Day 22 – Saturday -- The Book of Song of Songs

Day 22 – Saturday

The Book of Song of Songs

This book is sometimes named The Song of Solomon.  About the same time Sophocles was composing Antigone and Oedipus Rex in Greece, the Song of Songs was being written; not by Solomon, of course—it was hundreds of years too late. Like the Book of Esther, this is a book that doesn’t mention God. Yet, if God is love as the New Testament asserts, then God pervades these poems. I may be wrong, but I don’t think any part of the Song of Songs is quoted in the New Testament. The Jewish community of faith reads the Song of Songs during Passover, partly because its mention of spring:

Winter is passed,

the rains are over and gone.

The flowers appear on the earth.

The season of glad songs has come,

the cooing of the turtledove is heard

in our land. (2.11-12)

Whether or not the Song of Songs would be included in the Hebrew Bible was hotly debated by the rabbis. At the Council of Jamnia in 90 CE, Rabbi Aqiba defended its inclusion, saying: “For in the entire world, there is nothing to equal the day on which the Song of Solomon was given to Israel. All the writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is most Holy.”[1]

The Song of Songs is a love song. It can be read as a series of poems or as a drama. It begins with a kiss:

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth. For your love is better than wine (1.2).

Andy Warhol said, “Two people kissing always look like fish.” I like the little poem by Joseph Lilienthal:

"MAY I print a kiss on your lips?" I said,

And she nodded her sweet permission;

So we went to press and I rather guess

We printed a full edition."[2]

There are basically three ways to approach the Song:

(1) It is about the erotic feelings and actions of two lovers.

(2) It is about the love of God for God’s people. As a Jewish writing it portrays God’s love for Israel. As part of the Christian Bible it tells of God’s love for the Church (or the Church as Christ’s bride).

(3) It has been read in a mystical sense, singing of God’s love of the individual soul.

The Bible is a very sexual book. The very first commandment in the Bible is: Have sex! (It is usually read as, “Go and multiply.”) All those boring genealogies in Scripture are about people being begat. That means every genealogy is full of intercourse. Two people are begetting. Adam and Eve are frolicking in the Garden and having fun at the beginning. Then they sin. And all of a sudden they realize they are naked. That was the birth of shame. What a shame that sex and shame have been wed in humanity’s experience.

The Hebrew Scriptures celebrate sex. David danced naked before the Ark. Solomon had a bunch of wives and concubines (read “mistresses”). In Jewish tradition, Friday evening (the beginning of the Sabbath) is a time for husband and wife to have intercourse. The Song of Songs celebrates the erotic.

The first verse of the text per se is: Kiss me! In chapter 4 the man describes his lover’s hair, teeth, lips, mouth, cheeks, mouth, and breasts. In chapter 5 the woman describes his head, hair, eyes, face, lips, arms, body, legs, and kisses. This is a carnal book, full of anatomy and flesh.

Here is the way Eugene Peterson translates a passage in chapter seven:

You are tall and supple, like the palm tree,

    and your full breasts are like sweet clusters of dates.

I say, “I’m going to climb that palm tree!

    I’m going to caress its fruit!”

Oh yes! Your breasts

    will be clusters of sweet fruit to me,

Your breath clean and cool like fresh mint,

    your tongue and lips like the best wine. (7.7-9, The Message)

The second level of interpretation sees the lovers as God and God’s people. The language of marriage vows connotes the covenant between God and Israel:

I am my beloved’s,

and my beloved is mine. (6.3)

All through Scripture God uses this marriage/covenant language, such as:

I will be their God,

and they shall be my people. (Jer. 31.3)

It is possible to read the Bible (or parts of it) as the relationship between the Sovereign and the subjects; or the Law-giver and those who obey the law. But the Song of Songs invites us to read the Bible differently: as a love letter from God to us. A child obeys her parents. But a grown woman falls in love with her husband. Both relationships are appropriate at different stages. Perhaps the more mature perspective for students of the Bible is to view the whole through the part – to look through the key hole of these love poems and see into the larger room of covenant love. How would we feel differently about God if we read Scripture as the relationship of God our Lover to God’s people, the Beloved?

Isaiah brings up the marital image to speak of God’s relationship to Israel:

Your Creator will be your husband (Isa. 54.5).

And Jesus speaks of himself as the Groom of the Church:

Surely the bridegroom’s attendants would never think of fasting while the bridegroom is still with them (Mk. 2.19).

So, even though the Song of Songs expresses the intimacy between two individuals, it has been read by both the Jewish community and the Church as representing a communal reality: the Jewish people as a whole, and the Church as a whole.

The third level of interpretation pervades the writings of the Christian mystics. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux said she had discovered in the Song of Songs “such profound things about the union of the soul with her beloved.”[3] St. Bernard preached 86 sermons on the first two chapters of the Song.

Brother Wayne Teasdale, a Catholic monk, gives this summary:

The Spanish mystics of the sixteenth century, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, conveyed their experience and its elaboration in terms of love-mysticism. They drew heavily on the bridal images of the Cistercians, notably Bernard of Clairvaux in the Twelfth century, developed insights from his own contemplative experience in the rich framework and symbolism of the Song of Songs… Both Teresa and John detail the stable mystical union known as the spiritual marriage—an unbreakable bond of profound affection in which the soul as the bride and God as the bridegroom, the lover and the beloved, become inseparable.[4]

St. Clair of Assisi, the friend of St. Francis of Assisi, expresses her relationship to Christ with references to passages from the Song:

Draw me after You! We will run in the fragrance of Your perfumes, O heavenly Spouse! I will run and not tire, until You bring me into the wine-cellar, until Your left hand is under my head and Your right hand will embrace me happily [and] You will kiss me with the happiest kiss of Your mouth.[5]

The Song of Songs is the go-to Biblical book for all of the mystics as they discuss the nature of the contemplative life. The highly erotic language morphs into mystical language which points to inexpressible intimacy between the human soul and its Creator.

Toward the end of the book are verses sometimes read at weddings:

Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it (8.6-7).

Love is strong as death. Well, even stronger if we receive the Good News of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ.

Finish this: When I think about God being my Lover…..

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[1] Quoted by Tom Gledhill in The Message of the Song of Songs (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1994), 35.

[2] Quoted by Tom Gledhill in The Message of the Song of Songs, 101.

[3] Blaise Arminjon, The Cantata of Love (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 39.

[4] Wayne Teasdale, The Mystic Heart (New World Library 1999), p. 222.

[5] Translation by Regis J. Armstrong or Ignatius C. Brady in Francis and Clare: The Complete Works (Paulist Press, 1982).