Chapter Fourteen: Be Free with Your Body

[1] Tremper Longman III, Song of Songs, The New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 184.

[2] See Marvin H. Pope, Song of Songs, The Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977), 574–579, for extensive comment. Pope goes so far as to associate the “nut” with the male and female genitalia —the “nut” referring to the testicles and an open nut to the female vulva. He cites an Italian rabbi and physician, Isaac Ben Samuel Lampronti (1679–1756), in the Talmudic encyclopedia, suggesting that the nut represents Eve’s vulva. Tremper Longman III, 184–185, accepts this as well, but it seems a stretch. The extrabiblical parallels cited come from a different era and cultural milieu.

[3] Irene and Walter Jacob, “Flora,” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. D. N. Freedman (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1992), 2:808. “The fruit, which is ripe about September, is apple-shaped, yellow-brown with a blush of red, and is surmounted by a crown-like hard calyx; on breaking the hard rind, the white or pinkish translucent fruits are seen tightly packed together inside. The juicy seeds are sometimes sweet and other times somewhat acidic and need sugar for eating. The juice expressed from the seeds is made into a syrup for flavoring drinks and in ancient days was made into wine: ‘I would cause thee to drink of spiced wine, of the juice of my pomegranate’ (Song of Songs 8:2)”; E. W. G. Masterman, “Pomegranate,” in The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, ed. J. Orr (Albany, OR: Ages Software, 1915).

[4] Franz Delitzsch, “Song of Songs,” Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, n.d.), 122.

[5] William Gesenius, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, eds. Brown, Driver, and Briggs (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 1057.

[6] See Longman, 194–195, for further discussion. Roland E. Murphy translates shor as “valley” and understands it as “a euphemism for the pudenda.” See The Song of Songs (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990), 185.

[7] Longman, 195.

[8] Robert Gordis, The Song of Songs (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1954), 26.

[9] Longman, 195.

[10] Rabbi Dr. S. M. Lehrman, “The Song of Songs,” The Five Megilloth, ed. Dr. A. Cohn (New York: The Soncino Press, 1946), 26.

[11] Craig Glickman, A Song for Lovers (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1977), 83.

[12] Tom Gledhill, The Message of the Song of Songs (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1994), 207.

[13] Otto Zockler, “Ecclesiastes,” in Commentary on the Holy Scriptures: Critical, Doctrinal, and Homiletical, ed. John Peter Lange, trans. Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1960), 56.

[14] F. Brown, S. R. Driver, and C. A. Briggs, Enhanced Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon, electronic ed. (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, 2000), 772:2.

[15] L. Koehler, W. Baumgartner, M. Richardson, and J. J. Stamm, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, electronic ed. (New York: Brill, 1999), s.v. “tahanug.” See Ecclesiastes 2:8, where the concept is associated with the sexual pleasures offered by concubines.

[16] J. Orr, The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (Albany, OR: Ages Software, 1915), 4:2235.

[17] Longman, 198.

[18] Don and Sally Meredith, Two Becoming One: Experiencing the Power of Oneness in Your Marriage (Chicago: Moody, 1999), 187.

[19] Dr. Laura Schlessinger, The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 135.