She calls herself a common meadow flower and he answers with the most extravagant thing said to her yet. Then he comes over the hills, stops at the wall, and asks her to come out — and the chapter ends without her going.
A study in Song of Solomon 2 · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 12 min read
I Am The Rose Of Sharon
“I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys. As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters. As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.”
Song of Solomon 2:1, 2, 3
Those three verses are a conversation, and knowing who says which one changes the whole passage.
Generations of hymn writers have put verse 1 in Christ’s mouth, and “Jesus, Rose of Sharon” is fixed in a great many memories. But follow the speakers. The woman has been talking since the end of chapter 1 and she does not stop; verse 2 is clearly his reply, because it begins as the lily — picking up the very word she has just used about herself — and calls her my love. So verse 1 is hers.
And that matters, because said by her it is not a boast. It is the opposite.
Sharon was the coastal plain — ordinary pasture, not a garden. The flower behind the English word is a common meadow bloom, and lilies of the valleys are what grows in low ground by itself, in quantity, unplanted. She is saying I am a wildflower. There are fields of me. It is the same note she struck in chapter 1 about her sunburn and her neglected vineyard, in prettier words.
Now hear his answer, which is one of the great replies in Scripture. He does not contradict her word. He keeps it — as the lily — and adds four syllables that change everything: among thorns.
Fine, you are a lily. Put a lily in a thicket of thorns and see whether anyone has trouble picking it out. He does not argue her out of her self-assessment; he accepts it and then supplies the background she had not considered.
And she answers in kind, which is the first time she has matched him compliment for compliment: as the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. A fruit tree in a forest of timber — the one tree there that feeds you and gives shade you can sit in.
Ellen White takes those two verses and reads them straight into the Christian life, and the sentence she puts in front of them is worth the whole passage:
“Not a pause for a moment in His presence, but personal contact with Christ, to sit down in companionship with Him — this is our need.”
Ellen G. White · Education, p. 261
I sat down under his shadow. Not visited. Not glanced at. Sat down, and stayed long enough to eat.
His Banner Over Me Was Love
“He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love. Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love. His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me.”
Song of Solomon 2:4, 5, 6
A banner is not decoration. It is a military standard — the pole an army forms up under, so that in the noise and dust every man can see whose side he is on and where the line is.
He raises one over her, and the device on it is love. She is publicly claimed, and claimed under the one flag that never has to be defended by argument.
Verse 5 is the honest consequence, and it is not a pious sentiment: I am sick of love. She is not weary of it — that is the modern sense of the phrase and it is exactly backwards. She is lovesick, undone by it, and asking to be propped up with food because she cannot stand. Being loved like this is not restful at first. It takes the legs out from under a person who did not think she was much to look at.
Then verse 6, which is quieter and better: his left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me. One hand supporting, one hand holding. It is the posture of someone being carried while still being held — and it is the answer to Isaiah 49, where God says the name is cut into both palms.
Stir Not Up, Nor Awake My Love
“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
This is the first of the book’s three refrains — it returns at 3:5 and again, shortened, at 8:4 — and it works the way a returning theme works in music, closing a movement.
Its sense is a warning against forcing. Stir not up and awake are both words for rousing something before it is ready. She has just described being overwhelmed by love, and her immediate instinct is to turn to the other women and tell them not to hurry it.
Taken up a level it is searching counsel. There is such a thing as working up feelings that have not arrived — manufacturing an experience because you have read that others have had one. The Song is against it, and says so three separate times.
He Standeth Behind Our Wall
“The voice of my beloved! behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills. My beloved is like a roe or a young hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the windows, shewing himself through the lattice.”
Song of Solomon 2:8, 9
She hears him before she sees him. The voice of my beloved! — the exclamation of somebody who knows a footstep.
And the picture is all speed. Leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills, like a young stag — an animal that does not go round obstacles. Everything between them is being cleared at pace.
Then verse 9 stops, and the detail is easy to read past and should not be. He arrives, and he does not come in.
He standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the windows, shewing himself through the lattice. He crossed the mountains in two verses and stopped at the last few feet. He is visible in pieces, through a screen, and the wall is still standing.
Note whose wall it is: our wall. Hers, and the household’s. He is not the one who built it, and he does not go through it. He stands outside it and lets himself be seen, and then he speaks.
The Winter Is Past
“Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”
Song of Solomon 2:10, 11, 12, 13
Four verses, and they are bookended by the same sentence. Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away at the start; Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away at the finish. Everything between is his argument for why.
And the argument is simply that the season has changed. Not that she is ready, or has improved, or has finally kept her vineyard. The winter is over, and that is reason enough.
The details are those of a man who has been outside. Rain finished. Flowers up. Birds singing. The voice of the turtle — the turtledove, a migratory bird whose return is the sound that tells everyone the season has turned. Green figs on the tree, and the vines just in blossom, giving off that particular smell.
Ellen White quotes the passage in Education simply as an example of how beautiful the Bible is, which is a use of Scripture worth defending: sometimes the right thing to say about a piece of the Bible is that it is lovely.
“For beauty of expression read also the description of springtime, from the Song of Songs.”
Ellen G. White · Education, p. 159
O My Dove, In The Clefts Of The Rock
“O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.”
Song of Solomon 2:14
Now we learn why he stopped at the wall. She is not standing at the window waiting. She is hiding.
A dove in the clefts of a rock is a bird nesting in a crack in a cliff face — somewhere nothing can reach it and nothing can see it. The secret places of the stairs is the same idea indoors. He is calling to someone tucked into a gap in the masonry.
And what he asks for is very small. Not that she come out. Two things: let me see thy countenance and let me hear thy voice. Show me your face. Say something.
Then he gives his reason, and it is the reason she would least have predicted: for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely. He is not asking because he needs to check on her. He is asking because he likes her face and enjoys the sound of her.
Which is precisely the thing the woman of chapter 1 could not believe, and it is why this book exists. Most people can accept that God will put up with them. That He would stand at a wall asking to hear their voice because He finds it pleasant is a different proposition entirely, and it is the one being made here.
The Little Foxes
“Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.”
Song of Solomon 2:15
One verse, dropped into the middle of a love scene, and it has outlived most of the chapter in ordinary speech.
The emphasis is on the size. Not the foxes — the little foxes. Nothing large is threatening this vineyard. What spoils vines is small animals working at the roots, at a scale nobody bothers to drive off, and the damage is done to tender grapes: fruit at the stage where it cannot survive interference.
Nobody in this book has a disaster. What they have is a doorway not opened in time, a delay, a wall left standing. The little foxes are the honest name for what actually spoils things between people, and between a person and God — and the verse says to go and catch them, in the plural, while the fruit is still forming.
My Beloved Is Mine
“My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies.”
Song of Solomon 2:16
This is the sentence to mark, because the book will say it twice more and never in the same order.
In chapter 1 she made no such claim at all. Here, for the first time, she states the relationship in both directions — and notice which direction comes first.
My beloved is mine, and then I am his.
What she has is a possession. The first thing she is sure of is what he is to her. That is not wrong — it is a real advance on chapter 1, and it is where nearly everybody begins. But it is the beginning, and the book knows it.
Four chapters later she will say the same words in the other order — I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine (6:3) — and by 7:10 she will drop her half of the claim entirely: I am my beloved’s, and his desire is toward me. Possession, then belonging, then simply being wanted.
She has taken the first of those three steps here, in a chapter where she is still behind a wall.
Where This Chapter Sits
Measured against chapter 1, three things have moved and one has not.
She has stopped cataloging her defects. Chapter 1 was sunburn, brothers, a neglected vineyard. Chapter 2 opens with one modest line about being a common flower and then never returns to the subject. His answer took.
She can return a compliment. In chapter 1 he described her and she described herself. Here she answers him in his own form — the apple tree among the trees of the wood — and it is the first thing she has said about him that is not a request.
She makes her first claim. My beloved is mine. Herself first, but said out loud.
And the thing that has not moved: there is still a wall, and she is still behind it. He crosses the mountains, stops outside, and asks for her face and her voice. Then he asks her twice to come away.
Now read the last verse of the chapter, and then the first verse of the next.
“Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.”
Song of Solomon 2:17
Whatever exactly she means by turn — and translators divide over whether she is calling him toward her or sending him back over the hills until morning — the chapter ends with the day not yet broken and the shadows not yet gone. They are not together.
And chapter 3 opens: “By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.”
He asked her to come away. She did not go. That is the honest reading of the seam between these two chapters, and it is worth sitting with, because the same thing happens again in chapter 5 with far worse consequences — he comes to the door, she does not open in time, and by the time she does he is gone.
Growth in this book is not a straight line. She is further along than she was, and she has just missed something, and both are true in the same chapter.
