Song of Solomon

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A book of the Bible with an ambiguous author. The song is Solomon's, but he may not have penned it. This is his song of songs, his greatest song, and I think it's his only song to survive.

Canonicity

According to rabbinical literature, the first few centuries of the Christian era, certain sages disputed on internal evidence, the canonicity of Ezekiel, Proverbs, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Esther.

(The Origin of the Bible: Newly Updated by F. F. Bruce, J. I. Packer, Philip W. Comfort, and Carl F. H. Henry, 2020. Page 51.)

Literary Form

Song of Solomon is a collection of love poems that form an exalted epithalamion about a single courtship and wedding. The poems are pastoral love poems. As it's a song, it portrays a series of feelings and moods rather than a concrete story and has a stream-of-consciousness structure.

The style is consciously artificial and highly sensuous, metaphoric, hyperbolic, and passionate. As a pastoral work, it includes the invitation to love, praise of the beloved, emblematic blazons (lists of the features of the beloved, with each feature compared to an object in nature), courtship and wedding poems, and songs of separation, longing, and reunion.

(The Origin of the Bible: Newly Updated by F. F. Bruce, J. I. Packer, Philip W. Comfort, and Carl F. H. Henry, 2020. The Bible as Literature by Leland Ryken, Page 141)

Summary

1 - She confesses her love. She is dark but lovely, keeper of her family's vineyard but not her own. She asks her love where he pastures his flock, and he tells her to follow the tracks of the flock and pasture her young goats beside the shepherds' tents. She is a mare among Pharaoh's chariots, ornamented with jewels, gold, and silver. Her nard gave forth fragrance.Their couch is green, their beams are cedar, and their rafters are pine.

2 - She is a rose of Sharon, but he calls her a lily among brambles (young women). She calls him an apple tree among the trees (young men) who provides shade and refreshing apples. Do not stir up love until it pleases. Her beloved is like a gazelle or young stag gazing through the window beckoning her to arise and come away for winter is past and rain is over so she can catch the foxes that spoil their vineyards. He grazes among the lilies. She wants him to turn like a gazelle or young stag.

3 - She dreams of searching for him whom her soul loves until she found him and would not let go until she had brought him into her mother's house and chamber where she was conceived. Do not stir up love until it pleases. A vision of Solomon carried by 60 men, perfumed, on a carriage of Lebanese wood, silver posts, a golden back, and a seat of purple. The interior was inlaid with love by the daughters of Jerusalem. Look upon King Solomon, with the crown with which his mother crowned him on his wedding day.

4 - He compliments her dove eyes, goat hair, ewe teeth, scarlet thread lips, lovely mouth, pomegranate cheeks, tower neck, and fawn breasts. He wants to go away to the mountain of myrrh (Song of Solomon 1:13's sachet?). Her love is better than wine, her fragrance better than spice, her lips drip nectar, and honey and milk are under her tongue. She is a garden locked. Awake O north wind and come O south wind to blow upon his garden - then she invites him to eat choicest fruits from his garden.

5 - He enjoys the garden. She slept, but her heart was awake. Then a sound! Her beloved knocked, but she tarried to open and he had turned and gone. Her soul failed her when he spoke. She sought him but was found and beaten by the watchmen. The Others ask what's so special about him, and she answers he is distinguished among ten thousand, that his arms are rods of gold set with jewels, his body polished ivory, legs alabaster columns on bases of gold, and his appearance is like Lebanon, choice as the cedars.

6 - The Others offer to seek out him with her, and she says he has gone down to his garden to gather lilies. I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine. He calls her as beautiful as Tirzah, lovely as Jerusalem, awesome as an army with banners. The sixty queens, eighty concubines, and countless virgins praise her. Before she was aware, her desire set her among the chariots of her kinsman, a prince. The Others call the Shulammite to return, so they may look upon her. But her asks why they should look upon her as upon a dance before two armies?

7 - He observes her beautiful sandaled feet, jewel rounded thighs, mixed wine bowl navel, heap of wheat belly encircled with lilies, twin gazelle fawn breasts, ivory tower neck, pools in Heshbon by the gate of Bath-rabbim eyes, tower of Lebanon nose looking towards Damascus, head crowning like Carmel, flowing locks like purple holding a king captive, palm tree stature with breast clusters, apple breath, and mouth like best wine. She invites him into the fields and villages to see the grape and pomegranate blooms. She will give him her love. The mandrakes give fragrance, and all choice fruits new and old have been laid up for him.

8 - She wishes he were her brother, so she could kiss him publicly and bring him home to her mother's house to give spiced wine, the juice of her pomegranate. She comes up from the wilderness to lean on her beloved. She awakened him under the apple tree where his mother bore him. She tells him to set her as a seal upon his heart, upon his arm, for love is as strong as death, jealousy as fierce as the grave, and its flashes the flashes of fire, the very flame of the LORD. Many waters cannot quench it, and it would never be traded for all wealth.

But what might they do for their little sister with no breasts? If she is a wall, they will build a battlement of silver on her. A door, they will enclose her with boards of cedar. She herself was a wall with breasts like towers and was in his eyes as one who finds peace.

Solomon had a vineyard at Baal-hamon that he let out to keepers, each to bring for its fruit 1000 pieces of silver. Her own vineyard is before her. Solomon may have the thousand, and the keepers two hundred. He calls to those who dwell in the gardens and desires to hear from her. She calls for his return from the mountains of spices.

Topics

Figures

Peoples

Places

Other

Verses