1All night long on my bed
I looked for the one my heart loves;
I looked for him but did not find him.
2I will get up now and go about the city,
through its streets and squares;
I will search for the one my heart loves.
So I looked for him but did not find him.
3The watchmen found me
as they made their rounds in the city.
“Have you seen the one my heart loves?”
4Scarcely had I passed them
when I found the one my heart loves.
I held him and would not let him go
till I had brought him to my mother’s house,
to the room of the one who conceived me.
5Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you
by the gazelles and by the does of the field:
Do not arouse or awaken love
until it so desires.
6Who is this coming up from the desert
like a column of smoke,
perfumed with myrrh and incense
made from all the spices of the merchant?
7Look! It is Solomon’s carriage,
escorted by sixty warriors,
the noblest of Israel,
8all of them wearing the sword,
all experienced in battle,
each with his sword at his side,
prepared for the terrors of the night.
9King Solomon made for himself the carriage;
he made it of wood from Lebanon.
10Its posts he made of silver,
its base of gold.
Its seat was upholstered with purple,
its interior lovingly inlaid
by the daughters of Jerusalem.
11Come out, you daughters of Zion,
and look at King Solomon wearing the crown,
the crown with which his mother crowned him
on the day of his wedding,
the day his heart rejoiced.
Original Meaning
IF SONG OF Songs 1–2 are characterized by intimate and carefree dialogue between the two lovers, even where there is a physical separation between them that must be (and is) overcome, chapter 3 has a very different character. The longing of the woman for the man that is expressed in the 3:1–4 is communicated not to the man himself, who is entirely absent and “lost,” but to unannounced bystanders (the daughters of Jerusalem perhaps, mentioned in v. 5, and through them the readers of the chapter). Moreover, there is a much more anxious tone to the speech, which concerns a frantic search. Verses 6–11 do not explicitly concern the man and the woman at all. They apparently deal with (as translated by NIV, but see further below) a procession associated with King Solomon. The emphasis of this passage falls on possessions rather than on people and their relationships, on opulence rather than simplicity, and (I will argue) on coercion rather than intimacy. Observation is invited and indeed commended (v. 11) rather than engagement—in line with the third-party and somewhat distanced references to the king in chapter 1.
The major interpretative question concerns the precise relationship between the two parts of the chapter, which both tell us of things that happen during the night (note the unusual Heb. plural ballelot in vv. 1, 8), involving a bed (Heb. miškab in v. 1 and miṭṭa in v. 7, NIV “carriage”), and which both place a “mother” in a prominent position (ʾem, vv. 4, 11).
The first bed is the one on which the woman is lying as the chapter opens and on which she seeks “the one my heart loves” (v. 1)—a phrase repeated in verses 2, 3, and 4 (such repetition communicates the intensity of the longing). The phrasing implies that we are reading of a dream (cf. also 5:2–8; Dan. 2:28–29). Thus, 3:2 is intended not so much to tell us what happens next (as the NIV’s “I will get up now” implies) as to describe what the woman says to herself and does during the dream. That is, she does not look for the man while in the bed, only later attempting the different strategy of looking for him in the city. She looks for the man only while in the bed, saying to herself in her dream, “Let me arise . . . search” (v. 2).
The identical report of failure at the end of each of verses 1 and 2 refers to the same dreamt search; the first part of verse 2 simply expands on the first part of verse 1. The city in which the search takes place is not identified, and it is perhaps not sensible to pursue this question, given that we are in dreamland. But if a location is sought, then Jerusalem is the obvious candidate.
The watchmen who “find” her (mṣʾ, v. 3) as they “make their rounds” (sbb) of the city—in the midst of her own frantic “rounds” of the city (sbb, v. 2; NIV “go about the city”) and of her failure to “find” (mṣʾ, vv. 1, 2) her beloved—are likewise the shadowy figures of dreams. They neither challenge the woman about her unusual presence at nighttime in the city (cf. 5:7), nor do they answer her question. It is not clear how they would have known the answer to the question, given that the lover has hitherto been identified as someone from “outside” and has apparently only met his beloved there (chs. 1–2). The shadows of the night simply flit past, as our desperate female moves through the streets; suddenly, without details provided, she finds her man (v. 4).
Her anxiety is communicated in what happens next. She grasps hold of him (ʾḥz) and refuses to let him go (rph, “to leave alone, forsake”), escorting him to her mother’s house and, within the home, to her mother’s bedroom (ḥeder, as in Song 1:4). Now they are reunited in intimacy once again. Whether the dream bed is the same as the real bed of 3:1 is not made clear, but the previous reference to the king’s chambers in 1:4 and the following material concerning the royal bed in 3:6–11 suggest not. She does not in reality live with her mother any longer. The maternal home (which is presumably real enough in itself, 8:1–2) is simply symbolic in the dream-world of the security and safety for which the woman yearns—the security and safety of much younger days.
Thus, the mother embraces both her daughter and her lover and hides them away in her inner chamber, with all its associations with the womb (“the room of the one who conceived me,” v. 4). A frightening separation has been overcome, and the lovers lie together under parental protection and blessing. The terrifying power of love has once again been demonstrated, however—a love that can invade even the realm of the unconscious and bring with it unsettling thoughts. It is no surprise that the warning that follows the embrace in 2:6–7 and 8:3–4 should therefore also be found following the implied embrace in 3:5. The daughters of Jerusalem, we hear, should be wary of stirring up love until the time is right. It is a power far beyond their control, which drives one to dream crazy dreams, if not to enact them.
Turning now to the adjacent passage in 3:6–11, we need to acknowledge first of all that many commentators have not found any connection between these verses and verses 1–5. Roland Murphy presents the common view (although he does not, like some, believe that the name “Solomon” is literally meant of the ancient Judean king): “These verses describe a procession of ‘Solomon,’ which has nothing to do with the episode of the woman’s search in vv 1–5.”1
Yet it is far from clear that there is any real procession—usually thought of as a wedding procession (3:11)—in this passage, and once the idea of the wedding procession is banished from the mind and we resist all the questionable interpretations of individual verses that follow on from this false premise, the two parts of chapter 3 have more in common than one might at first think. For the text does not concern, as some commentators seriously seem to believe, the pilgrimage of a princess across the desert from Egypt (or some other distant land) in a heavily defended and expensive sedan chair. It concerns the heavily defended bed of the wealthy Solomon, who has all things at his disposal (including women) and possesses no neurotic fear of losing a unique beloved (in contrast to 3:1–4), yet knows nothing of either intimacy or fulfillment.
We begin with the ʾappiryon that Solomon made (v. 9), which, in spite of the highly misleading definite article in the NIV (“the carriage”), is not to be presumed in advance to be identical with the “carriage” (representing a different Heb. word, miṭṭa) of verse 7. That identity remains to be seen.
The word ʾappiryon is unique in the Old Testament and is problematic as to its precise derivation.2 But the description of it that follows in verses 9–10 clearly suggests a stationary structure (or part of one) rather than a portable structure. Its “interior” or middle (toko) is said to be “paved with love” (NIV “lovingly inlaid,” v. 10). The verb rṣp does not otherwise appear in the Old Testament, but the noun riṣpa does, and it always refers to the paved floor of a temple or palace (2 Chron. 7:3; Est. 1:6; Ezek. 40:17–18). The associated noun marṣepet appears in 2 Kings 16:17 of a stone pavement in the temple in Jerusalem (cf. also riṣpa, “glowing stone,” NIV “hot coals,” in 1 Kings 19:6; Isa. 6:6). These words never appear of the inlaid interiors of movable objects, which would not in truth move far if encumbered by many stones. Therefore, even if (as I will argue below) the “paving” is metaphorical rather than literal, the associations of the word are clearly with large, permanent structures rather than smaller, movable ones.
The Heb. word ʿammud (NIV “posts,” v. 10), where it does not refer to a column of smoke, always refers to large pillars of a size and strength sufficient to support a building. It is used, for example, of the pillars in Solomon’s palace (1 Kings 7:2–6) and in Ezekiel’s temple (Ezek. 42:6), as well as of the prominent bronze pillars Jakin and Boaz that stood before the Jerusalem temple (1 Kings 7:15–22). It is also used of the pillars of the movable tabernacle (e.g., Ex. 27:10–11), but this structure was also large and could not simply be lifted up in toto and carried across the desert. The point is that the word ʿammud never refers to smaller “posts” such as those that might be found on an allegedly movable ʾappiryon. If such hypothetical posts were indeed fashioned out of silver, they would also add considerable weight to such a structure.
The same is true of the gold mentioned in verse 10, whatever the unique Hebrew noun repida (NIV “base”) refers to. The verb rpd has already appeared in 2:5 of the refreshment or support that fruit gives. It seems natural, therefore, to understand the repida as something that supports the pillars (cf. Job 17:13; 41:30, where the verb refers to something spread out on the ground) and thus as the floor or foundation/base of the structure.
As we add all this detail together, we see that the overall impression is not of a “carriage” at all, but of a large, fixed structure constructed (at least to a significant extent) of wood and having silver supporting pillars and a gold base or floor. The associations are, in fact, above all with Solomon’s major building works as described in 1 Kings 5–10, often with the use of the same verb ʿśh (“do, make”) that we find in Song 3:9 (cf. 1 Kings 6:31, 33; 7:6, 7, 51; 10:18). Two of the main building materials mentioned in 1 Kings are indeed wood from Lebanon (5:6–10; 7:1–12) and gold (6:19–22, 30–35; 10:16–21), which can even be used for flooring (6:30).
It is not surprising, then, that some commentators have understood the passage as alluding to Solomon’s throne hall (1 Kings 7:7; cf. 10:18–20 for the impressive throne), taking the “seat” of Song of Songs 3:10, upholstered with expensive purple cloth, as the throne. It is certainly possible to read the description of verses 9–10 as indicating movement, visually, from a vast hall dominated by wood, presumably including a wooden ceiling, down the great silver pillars to a golden floor, at last arriving at the centerpiece of the whole scene—the throne that sits on a specially paved area (a mosaic of other precious stones, perhaps?) in the middle of the hall (cf. the analogous setting of the great Sea in the temple on a paved area, 2 Kings 16:17). At least one of the suggested derivations for the Hebrew word ʾappiryon, that it is from the Egyptian word for “house, great house,” fits this scenario.
I agree that ʾappiryon likely refers to a room within Solomon’s palace, known as the Palace of the Forest of Lebanon because of the heavy use of wood from Lebanon in its construction. It is important to note, however, the highly metaphorical language that is used in the second part of verse 10. The centerpiece is not a regular throne (kisseʾ, as in 1 Kings 7:7; 10:18–20), but literally “a chariot” (merkab, cf. Lev. 15:9; 1 Kings 4:26); moreover, the “middle” is not paved in the normal way with stone but with love. In the context of the Song of Songs, this last reference to “love” (ʾahaba, as in Song 2:4, 5, 7), with which commentators who take a too literal approach to our chapter have had great difficulty, is much more likely to refer to acts of physical love than to the loving construction of a pavement or mosaic.
The “chariot” is, therefore, in my view best thought of as a bed, not a throne. It is the finely upholstered “vehicle” on which the king travels, as it were, on his journey of sexual delight. The “daughters of Jerusalem” (the king’s many wives and concubines, plus other women; cf. 1 Kings 11:3; Song 6:8) pave his way, as it were, by lying with the king in the center of his ʾappiryon—his bedchamber. These are the people who provide the “stones” that enable the ongoing royal journey. There is, therefore, “movement” in 3:9–10. It is the movement, however, not of a sedan chair or carriage but of the “chariot” on which the king rides to meet the dawn.
It is now clear that it is this “chariot” within the ʾappiryon, and not the ʾappiryon itself, that is the miṭṭa of verse 7. The word miṭṭa is a regular word for a bed or couch, a common item of furniture in the Old Testament found, among other places, in a bedroom (e.g., Ex. 8:3, where the miṭṭa is in Pharaoh’s ḥadar miškab, cf. Song 3:1, 4 above). Beds can sometimes be lifted up and moved, of course (e.g., 1 Sam 19:13–16), depending on their mode of construction, and miṭṭa is thus used also of a funeral bier (2 Sam. 3:31). There is no justification in the Old Testament, however, for understanding miṭṭa as referring to a “carriage” or sedan chair. It is a bed, and it only “moves” in Song of Songs 3 because it is, metaphorically, a “chariot.”
It is not inappropriate in the context of such fictive movement to refer to the sixty warriors associated with the miṭṭa as “escorting” it (NIV), so long as it is remembered that they are said in the Hebrew simply to be sabib lah, “around it” (v. 7; cf. sbb in vv. 2–3). It is the soldiers who are the most striking feature of the scene and thus attract detailed comment from our observer. They are (lit.) “warriors from the warriors of Israel” (v. 7; NIV “warriors, the noblest of Israel”)—an elite guard, similar to David’s bodyguard (e.g., 2 Sam. 23:8–39) but twice as many in number (“sixty” to David’s “Thirty,” itself a round number, cf. 2 Sam. 23:24, 39). They are all men who are (lit.) “held fast [ʾḥz] by the sword” (NIV “wearing the sword,” Song 3:8)—that is, devoted to their profession and possessed by it (cf. ʾḥz in v. 4, “I held him”)—and battle-hardened, ready for action (note the repetition of “sword” in v. 8, emphasizing military readiness). It is a heavily guarded bed, this “chariot” of Solomon. He goes into “battle” with good men around him to protect him from the “terrors of the night” (v. 8)—if it is indeed Solomon’s protection that they are concerned with.
This raises the question, however, of what this section of chapter 3 is really about. It is difficult to read it in the Hebrew, stripped of all the interpretative translation that has confused fictive with real motion, without the thought occurring that we are dealing with satire. Here is the great Solomon driving around in his pretentious chariot-bed. He is the mighty Solomon, but he needs sixty elite warriors to stand around his “chariot” and help get him safely through the night. In truth he cuts a rather pathetic figure, inhabiting a lonely world of materialism and sexual conquest—for it is conquest that is implied by the military overtones of verses 7–8. The charioteer Solomon rides roughshod over the daughters of Jerusalem, on the road paved with sexual acts. It is perhaps their terror, rather than his, that is alluded to in verse 8; that is, the guards are stationed as much to keep the women in as to keep intruders out.
It is intriguing in this light that the language of 3:6, which seems partly designed to evoke the picture of clouds of myrrh and incense rising up from the bed, is at the same time very much the language of temple and sacrifice. The NIV’s “perfumed” is qṭr in the Pual, a verb that regularly means in the Piel “to make sacrifices smoke”; “myrrh” can be an ingredient of sacred oil (e.g., Ex. 30:23), and “incense” is heavily associated with sacrifice (e.g., Lev. 2:1–2; 5:11). The Hebrew feminine noun ʾ abaqa, “spices,” is unique, but a masculine noun from the same root refers figuratively on one occasion to the clouds (“dust”) under God’s feet (Nah. 1:3). “Smoke” (ʿašan) is itself associated with the divine presence in verses like Exodus 19:18 and Isaiah 6:4. Note also Joel 2:30, which gives us the only other occurrence of timarot ʿašan, “billows of smoke.” The related timorot actually designates ornamental palm figures in the Solomonic temple (1 Kings 6:29–35; cf. also Ezekiel’s temple in Ezek. 40–41). Finally, the feminine participle ʿola (“coming up”) is identical in form to the feminine noun ʿola (“burnt offering”), and the verb ʿlh is often used of offering up a sacrifice.
A good case can thus be made for taking Song of Songs 3:6 as an allusion to the sacrificial female victim who lies on the “altar,” which is Solomon’s bed. This is the force of the question, “Who is this coming up from the desert?” with its feminine pronoun zoʾt, “this.” It is a woman who “comes up,” but she is not moving laterally across a (real) desert in the direction of Jerusalem, as has sometimes been argued. She is, rather, arising from the royal bed, in the way that smoke rises up into the sky when sacrifices are burnt. We might translate verse 6 in this way: “Who is this, ascending from the desert like a column of smoke, burned with myrrh and frankincense made from the dust of the merchant?” There is, again, “movement,” but it is on this occasion the movement of the sacrificial victim upward and not (at least in the first instance) of the royal “chariot” forward.
It is this initial “movement” in verse 6 that in fact first draws the attention of the observer to the chariot bed in verse 7. Perhaps we are meant to picture in our minds a watchman standing on a city wall, looking out intently into the desert and perceiving in the distance what looks like a column of smoke. As he watches the smoke clear, he sees for the first time (“Look!” in v. 7; hinneh, emphasizing the dramatic discovery) the detail of the “chariot.” The situation is analogous to that in 2 Kings 9:14–29, where a watchman sees troops approaching in the distance and is gradually able to make out Jehu son of Nimshi driving his chariot. It is thus possible that the “column of smoke” in the end has a double function, suggesting both sacrifice and yet also the dust cloud stirred up by the royal entourage as (in the mind’s eye) it approaches the one who is observing it.3
The characterization of the royal bed as a “desert” is, of course, a clever touch, for the desert or “steppe” in the Old Testament is uncultivated and unsettled land—an uncivilized place that is often described as harsh and infertile and is thought of as a place of danger, evil, and death (e.g., Ps. 107:33–38; Isa. 32:15; Jer. 4:26). It is the antithesis of the Garden of Eden (Isa. 51:3).4 To name the royal bed a desert is to offer an understanding of it, we presume, that is very different from Solomon’s understanding, in all his wealth and cultured sophistication. It is also to contrast most forcibly the lovemaking that happens there with the lovemaking that happens elsewhere in this song, which is so routinely associated with fertility and abundant vegetation (e.g., Song 1:13–17; 2:1–13).
If 3:6–11 is thus a dark and bitter satire concerning Solomon and his string of sacrificial female victims, then the point of the juxtaposition of 3:1–5 and 3:6–11, already suggested in the contrast just mentioned between the royal bed and others, becomes clearer. The first part of our chapter concerns an individual woman who is in love with an individual man and initiates an anxious search for him. She is certainly not an unwilling sacrificial victim in this relationship (although 1:4, 12 have implied that she has indeed been a victim of the king). She is not, in this relationship, simply a stepping stone on the man’s road toward sexual utopia. She is an initiator; she knows no terrors of the night but steps out bravely into the darkness to find her man. Her fear is not that she will be required to spend time with him but that she will not be able to spend time.
Moreover, hers is a vulnerable bed, unguarded by any military force. Her lover can leave it when he wishes. It is not surrounded (sbb) by warriors who are “grasped” (ʾḥz) by their swords. She herself must therefore “go around” (sbb) looking for her lover, risking the encounter with the guards who make their rounds of the city (sbb), and she herself must “grasp” him (ʾḥz). Yet in the midst of the vulnerability there is intimacy and joy, offered and overseen by the woman’s mother, who provides her ordinary bedchamber (with its associations of fertility) for the lovers.
There is, by contrast, no true intimacy experienced in the desert, which is the extraordinary royal bedchamber. It is not even clear that there is Solomonic joy. We do read in 3:11 that Solomon rejoiced on his wedding day when his mother, too, was involved in the proceedings, but that wedding day, for all we know, may have been far in the past. The “crown” may be meant only as a sad reminder of better days—symbolic once of joy but now only of the royal power to command and especially of the unequal terms on which he meets women in his bed.5 There is certainly no clear evidence elsewhere in 3:6–11 that a wedding is currently being celebrated, nor is there any overall emphasis throughout the passage on joy.
There is one final question that must be asked of 3:6–11: Who is speaking? The most natural conclusion is that it is still the woman who speaks—the one who refers to the king in the third person also in 1:4, 12. Perhaps we are even to think of 3:6–10 as a continuation of the dream in 3:1–4. Whether she dreams or simply conjures up a picture in her imagination, her purpose is to offer a stark contrast between her relationships with the two men already introduced in chapters 1–2, inviting the group of females around her (“daughters of Jerusalem” in v. 5; “daughters of Zion” in v. 11, probably phrased this way in order to avoid immediate repetition of “daughters of Jerusalem” in v. 10) to consider their nature. She is an eager participant in one of these relationships and a reluctant victim in the other, like the woman she observes in verse 6.
The dream of verses 1–4 thus bespeaks her fear of loss, and even a longing to return to the safety and security of her youth when she lived in her mother’s house—the natural home of the woman who is not married (cf. Gen. 24:28; Ruth 1:8). The vision of verses 6–10 bespeaks her resentment of royal possession and her longing for release from royal coercion.
THE MEMORY OF King Solomon that was kept alive in Israel after his death was far from flattering. True, he was remembered as a wise king, yet also as one whose wisdom was not always used for honorable ends (1 Kings 2:13–46, where he snatches every opportunity presented to him in order to remove threats to his sovereignty over Israel). Toward the end of his reign it had degenerated to a large extent into a self-indulgent playing of games with words (1 Kings 10:1–13).6 He was remembered as a king who was committed to worshiping and obeying God, yet as one over whom hung, from the start, questions about his integrity. His reign was one of progressive defiance of the Mosaic law concerning kingship (Deut. 17:14–20) as he accumulated horses (1 Kings 4:26, 28), then large amounts of gold (9:10–28), and finally large numbers of women (11:1–3). Eventually his accumulated individual indiscretions turned to outright apostasy (11:4–8). He was in many ways and to a large extent an ideal king ruling over an ideal kingdom; but ideal and reality were always in some degree of tension, and eventually the reality was much less than ideal.
To such an extent was this tension present that Solomon was spoken of among some of the rabbis of a much later time in the same breath as such notorious kings of Israel as Manasseh (2 Kings 21). Already in Ecclesiastes, however, the negative memory of Solomon provides the necessary backdrop against which Qohelet can enact his “Solomonic” quest for “gain” (see comments on Eccl. 1:12–2:26). There “Solomon” is presented as one who first finds wisdom limited in what it can achieve as he strives for profit from his labor, only to discover that pleasure is also a cul-de-sac. He was one who set out in a godlike way to transform his environment and thereby to facilitate his enjoyment of life by building houses, vineyards, gardens, and “parks” (pardes, as in Song 4:13) and by filling this earthly paradise with slaves, herds and flocks, hoards of treasure, and women. It did not, however, bring him any advantage. He was not able to burst through the limitations of mortality and frailty and get ahead of the game of life.
It is in the immediate context of 1 Kings 1–11 and Ecclesiastes 1:12–2:26, as they themselves direct us in particular back to the story of Creation and Fall in Genesis 1–3 and the following chapters, that we must understand Song of Songs 3. The biblical story is concerned to teach us that right at the heart of the human problem lies a refusal to live life within the confines that God has ordained for mortal beings, even though this may involve living in a paradise where joy abounds.
From the beginning human beings have chosen to transgress these God-given boundaries in search of something more, turning the life that comes to us as a gift to be enjoyed into capital that might fund our own imperial plans for exploitation and expansion. The more power we have, the more we become intent on creating our own paradise to supplant the kingdom of God—which is why it is kings like Solomon, more than any other sort of human being in the Old Testament, who are presented as grasping after godlikeness and seeking to fashion reality after their own liking. They have the resources at their disposal to make a credible attempt at equivalence with the gods.
Yet such human beings only represent in a particularly blatant way what the Bible presents to us as the characteristic set of human choices, and these choices have enormous repercussions for other people as well as for the aspirants to godhood. For if I as a human being grasp after divinity, regarding myself (rather than God) as the center of the universe, I will inevitably not view my fellow human beings any longer as equals made in the image of God toward whom I have a duty of love and respect, but rather as those whose interests must be repressed in favor of my own and whose value will be measured only in terms of their value to me.
The narrative of Genesis 1–6 shows us all too clearly how the progression works, as rebellion against God leads on to alienation between the man and the woman. They were created to be one flesh, naked but not ashamed (2:24–25), but now they are found divided, at odds with each other, concealed from each other (3:7). These humans, at least, stay together and build community, but in 4:1–16 we read of the alienation of brother from brother, with far more serious consequences (death on one side and exile on the other). Here we have the complete breakdown of community. As we move on, the alienation progresses even further outward from the center of the family circle—neighbor and neighbor divided and alienated (4:23–24) and the eventual slide into complete chaos and anarchy (6:5–7, 11–13).
Even humankind’s many achievements of culture (4:17–22) cannot disguise this slow but remorseless breakdown of community. Sophistication, we are told, is quite compatible with barbarism. That it depends on some people serving only the interests of others is already suggested in Genesis 5:28–31, where a father welcomes a new son into the world (Noah) not so much as son but more as a worker who will release him from the toil imposed on all Adam’s descendants (5:29).
It is in the context of this breakdown of community that we first hear of someone being married to more than one wife (Gen. 4:19–24); he is not a character whose other exercises in multiplication lead us to think that this development (which is not explicitly commented on) is a good one (note 4:23–24, where Lamech boasts to his two wives of the elevenfold and entirely disproportionate retribution visited on another man). It is a striking departure, in fact, from the creation ideal articulated in Genesis 2:23–24, where the marriage relationship is envisioned as involving one man and one woman. That polygamy became accepted by many Israelites does not mean that it was ever intended by God (any more than was the case with divorce; cf. Mal. 2:16; Mark 10:2–9).
It is in this context that the juxtaposition of Song of Songs 3:1–4 and 3:6–11, separated by the warning about love’s dangers in 3:5, may be more fully appreciated. The first passage sets at the center of our attention a woman’s desires, hopes, and fears, reminding us that she is not an object to be possessed or a number to be called, but a person to be encountered. In the world of her dreams, at least, she is able to pursue the man of her choice, grasp hold of him, and enjoy the deepest intimacy with him. We, as readers, are exhorted to respect that dream and not to hinder its achievement (as the watchmen do not, on this occasion, hinder its achievement).
The world of love is a dangerous one, however. Thus, in 3:6–11 we are transported to a different location to view its darker side. Here a king who has sought to build a paradise sits in a chariot bed, which is, ironically, a desert. He is the polygamist par excellence, adding ludicrous numbers of female objects to his collection of objects in general; the damage both to these women and to himself is plain. They are victims sacrificed on his altar, and he cuts a pathetic figure, surrounded by his elite troops and his luxurious fitments as he waits for his next offering to present herself. The mutuality of the first garden, so desperately sought by the woman in 3:1–4, is entirely lacking here. There remains only power and objectification.
So it has often been for women throughout history, whether biblical or later. The male lust for divinity has had terrible consequences for them, as the enormous social costs of idolatry have been passed on especially to those who have lacked independence and power. The Song of Songs provides us with a glimpse of what this felt like from the perspective of one of the victims—one of those many women collected by Solomon (and men of his kind) for his pleasure, who were to him (and men like him) merely “a breast or two,” to use the casual and offensive words of Ecclesiastes 2:8 (see comments).
If the false gods of the cosmos (whether human or not) are thus apt to regard women only as somewhat anonymous means to their own ends, that is certainly not how the living God regards women (or any creature of his). The Bible teaches us that God made us creatures who possess freedom of will. Each one of us is precious to God as an individual, whom God desires to have in a right and good relationship with him. God has no interest in relating to human beings coercively, therefore (although in the end all mortal beings must reckon with his power if they will not embrace his love). His relating to each of us is highly personal and certainly not anonymous. None of us is merely a means to his ends; we are ends in ourselves.
Thus in the book of Hosea, for example, God speaks of wooing his bride, Israel, back from her sinful ways, restoring that one-to-one relationship she previously had with him (Hos. 2:14–23). When Jesus comes among his people in the Gospels, he likewise invites, rather than forces, those to whom he speaks to pursue a relationship with him. Above all, it is clear that those who yearn for the divine Lover and pursue him will indeed find him, as the woman finds the man in Song of Songs 3:1–4 (e.g., Matt. 7:7–11).
It is striking to note how often throughout the Gospels, in fact, Jesus is found relating to women in particular in ways that would have been considered offensive by many first-century Jewish men but that testify to equivalency of the love and esteem that God has for both women and men.7 God’s relating to us should always set the largest context in which we work out our relationships with each other. Judged in that context, it is clear which of the two kinds of male-female relationships described in Song of Songs 3 we should pursue. By the same token as we pursue relationships of joyful mutuality rather than of oppression and coercion, we will testify truly about who God is.
Contemporary Significance
I was reminded again that our captors’ obsessions with God and sex were not about religion or morality. They were ciphers for their own powerlessness: an impotence that they experienced unconsciously at a deeply personal level and also in the world of politics.8
Brian Keenan was held hostage along with others for over four years by various Islamic militias in Lebanon in the late 1980s. His account of captivity is a powerful and disturbing one, not least because of its perceptiveness about what happens to human beings when relationships are marked by significant imbalances of power. The captors inhabited a world in which they not only lacked personal and political power but had also embraced a version of Islam that in one sense legitimated their powerlessness and guaranteed its ongoing nature, for it was a religion of repression. As Keenan puts it:
Their submission to God was an act of repression. Their God was a God of judgement and of vengeance and they were afraid of this God. And their own repressed fascination with sexuality hinted at none of the liberation that a religion should present to its followers. It held them in bondage. These men existed in their own kind of prison, perhaps more confining than the one that held us.9
The consequences for the hostages, however, were not insignificant, for some of the jailers dealt with both their fear of the Westerners and their frustration over their powerlessness by inflicting savage beatings on them. Keenan is frank in drawing attention to the sexual aspect also in these beatings. There is an unholy mixture of God, sex, and violence in the whole environment that the book describes.
It is intriguing, therefore, to read that in the author’s own turning to God in the midst of the horror of it all, he not only took comfort in the Psalms as a pathway to the God of love but also delighted in “the gentle eroticism of the Song of Songs.”10 He does not tell us whether he read the Song of Songs as speaking of God’s gentle love for him or simply as reminding him powerfully, in an environment of awful human dislocation, of the reality of human intimacy. Perhaps both readings would have been equally comforting. The two loves—of God and of neighbor—are bound up with each other, just as surely as a God of repression is bound up with repression of one human being by another, and first of all with the repression of the self.
Long before God is invoked as the legitimator of self-repression and the repression of others, of course, he has already been abandoned as the bringer of life and of liberation. We need to get sufficient distance from the true God to make our claims about false gods seem plausible. In that abandonment, as we have seen already, we are not only alienated from God but also distanced from each other, as the communal bonds that hold us together are progressively dissolved. We are fractured selves—both damaging other people and being damaged by them, both sinning and sinned against. We find ourselves locked into sets of relationships that at best are flawed and at worst are destructive, marked by significant imbalances of power that lead us either to be oppressors or oppressed.
It is the sad but observable truth that sex is often bound up in this troubled world with power and its abuse, and sexual expression comes to be one of the primary ways in which the fracturedness of our existence is displayed for all to see. That which was gifted to us so that we could witness through it to the Love that governs the universe has thus come to symbolize everything that has gone wrong with human relationships in the world. It is a bitter irony when God is then reintroduced through the world’s backdoor as the one who made everything just this way and who desires it to continue just as it is.
The conjunction of sex and power is not just seen in King Solomon. It is seen historically in such kings as Ivan the Terrible of Russia who, upon deciding to marry, commanded all the nobles in his realm (on pain of execution) to send their marriageable daughters to Moscow for inspection. Fifteen hundred girls turned up, and he chose one. The girl, naturally, had no choice in the matter, nor did the second wife who followed. A third (compulsory) fiancée in his later years took ill and died when informed of her fate.
The situation has been little different for most women throughout much of history, however. They have been the property of men, often traded between them without the slightest concern for any female opinion and with the shared assumption that the matter was somewhat akin to horse-trading—the money earned, the status gained, and the breeding potential being the main concerns. Outside the realm of law, including marriage law, women have been vulnerable to a deeply rooted male compulsion towards sexual conquest and domination and have frequently been the victims of naked power.
The legal position has altered in much of the modern world, although it remains the case in all sorts of other ways that sex and power are closely bound up with each other. The need that many men appear to have to dominate and to conquer women sexually is still a marked feature of our world, as is revealed by statistics on marital violence, rape, and prostitution (which, it is not well understood, is much more about the need to exert power than the need for sexual intercourse), not to mention child abuse (which itself often leads its victims into prostitution).
The fractured nature of our souls with regard to our sexuality is well illustrated in particular by the veritable explosion of interest in pornography since the Internet began to offer relatively risk-free access to it. The Datamonitor Company released a report11 in May 1999, noting that in 1998 Internet surfers paid $970 million for access to “adult content sites.” It forecast that this amount will rise by more than 25 percent a year to reach $3.12 billion in 2003. The significant thing about these figures is that people are usually unwilling to pay for access to websites. It is only where sex is involved that such massive sums of money change hands.
We are deeply troubled beings indeed. The depths of our trouble and our confusion were exposed in a 1999 movie that examines a woman’s sexual exploration and, at times, degradation, and that was by common agreement the most sexually explicit film to play in mainstream movie theaters for some time. The movie, which included graphic scenes of oral sex and anal rape, was (astonishingly) entitled Romance.
It is into this twisted world of sex and power, where the power lies mostly in the hands of men and yet to some extent also in the hands of women themselves,12 that the Song of Songs intrudes with its “gentle eroticism.” It acknowledges the all-too-common reality of our male-female relationships, distorted as they are by dark forces that rage within us and without. Yet it rejects that reality as inevitable or normative and looks beyond it to a different way of being, in which persons are taken seriously first of all as persons, whether they are men or women, and joyous mutuality of relationship is the norm. In that context, sexual expression is not a dangerous thing, but outside that context it can indeed lead on to disaster.
The Song of Songs thus lauds romance while reminding us not to be romantic about a world in which coercion and violence all too often mark human affairs. It praises sexual intimacy while reminding us that sexual activity is not itself intimacy and can express the opposite. It also summons us to repentance, however, by presenting us with an ideal we constantly fail to achieve, whether individually or societally. It is almost certain that among the readers of this commentary there will be some who are addicted to pornography, some who have visited prostitutes, and perhaps even some who have raped, inflicted sexual violence on their wives, or sexually abused a child. There will be many who have failed to love their spouses as equals before God and to give themselves wholly and unreservedly to their spouses in loving and sexual intimacy.
The dark side of sexuality affects all of us in one way or another. The Song of Songs calls us to repentance and to a determination to live differently before God and our fellow human beings. It calls us to place the erotic in the context of all that is wholesome and most deeply human and not to allow it to wreak havoc on human life by escaping its proper time and place.
The Song of Songs also calls us, however, beyond repentance to healing—to face the darkness that lies within us (and which was perhaps placed there in the first instance by others who sinned against us, sexually), and in facing it to understand it and have it in due time dispelled by God’s light. For the Song of Songs tells us, in telling us of the woman’s dream in chapter 3, that God did not make the world the way it is, nor does he ask us to pretend he did or commend us when we do so. It especially tells us not to use him as a means simply of repressing our pain or our fear or of avoiding dealing with our sense of powerlessness.
Repression will never in the end work. Our darkness will always in the end break out. It is just as well, then, that God is in truth no legitimator of self-repression and the repression of others but in reality the bringer of life and of liberation. Only as we present ourselves as we are, in all our brokenness, before this God (and before others whom we trust) and only as we seek his healing presence in our lives will we move beyond brokenness to wholeness. Only then for many of us will the words “gentle” and “erotic” come in time to appear well-suited and will the words “sex” and “power” be seen to be deeply incompatible.
This is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another. (1 John 3:11)
Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God. (John 3:19–21)