relationship.
The medieval period saw the progressive development of Christian allegorical reading, with more and more of its details interpreted as referring to some aspect of the God-human relationship. The period since the Reformation has seen progressive disillusionment with the approach in its traditional Jewish and Christian forms as readers first began to ask whether much of the allegorization of the detail was not fanciful and then began to doubt whether ancient nervousness about the literal reading was justified. The notion that the text truly speaks of something other than what is apparent on the surface level survives, however, in approaches that understand this song as about, among other things, sacred marriage and ancient fertility rites.7 While it is not to be questioned that various connections (unsurprisingly) exist between the Song of Songs and its broader ancient Near Eastern environment, some of the work done in this area is no more plausible than the most extreme of the medieval efforts at reading behind the text to find out what is “really” there.8
If literal and allegorical readings of the Song of Songs have thus been in evidence throughout the history of interpretation, the question that arises and must be addressed here in the first instance is this: Which manner of interpretation is most likely to correspond to the manner of interpretation intended by the original author9 of the book? This is an extraordinarily difficult question to answer. It is somewhat difficult to believe that an ancient Hebrew author primarily intent on speaking of a relationship between God and God’s people would have composed the Song of Songs in precisely the way that he or she did, with such heavy emphasis on the erotic aspects of love and particular passages such as 8:5b–7, where the woman (i.e., on this reading, the people of God) takes the initiative in “rousing” the man’s (i.e., God’s) love. We cannot rule out, of course, the possibility that allegory is primarily intended, especially since the man-woman relationship is alluded to elsewhere in the Old Testament as analogical to the divine-human relationship (e.g., Ezek. 16). Yet the apparent surplus of language (much of which is never persuasively accounted for by allegorical interpreters) is surprising if this is the case, and certainly nothing else in the Old Testament really prepares us for such an explicitly sexual text about God’s relationship to his people—not even Ezekiel 16. One possible way in which to account for this “surplus” is to hypothesize that the person responsible for the book borrowed from elsewhere either preexisting poems, or at least an existing poetic tradition, with a view to using this already existing material (originally concerning human love) to speak of the divine-human relationship. One cannot discount the possibility, even if we have no direct evidence that this is what actually happened.
If one hesitates in affirming that allegory was the primary intention of the author, however, then at least one must say this: It is impossible to rule out allegory (or at least a second and deeper sense of the text) as one aspect of the text’s intentionality. It is here that modern interpreters, in their understandable reaction against the claim that the text is only allegory and especially against implausible allegorization at the level of the text’s details, have tended to err. They have assumed that if we once demonstrate the unlikelihood that the text was originally meant primarily as allegory, and if we have demonstrated the absurdity of many of the detailed allegorizations that have been offered historically, we have also thereby dismissed allegorization completely as an aspect of the author’s likely intentions.
Authors need not have only one aim in writing or only one intention in the words they use. Especially when we consider the language used elsewhere in the Old Testament of the God-human relationship, it becomes clear that we cannot rule out the possibility that allegory was at least partly in the mind of the author of this song. If Israel is elsewhere a bride or a vineyard (Isa. 5:1–7; Hos. 1–3); if the whole Bible story begins with a picture of intimacy in a garden, between God and humans and between human and human (Gen. 1–2); and if the individual soul can be said to desire God in much the way that a lovesick lover desires an absent beloved (e.g., Ps. 42:1–2); then it becomes difficult when reading the Song of Songs entirely to dissociate what is said of human love from what might be implied in such speech about divine-human love.
Nor is it clear, once we have remembered these other texts and have recalled in addition the close connection that is generally made throughout the Bible between our relationship with God and our relationships with each other, why we should feel compelled to make any attempt at dissociation. Why can the text not be assumed in its original intention to be both about human love and about divine-human love? Why we should believe that we have to choose, in assessing the original intention of the author of this book, between literal and allegorical interpretation?
It is fairly clear why Christians of earlier times felt that they had to choose, for they lived in a culture that made it difficult for them to recognize a song about human love and sexual intimacy as being at the same time a spiritual song. Whether we think of the environment of the earliest Christians within a Roman empire so heavily influenced by Greek thought, or of the later Christians who inhabited the Holy Roman Empire and the Europe of the Renaissance, both of which were powerfully shaped by the earlier Greco-Roman culture, we are thinking of cultures that had difficulty in accepting that what was natural could also in the end be good.
This was particularly true of sexual expression, which was routinely associated with the unholy and the impure; conversely, holiness and purity were associated with sexual renunciation. The Christianity that was birthed in a Greco-Roman culture and was marked by the binding together of celibacy and spirituality proved sadly unable to offer any sustained critique of this culture; in due course, in fact, Christianity came to offer this renunciation of the sexual powerful legitimization, as a heavily ascetic Christianity became the official religion of early and medieval Europe. Such a Christian tradition, dominated by celibate theologians who posited a great gulf between the earthly and the heavenly, the fleshly and the spiritual, and many of whom were clearly frightened by sexuality, was bound to see in the literal reading of this song a profound threat to the whole order of things—a text that could not be reconciled to the dominant ideology.
Allegorization became the powerful means of ensuring that earth and heaven, flesh and spirit, remained separated by some distance and that the terrors of the sexual nature were kept at bay. Origen himself provides us with some of the best insights into the worldview that we are describing here—the man who so resolutely insisted that the prerequisite to acquiring spiritual love was the despising of all bodily things and who allegedly castrated himself in order to deal decisively (as he presumably thought) with his sexual desires.
Thus, we can understand why Christians of earlier times believed that they had to choose between literal and allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs, but we can equally understand just how seriously misguided they were in this belief. In retrospect it is obvious, in fact, how much more they were influenced by Plato’s opposition of the earthly/physical and the heavenly/spiritual and by gnostic thinking, which understood the body as a prison from which the soul must escape, than they were by biblical thinking about the nature of the human being and of human sexuality, as well as biblical teaching on creation and redemption.
The Bible teaches us of a creation that is good and of a sexuality that is a hallowed aspect of what is good (Gen. 1). It knows that sexuality is touched by sin and damaged, as are all aspects of creation; but redemption, biblically, is not about escape from createdness. It is about the restoration of the image of God in human beings (as well as the renewal of all creation); such restoration involves, at least on this side of eternity, the restoration of sexuality and sexual expression as it should be under God. Biblical thinking about redemption thus involves no great dichotomy between creation and redemption or between body and soul. It does not know of any future life with God, in fact, that does not entail the resurrection of the body.
There is no justification, then, for thinking that Christian living must necessarily be ascetic living or that ascetic living is somehow more spiritual than living that is not ascetic. God made everything good—and it remains good, even though marred by sin. Sexual expression remains good in itself, even though touched by sin (whether committed by us or upon us). It is indeed one of the wonderful things about the biblical perspective on the world that it honors what is ordinary and human, in itself and for its own sake. The Christian life is the ordinary human life, redeemed and sanctified in all its ordinariness and lived out before the God who created it.10 The fact that individual Christians or even whole sections of the church have failed, tragically, to grasp this truth historically and down to the present, and have been particularly confused about sex, does not alter its status as biblical truth.
We do not need to choose between literal and allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs, as earlier generations of Christian readers felt they had to. There is no good reason to see erotic, earthly love as problematic either in itself or in its ability to speak by analogy of the divine-human relationship. Even if we had a problem here, of course, we should still have to ask whether we had good grounds for thinking that the original author found any difficulty in this area—and there is in truth no good reason to think that he or she did.
All this is not to claim that we have somehow proved what the original intentions of the author really were—certainty on that point is beyond us. Yet certainty is not necessary for interpretation to proceed. Our sections headed Original Meaning in the commentary that follows will simply adopt a fairly indeterminate, descriptive approach to the text, avoiding any question of what it is that the text is “referring” to outside of the drama of the male-female relationship that is being enacted within the text itself. We will address questions of reference in the Bridging Contexts and Contemporary Significance sections that ensue, exploring in these sections the extent to which we might profitably understand the text as speaking of our relationship with other human beings and the extent to which we might profitably understand it as speaking of our relationship with God.
I have used the term drama in the preceding paragraph to describe the Song of Songs, and this term itself requires some explanation and justification. I use it first of all to claim that there is no reason to think of this book as a haphazard collection of shorter poems cast together simply because of their common theme of love. There is every indication, rather, that it is intended to cohere as a unity at a deeper level (even though its unity is not a straightforward one). The heading to the work itself invites us to read it in this way (it is “the song,” in the singular), and our ability to accept this invitation becomes all the greater as we proceed in our reading and find frequent repetition of theme and language and consistent characterization throughout the book.
It may well be the case (for all we know) that the author of the book used preexisting poetic material in composing it, but if so, then he or she gives every impression of having used it carefully and thoughtfully to produce a unified work. The commentary that follows tries to demonstrate the ways in which this is so.11 I do not use the term drama necessarily to imply that the text was written for enactment by actors, whether in the royal court or in worship. We do not know anything, in fact, about its earliest reading and use.12 I use it, rather, because the Song of Songs has a clearly dramatic form—something recognized already by Origen in the third century and by the Greek translators of Codex Sinaiticus (fourth century) and Codex Alexandrinus (fifth century), who added marginal notes to the text intended to indicate the speakers and the persons addressed.
The Hebrew text of the Song of Songs does not explicitly help us in these ways, although it is usually clear to one who reads the Hebrew text cumulatively from beginning to end which of its various characters or groups of characters is speaking at any given point. We need only pay careful attention to such phenomena as changes of gender in the verbal and noun suffixes in the book. The main characters are a male and a female speaker,13 who address each other employing the language of love and intimacy. They have a supporting cast of female and male companions, to whom reference is sometimes made (e.g., 1:7) and speech is sometimes directed (e.g., 2:7), and who even on occasion themselves speak (e.g., 5:9; 6:1).
The question as to whether Solomon himself is a member of the supporting cast or is to be identified as the male speaker has been a vexing question in the history of the interpretation of this book. The mainstream of interpretation throughout the ages, where it has paused to consider the human aspects of the drama, has followed Origen’s view that we find only two main characters in it—King Solomon and his bride. A second line of interpretation derives ultimately from the medieval Spanish exegete Ibn Ezra, who distinguished the “king” from the “shepherd,” suggesting that there were therefore two main male characters to be found. This led in time to an interpretation of the song that understood Solomon as a dark force in the drama, threatening the love relationship between the woman and her shepherd-lover.14
The commentary that follows adopts this second understanding of the book. The king, who only ever appears explicitly in the third person, is understood as a third party to the couple who are in dialogue with each other and express their love for each other. It is to my mind particularly clear in 3:6–11 and 8:10–12 that Solomon is not viewed at all positively, in contrast to the woman’s lover. He is merely a famous collector of women, of whom the woman in the Song of Songs is certainly one, but he has no true relationship with her. Her heart (and body) is given over wholly to another.
I understand the movement of the drama in the Song of Songs, therefore, in the following way. The woman, already a member of the king’s harem, expresses her continuing love for her lover (and, implicitly, her disdain for the king), and her lover reciprocates (chs. 1–2). The contrast between king and lover is forcibly underlined in chapter 3, where both the woman’s determination to overcome threats to her relationship with the man and her negative view of the royal bed and its owner are clear. Both the threats to and the depths of the relationship are in evidence in chapters 4–5, where the language and the imagery speak of a committed, marital-like relationship between the man and the woman. Chapters 6–7 portray for us in yet further graphic detail the nature of this relationship. Chapter 8 provides us with a strong closing statement of the woman’s passion for the man and her resistance to those other males who claim possession of her, whether her brothers or the king. It is a stirring tale of fidelity to first love in the face of power, coercion, and all the temptations of the royal court.
In summary, what we appear to have in the Song of Songs is a dramatic composition of uncertain date and authorship that sets before us for our consideration two different kinds of male-female relationship. The first, which occupies most of the attention of this song, is that manner of relationship in which a woman and a man enter freely into love and sexual intimacy, binding themselves in lasting commitment to each other and giving themselves to each other, physically and emotionally, in joyful abandonment that knows no reservation or shame. The second kind of relationship, which lurks in the background of the Song of Songs and occasionally has the spotlight shone on it, places the male in a dominant and powerful position over the female, such that she does not enter the relationship by choice but is only the pawn in a male game that has to do with legal contracts, money, and the collection of objects of pleasure.
It is the first kind of relationship that the Song of Songs exalts—something underlined by the fact that the woman does most of the speaking in it and takes by far the greater part of the initiative in her relationship with the man. It is the second kind of relationship, however, in which many women have found themselves historically and down to the present day and which the Bible itself has often been used to legitimate as God-ordained. The Song of Songs, whether we understand it literally or allegorically, undermines this hierarchical view of reality, for a God who woos his people and takes their freedom seriously cannot be invoked in support of male power over and coercion of women. Human beings who are made, both male and female, in the image of such a God must not understand God’s intentions for their relationships in terms of power and coercion.
This book reminds us, through its story of love portrayed in the imagery of fertile gardens and vineyards, of a time before sin touched all relationships in the universe, when men and women were “naked, and . . . felt no shame” before God and before each other (Gen. 2:25). It recalls the creation of male and female in partnership to multiply and to govern the earth (1:26–28), their very beings as “man” (ʾiš) and “woman” (ʾišša) corresponding to and complementing each other. In reminding us of all this, it invites us to reach for a vision of the male-female relationship that transcends what has been the all-too-common reality of human experience in general as it is described in Genesis 3:16 (“he will rule over you”) and which is inevitably also the all-too-common experience of God’s people both in the Bible and in subsequent history.
The Song of Songs, in this sense, presents us with a story of love redeemed, which contrasts with the more common human tale of love gone awry.15 In presenting us with this story, it calls us to shape our own story in its light. The extent to which men in particular have been unwilling to do this, historically, is itself reflected in their reluctance to see the Song of Songs as anything other than a problematic book at the literal level, for without the literal sense of the text as an anchor, it has always been too easy for men to sail the good ship allegory wherever they wished, avoiding those things in the ocean that they did not wish to comprehend.
A text that otherwise might have challenged a typical male way of living through helping men throughout history to see how resolutely this song undermines all culture in which men relate to women as Solomon and the brothers relate to the heroine of our drama was happily (for them) neutered and rendered impotent. To them, it spoke instead of the love of God in a way that did not require them too greatly to alter their perception of what it meant to love the female neighbor as themselves.
The Song of Songs in the Contemporary Context
IF IT CAN ALREADY be questioned at the level of original intentionality whether we should seek to drive a wedge between literal and allegorical readings of the Song of Songs, then it is certainly true that when we set the Song of Songs within its broader canonical context in the Christian Bible we will find still less reason to do so, for the Bible as a whole holds in closest analogical connection the love that exists between God and humans and between humans and humans. Thus John tells his readers: “Anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20). The apostle Paul connects the marriage relationship in particular to Christ’s relationship with the church, in a famous passage in Ephesians 5:22–33:
Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church—for we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.
The human relationship, including its obviously sexual aspects, is analogous to the divine-human relationship as Christ is united with the church. There can be no question but that Christian readers of the Song of Songs thus have canonical warrant for reading it both at the literal and at the allegorical level, drawing conclusions from it for both faith and life that touch on the entirety of who we are as people created and redeemed by God. What are the most important of these conclusions?
As to human relationships, we should begin by frankly acknowledging that we inhabit a world in which relationships between men and women are still significantly distorted, usually to the woman’s disadvantage and often to her hurt. This reality manifests itself in many different ways and in many different cultural and religious contexts. Women are still widely regarded in some of these contexts as being the property of males, to be bought and sold as the males desire. They are valued, not as equal persons, but for their usefulness as servants, childbearers, or sexual playthings.
Where they are theoretically equal with males under the laws of a country (as they have generally become in Western countries in relatively recent times), they are nevertheless often treated unequally in practice (e.g., in the financial rewards they receive for work). In the privacy of the home or in the darkness of the streets they are often still regarded as inferior to men and derivative of them and are subject to emotional and physical abuse and exploitation as male power and coercion are brought to bear on them there.
In some countries of the world, such power and coercion have no need even to hide away indoors or in darkness, for coercion, violence, and abuse are tolerated or even approved by society at large. As we consider the reality of this distorted world, it is difficult not to conclude that there is among men a widespread fear of and contempt for women and even a hatred of them, which leads males to attempt to suppress females even while they find that they deeply desire their company, affection, and sexual favor. Many women appear to hold an equally ambiguous attitude toward men, although the damage that consequently ensues for men is minimal in comparison to the damage that men inflict on women, mainly as a result of the unequal nature of the power that is available to each gender.
Bound up with all this dysfunctionality of relationship in the modern (as in the ancient) world is sexual activity. Sexual activity is a blessing from God that is supposed to symbolize in a profound way self-giving in the male-female relationship. It has come instead to symbolize all that is cursed about that relationship. It is commonly bought and sold as a commodity and is practiced as an expression of power, manipulation, and control. Where it is not directly expressive of these realities, it has come to be widely viewed as dirty on the one hand and as quasi-holy on the other—the leisure activity of the “liberated” who are incapable of commitment and who seek in serial sexual relationships some meaning and significance in the midst of the chaos and meaninglessness that characterize their lives.
All of this is a horrendous reality, which only seems “normal” because we have become so accustomed to it. Yet the Christian church has itself found difficulty in being entirely countercultural with respect to male-female relationships throughout its history. It continues to struggle with this challenge as it addresses the modern culture, even though it knows in one part of its brain that there is neither male nor female in Christ (Gal. 3:28).
Modern Christian pastors might hesitate to assert the rights of a husband to beat his wife, as medieval canon law allowed. If they live in Britain, for example, they might well be reluctant to advocate a return to an earlier historical period in which British women had no legal status of their own, independent of their husbands, had no say in the political process, and had little independent access to economic power. To that extent the gospel has made progress in the transformation of society.
Yet significant sections of the church, particularly those that have resisted social change in the past on the grounds that Bible and long Christian practice speak against such change (e.g., those who opposed the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century), continue to behave as if the calling of the church is to legitimate the fallen world rather than to usher in the kingdom of God. They bring theology and the Bible to bear on social issues only insofar as they tend to provide support for the status quo or for some previous status quo to which they wish society at large to return. For Christian men are still men, and the social world as it has generally been constituted historically suits at least some men very well and certainly favors them over women.
It is still possible to find men who are confessing Christians, therefore, who regard women as being in essence the property of males and who value their wives not as sisters and equals in Christ, but as servants, childbearers, or sexual playthings in respect of whom they have conjugal “rights.” It is not uncommon, still, to find churches structured as its men would prefer (but cannot realistically demand) that society should be structured, with the women in an entirely dependent and subordinate position vis-à-vis the men. This is not infrequently connected with convictions about female inferiority that remain deeply rooted in the heart even though they cannot easily any longer be confessed with the mouth in a politically correct modern society.
That fear of and contempt for women, and even a hatred of them, which were mentioned above, have not entirely been exorcised from male Christian hearts, it seems. The responses of Christian women vary from outright rejection of this attempt to define them only in reference to men, through a measured tolerance of a social reality from which they cannot in any case easily escape (albeit a tolerance often combined with a quiet but seething resentment), to a ready and submissive acceptance of a world that is to them God-ordained and may be the only world that they have ever known.
Bound up with all this dysfunctionality of relationship in the church, as in society at large, is sexual activity. A truly countercultural church would at this point confront with balanced biblical teaching on sexual expression both the modern society that idolizes it and the Christian tradition that essentially demonizes it and would seek to proclaim and to live the truth that God made the world as a good place and redeemed this same world in Christ. The reality is all too often different. The ancient belief (or even just the feeling) that sex is perhaps unclean and certainly not entirely spiritual is still to be found among Christian men and women at the dawn of a new millennium, leading to a view of the Christian life that is instinctually ascetic.
Such people simply do not believe, deep in their hearts, that Christ took on our humanity so as to redeem it in every aspect and to enable us as we are justified and sanctified in Christ to live it out as God intends. They cannot see that the gospel is about expression of our humanity. They have come instead to think of it as being about repression of significant aspects of our humanity. The collateral damage that the attempt to use Christian faith to repress important aspects of our humanity causes, however, is huge, for if faith and humanness are set in conflict with each other, sooner or later a human being will find the attempt to manage the conflict intolerable and will choose humanness.
Perhaps this is one reason why modern preaching about the Christian life continues to be so frequently and spectacularly undermined by the actual living of Christians, particularly in the matter of sexual activity, both in secret and then later (and inevitably) as it becomes public. They have embraced a false view of the Christian life that has at its heart repression, whether of the self or of others. Unable to live this life consistently, but unable to say so publicly, they develop a secret life in which repression of the self is no longer necessary. In due course their double life is exposed, with discredit then falling on their message and discouragement on those who previously heard it and believed it.
Along the way such dysfunctional Christians have been found to be preaching control to others but exercising little over themselves. Their need for power and authoritarian control over other people (including their own wives) has been found, in fact, to coincide far too directly with their need for a similar degree of sexual control over and manipulation of others—whether through pornography, prostitution, or other avenues open to fractured souls who are at peace neither with their whole selves in Christ nor with the idea that maleness by no means represents the whole of humanness.
In the midst of all the distortions of our lives respecting our relationships with each other, male and female, God speaks his Word to us in the Song of Songs, inviting us to reason with him and to change our thinking and our living so that it reflects what is true and good. He calls into question any assumptions we may have (whether we are men or women) about the status of women in a male-dominated world, making clear to us that a woman, as much as a man, should be able freely to make choices about her life. Insisting that male-female relationships are two-way situations in which each party initiates and responds, God critiques the view that a good woman is one who is always and only passive and receptive in respect of the initiating male. He clarifies for us that sexual intercourse and all that precedes and follows it in the making of love are good things and that frank speech about such matters is simply part of this love-making and nothing to be ashamed of.
Both word and action, whether they come from male or female, are blessed by God. He makes it impossible for us, if we are intent on listening to and registering his words, to understand the spiritual life as something distinct from our ordinary human life. He insists, through the providential presence of the Song of Songs in the Christian canon, that the Christian life is the human life, in all its aspects, redeemed and lived out before God and neighbor. He insists, thereby, that however much the sexual excesses of the culture around us disenchant, anger, and sicken us, we cannot respond to this culture with a gnostic escapism that pretends that Christian redemption is about leaving the body behind and floating off with our soul into a mystical never-never land. The journey is impossible, for there is no gnostic dichotomy between soul and body, as that great nontheologian Oscar Wilde saw (although typically overstating his objection): “Those who see any difference between soul and body have neither.”16
The only appropriate Christian response to the culture is to go on with our initial vocation—to live out fully the life God has given us, offering it all to him in joyous celebration of his goodness to us. It is only while walking such a path that we will be able to speak persuasively to the culture about what God’s kingdom means in respect of our entire lives.
Christians are called, therefore, to proclaim a resounding “yes” to sexual expression, in the context of a resounding “yes” to God. It is in this proclamation, rather than in our repression of humanness and in our preaching of negative rules, that the goodness of God will be seen by others. One of the sad features of church history is that Christians have sometimes managed all too successfully to promote the agenda of the serpent in the Garden of Eden rather than to advertise the kingdom of God. That is, we have presented God to the world, whether consciously or not, as a God of unreasonable prohibition (Gen. 3:1) rather than as a God who blesses us with freedom (2:16).
In truth, however, the negatives of the Christian life generally only make sense in the context of the positives; this is clearly true also in respect of biblical negatives concerning sexuality. Christians stand against certain forms of sexual activity because of what we think sexual activity is for. It is for the building of a lifelong, committed, and intimate relationship between one man and one woman, in which complete self-giving is possible. It is not for casual or time-limited relationships, in which people often engage in modern Western culture in particular and which are often focused around entirely selfish needs and desires (even if two sets of selfish needs and desires are temporarily met in the encounter). Nor is it designed for the expression of power and control by one party in respect of another or for the expression of intimacy between people of the same gender.
Sexual activity at the wrong time and with the wrong persons is, in fact—as the Song of Songs itself recognizes—destructive rather than good. The Christian “yes” to sex, as joyous as it should be, is thus always a “yes” in a context, defined by the good God who made all things and knows what is best for his creatures. The Song of Songs is thus seen to be a critique not only of the church but also of the culture, which has invested sexual acts in themselves and outside of any God-ordained context with a mystique and a religious aura that defies rational explanation. If the fact that we have at least one biblical book devoted explicitly to love and sex speaks a rebuke to Christians who find no place for love and sex in their Christian thinking and living, then by the same token the fact that we have only one biblical book devoted explicitly to love and sex speaks a rebuke to those who have invested love and sex with such ultimate significance. Repression and license are simply two sides of the same nonbiblical coin.
This last point leads directly on to a brief reflection on the Song of Songs as a book that can be read, in the context of the Christian canon, as concerning not only the male-female relationship but also the divine-human relationship. The very point about all created things, when they are divorced from God, is that they can all too easily become idolatrous. They can become “gods” of their own—things we worship and strive after, investing ultimate meaning and significance in them.
There can be no question but that the male-female relationship, particularly in its sexual aspects, has become the focus of idolatrous worship for many people in the modern (as it was for many in the ancient) world. It is widely believed, in the face of much evidence to the contrary, that the key to all existence is meeting “the right person,” who will then be able to satisfy all one’s needs and desires, especially in the area of sex. The catastrophic consequences in terms of human happiness and contentment that have followed especially in the Western world from this elevation of the “ideal male” or “ideal female” to the status of a god are plain to see, not least in the decision of subsequent generations of young people not even to commence the search but simply to “have a good time” enjoying the mere experience of sex with as many semianonymous partners as the brief span of youth will allow. One is reminded of C. S. Lewis’s wise words about what happens to human beings when they invest too much in any created thing and fail to understand that it cannot, because it is created, be a god:
The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune which we have not heard, news from a country we have not visited.17
It is, in the end, “longing” that drives the modern obsession with sex—a longing for intimacy and fulfillment that is far too deep and fundamental to be met by any other human creature and which can only destroy that creature and its lover if the obsession is not faced and understood. For it is a longing that speaks to us of who we are—people made in the image of God and designed to live in fellowship with him. Human love, including erotic love, always points beyond ourselves to the Love that undergirds all of reality and in whose Presence alone all longing can be satisfied. It is a sacred thing, but it points always not to itself, but to the Sacred that lies beyond it.
That is why the Song of Songs can speak to us today, in describing love of man for woman and of woman for man, of the love of God for us all and of the appropriate human response in love toward God. That is why, in the commentary that follows, we will reflect not only on what this song has to say about male-female relationships but also about the God-human relationship in the contemporary world. To speak of one without the other would be, inevitably, to speak falsely and unhelpfully.
Yet we will resist the temptation to which many medieval commentators succumbed when they pressed the many details of the Song of Songs into the service of allegorical reading. It is, for example, an unconvincing reading of 1:13, entirely unconnected to any literal sense, that takes the woman’s breasts to be the Old and New Testaments, and the lover who lies between them to be Christ. It is possible, however, to see, in the intimacy of this picture of human love and those others that chapter 1 gives us, the intimacy that should exist between God and the church, which holds God close to the heart. It is not necessary, for this song to speak truly of the divine-human relationship as well as of human relationships, that its every word should be found to have an allegorical as well as a literal sense.
We shall pursue a broadly based “allegorical” approach, therefore, rather than a narrowly focused one. Our approach might better be described as parabolic rather than as allegorical, following the lead of R. E. Murphy:
The individual verses are not to be taken singly. From this point of view, the Canticle can be compared to the Parable of the Prodigal Son. We accept, for example, that here Almighty God is symbolized under the figure of the father; but we do not apply each pertinent verse to Him. Rather, the whole story is an imaginative description whose sole purpose is to convey the mercy and forgiveness of God. Similarly, the purpose of the Canticle is to express the beauty and fidelity which will characterize the People of God in its Messianic betrothal. The individual scenes are described solely to highlight this aspect.18
It is in my view not the sole purpose of the Song of Songs to speak of God and the people of God (and Murphy indicates more clearly elsewhere in his writings that he, too, does not believe this). Yet I agree with Murphy’s emphasis on the whole in distinction to the details, insofar as the Song does speak of God and his people. It is with this in mind that I will be asking as we read through the book what this drama about good human relationships and bad ones has to say about the love of God for the church, and about the true love of the church for God in the midst of the temptations that face her in the world. For the struggle of the woman for fidelity to her lover when confronted with the king does have something to say about this larger struggle of God’s people for fidelity to him while being wooed by others—a struggle for faithfulness to their first Love that has continued, the Bible suggests, from ancient history and down to the present day. The balance for which I am striving here is nicely captured by E. J. Young:
The Song does celebrate the dignity and purity of human love . . . it reminds us, in particularly beautiful fashion, how pure and noble true love is. This, however, does not exhaust the purpose of the book. Not only does it speak of the purity of human love, but, by its very inclusion in the Canon, it reminds us of a love that is purer than our own.19