TEXT [Commentary]

  I.   First Love Poem: The Woman’s Pursuit (1:2-4)

Young Woman[*]

2 Kiss me and kiss me again,

for your love is sweeter than wine.

3 How pleasing is your fragrance;

your name is like the spreading fragrance of scented oils.

No wonder all the young women love you!

4 Take me with you; come, let’s run!

The king has brought me into his bedroom.

Young Women of Jerusalem

How happy we are for you, O king.

We praise your love even more than wine.

Young Woman

How right they are to adore you.

NOTES

1:3 your name is like the spreading fragrance of scented oils. Lit., “your name is poured out oil.” The metaphor is well captured by the NLT in that this would be scented oil that has been spilled, its wonderful smell filling the room.

1:4 The king has brought me into his bedroom. Notice that in the first part of this verse, the man is addressed in the second person and then in the concluding part he is referred to in the third person. Indeed, throughout this poem, the woman uses both second and third person to address the man. This is a poetic device called enallage, but since modern readers are thrown off by this ancient poetic convention, the NLT often harmonizes the references to the man in this poem, rendering them in the second person.

COMMENTARY [Text]

The woman speaks first. Indeed, the woman speaks more often than the man in the Song (see LaCocque 1998:41). She is not bashful or timid. She desires the man, and she tells him of her love. Here, she wants him to kiss her and take her away into his bedroom, the most intimate of all rooms of a house. She wants to be alone with him.

We should notice how she describes his desirability in a very sensuous way. She wants the intimate touch of a kiss. She describes his love as sweet to the taste. His name, which here has the connotation of reputation, has the smell of scented oils. Love in the Song has a very physical side; it is expressed unabashedly through the union of two bodies. In reference to taste, she compares his love to wine, a thick liquid that lingers on the palette. Furthermore, love can lift the human spirit in the same way as wine; both intoxicate.

The woman refers to the man as the king. This language is not to be taken literally or applied to the man throughout the Song of Songs. It is poetic language. In her eyes, he is king. Later, she will refer to him as a shepherd (see 1:7-8). These are not two different characters, but two different ways of referring to the man.

In this first poem, we are introduced to the young women. Here they are not named, but we detect their presence by the use of the first person plural in 1:4b. Elsewhere in the book, they are called the “young women,” the “daughters of Jerusalem,” and the “daughters of Zion.” These women are always treated and referred to as a group. They are a group of friends of the young woman. Their presence serves different purposes in the Song. In 1:4 they function as an external attestation to the qualities of the young man. They agree with the young woman that this man is indeed desirable. Further, at the end of the poem they celebrate the love that they see existing between the two.

At the end of this poem, we see that the woman speaks one last time. She speaks to her king-lover and affirms that “they,” the young women, are right when they adore him. She is not jealous but rather takes their words as a confirmation of her own judgment.