TEXT [Commentary]

  IX.   Ninth Love Poem: Seeking and Not Finding (3:1-5)

Young Woman

1 One night as I lay in bed, I yearned for my lover.

I yearned for him, but he did not come.

2 So I said to myself, “I will get up and roam the city,

searching in all its streets and squares.

I will search for the one I love.”

So I searched everywhere but did not find him.

3 The watchmen stopped me as they made their rounds,

and I asked, “Have you seen the one I love?”

4 Then scarcely had I left them

when I found my love!

I caught and held him tightly,

then I brought him to my mother’s house,

into my mother’s bed, where I had been conceived.

5 Promise me, O women of Jerusalem,

by the gazelles and wild deer,

not to awaken love until the time is right.[*]

NOTES

3:1 yearned. The NLT here translates a verb more lit. understood to mean “searched” (baqash [TH1245, ZH1335]).

COMMENTARY [Text]

Song of Songs 3:1-5 is a self-contained poem with a definite opening and closing. It is the story of a single evening as told by the young woman. Again, it is important to remember that these poems are not actual occurrences. It is a poem in which the young woman expresses her deep desire for the man, a desire that allows her to overcome large cultural and personal obstacles to go in search of her man. This “seek and not find” poem is similar in many ways to the poem that begins in 5:2, but the latter poem is much darker in atmosphere.

The woman recounts an evening when she lay in bed awake and uneasy because the man was not with her. Her intense desire for him is expressed by the verb “to yearn” (see note on 3:1). She feels empty at his absence, but her feelings of loneliness and desire do not result in his presence.

She realizes that if she is to have him, she must go out in search of him. At this point, we should note yet again how the woman takes the initiative in the relationship. She does not wait passively until he returns; rather, she sets out in hot pursuit of him. The poem expresses her determination by reporting her thoughts: “I will get up and roam the city.” This is a bold and brave move. For a woman by herself, the city was a place of great potential danger in antiquity, even as it can be today.

Her initial efforts to find her lover are not successful, something that simply builds the pressure of desire. She then encounters the watchmen, those charged with preserving the safety of the community. The modern equivalent would be the police. Their role in this poem, as opposed to the poem in 5:2–6:3, is simply to be a sounding board for the woman’s plaintive question: “Have you seen the one I love?” This shows her desperation for his presence, but the watchmen are not the ones who bring him into her presence.

Nonetheless, as she leaves them, she miraculously finds him. He appears out of nowhere, but how he is found is not the issue. He is in her arms, and she will not let him go. The description of her strong embrace underlines her deep affection for him and her desire to be in his presence.

But she does not just hold him; she takes him to the bedroom. The rest is left to our imagination, though our imagination is guided by the fact that this is the bedroom where her mother conceived her. It is a place of sexual activity, and she has been a good student of her mother. She, too, will enjoy her husband in a similar way.

The suggestion of intercourse turns her attention to her disciples in love—the women of Jerusalem. These are young women who have not yet experienced the pleasures of the marriage bed. In this refrain, which is repeated from 2:7 (see the commentary there for more on this verse), she warns them not to hurry love. The picture that she has drawn of intimacy with her man would certainly lead them to desire a similar relationship, but her warning is that love is not something to be entered into lightly.