There is a book in the Bible that never once mentions God, is frankly about desire, and was called by an ancient rabbi the holiest thing in Scripture. Before reading it chapter by chapter it is worth knowing who is speaking, why it is there, and how to read it without either embarrassment or nonsense.
A study in Song of Solomon · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 12 min read
The Song Of Songs
“The song of songs, which is Solomon’s.”
Song of Solomon 1:1
The title is a Hebrew superlative, and English does not really have the construction. It works the same way as holy of holies for the innermost room of the sanctuary, or King of kings for Christ, or vanity of vanities for the emptiest thing Solomon could name. Song of songs means the best song there is.
And that is a claim, because the same man had a large catalogue to choose from. “He spake three thousand proverbs: and his songs were a thousand and five” (1 Kings 4:32). Out of one thousand and five songs, this is the one that survived, and it was filed under a title that says it was the finest of them.
So the book does not arrive apologizing. Whoever gave it that heading thought a love song was the best thing Solomon ever wrote — better than the wisdom, better than the proverbs.
The Book That Never Says God
Now the fact that unsettles people, and it is better met head-on than discovered halfway through chapter four.
The word God does not appear in this book. Neither does LORD. Not once in eight chapters. The only other book in the Bible of which that is true is Esther.
There is one possible exception, and it is worth mentioning because it is the sort of detail that gets overstated. In 8:6 the King James has “a most vehement flame”, and the Hebrew word behind it ends in a syllable that can be read as a shortened form of the divine name — so some translations render it “the very flame of the LORD.” Scholars disagree, and it may simply be a Hebrew way of saying enormous, the way we might say a God-almighty flame. Nothing in this series will be built on it.
So take the plain fact. A book about love between a man and a woman, in the middle of Scripture, with the divine name absent from it.
That should be read the way Esther is read. God is not named there either, and nobody concludes He was uninvolved; the whole point of Esther is that His hand is on everything and appears nowhere. Here the effect is different but the principle is the same. This is one of the areas of human life where God does not need to sign His work, because He designed the thing being described.
Who Is Speaking
Most confusion about this book comes from one structural fact: there is no narrator. Nobody says “and then she said.” It is almost entirely direct speech, and the speaker changes without warning.
Once you know the voices it becomes straightforward. There are three.
The woman, called the Shulamite in 6:13. She speaks first, she speaks most, and the book is largely hers — which is itself remarkable for the ancient world. She begins it, and in 8:14 she ends it.
The man, called the beloved and several times the king. His speeches are shorter and consist mostly of describing her.
The daughters of Jerusalem, a chorus. They ask the questions that move the story along — what is thy beloved more than another beloved? (5:9), whither is thy beloved gone? (6:1) — and they are the reason we get the great descriptions, because somebody had to ask.
Two soloists and a chorus. It has the shape of an oratorio because it very nearly is one, and reading it aloud with the parts assigned is the single most useful thing anybody can do with this book. Half its difficulties are not difficulties at all; they are unmarked stage directions.
The First Reading: It Really Is A Love Song
Before any deeper reading, the plain one has to be allowed to stand, and a good many Christians have never allowed it.
This is a poem about a man and a woman who want each other. It admires bodies. It is not coy. And the church has spent long stretches of its history embarrassed by exactly the thing God was not embarrassed by — hurrying past the surface of the book to get to the safe spiritual meaning, as though the surface were something to be apologized for.
But the surface is inspired too. God did not merely permit a love song into the canon; He put the best one there. Marriage was His invention, given before sin entered and named very good along with everything else in that week. The Song is what that invention sounds like when it is working.
And there is a reason this matters for the spiritual reading rather than competing with it. If the human love in this book were shabby, it could not carry the weight of the comparison. The whole logic of Ephesians 5 depends on the earthly thing being genuinely good:
“Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it… This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church.”
Ephesians 5:25, 32
Paul does not say marriage is a convenient illustration. He says it is a mystery — something that was always about Christ and the church, and that we have been enacting for millennia without seeing what it was.
The Second Reading: Christ And His Bride
Which brings us to the reading this series will follow, and it needs no apology either, because Scripture supplies it rather than readers importing it.
The Bible calls God a husband and His people a wife, repeatedly, in every part of it. “Thy Maker is thine husband” (Isaiah 54:5). Hosea was told to marry an unfaithful woman so a nation could watch what its own conduct looked like from the outside, and God said “I will betroth thee unto me for ever” (Hosea 2:19). Paul told Corinth “I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ” (2 Corinthians 11:2). John the Baptist called himself the friend of the bridegroom. And the Bible ends at a wedding.
So when this book is read as being about Christ and His people, that is not a pious overlay on a secular poem. It is the figure the rest of Scripture uses constantly, found here at its fullest length.
Ellen White read it that way without hesitation, and she did it more often than most readers realize. The two lines she returns to again and again — in The Desire of Ages, Christ’s Object Lessons, Education, Counsels to Teachers and elsewhere — are from chapter 5, where the woman is asked what makes her beloved different from anyone else’s, and answers that he is “the chiefest among ten thousand” and “altogether lovely”. She applies both to Christ, every time.
“In the One ‘altogether lovely’ we behold Him, of whom all beauty of earth and heaven is but a dim reflection.”
Ellen G. White · Education, p. 192
That sentence is a good statement of how the two readings relate. The earthly beauty is real, and it is a reflection. Nobody insults a reflection by pointing out what it reflects.
Where Allegory Goes Wrong
Having said that, an honest warning is owed, because this book has been the scene of some of the worst interpretation in Christian history, and the damage was done by people who meant well.
The failure mode is straightforward: treating every physical detail as a coded doctrine. Commentators have made the two breasts of 4:5 into the Old and New Testaments, the teeth of 4:2 into the faithful of the church, the hair into something else again. Once that starts there is no control on it, and the interpreter can make the text say anything he already believed. That is precisely why allegory has a bad name, and the bad name is deserved.
The discipline this series will keep is simple, and it is the one the rest of Scripture models. The relationship is the type; the anatomy is not. When Paul draws the comparison in Ephesians 5, he takes the structure — the love, the giving of himself, the cherishing, the union, the presenting of her without spot — and he does not decode a single physical feature. Neither will we.
And there is a second discipline, less often mentioned. Where the Bible itself has already taken up a line from this book — as with altogether lovely, or the fire that many waters cannot quench — we can follow it with confidence. Where it has not, a suggested application is offered as a suggestion, and labeled as one.
How The Book Moves
It is not a random collection of love poems. There is a movement through it, and knowing the shape in advance makes each chapter easier.
Chapters 1 and 2 — longing and courtship. She opens with a request for a kiss and a worry that she is too weathered to be wanted. He tells her she is beautiful. The banner over her is love.
Chapters 3 and 4 — the search, and then the wedding. She loses him in the night and goes out into the city looking. Then the procession arrives, and chapter 4 is the bridegroom’s speech about his bride, ending in a garden.
Chapter 5 — the crisis. She is asleep. He knocks. She makes excuses about having already undressed. By the time she opens the door he is gone. This is the chapter with the most weight on it, and the next section says why.
Chapters 6 and 7 — recovery. She finds where he went. He describes her as fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners, which is not how anyone else in Scripture is complimented.
Chapter 8 — settled love, and the definition. The book stops describing and states what love is: strong as death, unquenchable, and not for sale.
The Refrain, Three Times
“I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please.”
Song of Solomon 2:7
That line comes three times — at 2:7, again at 3:5, and a last time in shortened form at 8:4 — and it works like the returning theme in a piece of music, marking the divisions of the book.
Its sense is a caution against hurrying love. Stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please — do not force it, do not manufacture it, let it come when it comes. Which is sound counsel about human affection and, taken up a level, is a rather searching word about the spiritual life: there is such a thing as working up feelings that have not arrived, and the Song is against it three separate times.
The Prophecy In Chapter Five
One chapter carries more than the others, and readers coming to this series should know it is there.
In chapter 5 the bride is asleep, her beloved knocks and calls, she delays with reasons that sound thin even as she gives them, and when she finally opens the door he has gone. She goes out to look for him and is beaten by the very watchmen whose job was to guard the city.
Read as prophecy, that sequence has been applied to the Advent movement of the 1840s — the call, the delay, the door opened onto an apparently empty street on the morning of October 23rd, 1844, and the ridicule that followed from the pulpits of the churches the Millerites had come out of. The site’s treatment of that reading is Song Of Solomon Prophecy, and the chapter study in this series will take it up in detail.
Two things will be said plainly there, and may as well be said here. The first is that the reading is an argument from the text and from history, not a quotation from anybody — Ellen White uses chapter 5 constantly, but always its closing verses about the beloved, never verses 2 to 8. The second is that the structure fits better than is usually noticed, because the story does not end at the empty doorway. In 6:2 she discovers where he went: my beloved is gone down into his garden. He had not abandoned her. He had moved, and she had to find out where.
What This Series Will Do
Ten studies. This one sets the stage. Then one for each of the eight chapters, in order. Then a closing study of the wedding the whole book has been moving toward — The Marriage Of The Lamb, which asks who is actually at that wedding and what the whole thing means.
Throughout, two commitments. The human love in the book will be treated as real and good, because it is. And the greater love it was always picturing will be followed wherever Scripture itself has already followed it.
One last thing before we start, and it is the reason the book is worth the trouble.
Most of us can believe that God is willing to forgive us. A good many can believe He is patient with us. What almost nobody quite believes is that He delights in us — that there is gladness in it on His side. That is precisely the gap this book was put in the Bible to close, and it closes it not with an argument but with a love song.
