She handed him a garden she had just been told was hers. Before she did, he told her she had no spot on her — and he said it before she had done anything to deserve it, which is the only reason it was worth saying.
A study in Song of Solomon 4 · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 12 min read
Behold, Thou Art Fair
“Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes within thy locks.”
Song of Solomon 4:1
He has said this before. Word for word:
“Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes.”
Song of Solomon 1:15
In chapter 1 that was the whole speech. One sentence, said to a woman who had just called herself sunburned and overworked, and then he stopped.
Here he says the identical sentence and then cannot stop for six more verses. That is the first thing chapter 4 is doing, and it is worth sitting with before any of the detail. The same man, the same opening words, and this time the sentence will not close.
One note about how to read what follows, and then we can get on with it. This chapter is the most physically detailed passage in the book — hair, teeth, lips, neck, and in verse 5 her body plainly. It is a husband describing his wife, and there is nothing in it to apologize for; Scripture is less embarrassed about married love than most religious people are. But the discipline set out in Before You Begin holds here more than anywhere: the relationship is the type; the anatomy is not. When Paul reaches for this marriage in Ephesians 5 he takes the structure — a husband who gives himself, a wife who is cherished — and he decodes not one physical feature. Neither will we. What the catalog tells us is not what the church looks like. It tells us what he is like when he looks at her.
A Tower, Not A Trinket
“Thy neck is like the tower of David builded for an armoury, whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men.”
Song of Solomon 4:4
Modern readers stumble here, because comparing a woman’s neck to a fortified tower does not sound like a compliment in English. It was one. But notice which compliment.
He does not say she is delicate. He says she is built — and specifically built as an armoury, with a thousand shields hanging on the outside of it. That is a picture of a woman who carries herself like something that has held. Whatever else he admires, he admires her strength, and he reaches for military language to say so.
Keep that in mind, because it comes back. In chapter 6 the chorus will describe her as “terrible as an army with banners” (6:10), and readers often treat that line as though it arrives from nowhere. It does not. He started calling her a fortress here, in the middle of a love song, four verses in.
Until The Day Break
“Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, I will get me to the mountain of myrrh, and to the hill of frankincense.”
Song of Solomon 4:6
Those first nine words are not new. She said them, at the end of chapter 2:
“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
The same formula for the same stretch of waiting, in two different mouths, and what follows it is completely different each time.
When she says it, the next word is turn, and the chapter ends with him on the far mountains and her where she was. When he says it, the next words are I will get me to the mountain of myrrh — he names where he will be. She used the interval to send him off. He uses it to file an address.
This matters more than it looks, because it is the first half of a promise the book keeps. Remember myrrh: it is the first thing he mentions. Two verses into chapter 5 he will be standing at her door in the dark with his hair wet, and when she finally gets up, her hands will drip myrrh onto the handle he touched. He went where he said he would go and came back carrying it.
There Is No Spot In Thee
“Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.”
Song of Solomon 4:7
This is the verse the chapter is named for, and it is the largest thing in it.
Two questions decide what you do with it. The first is whether it is true. The second is when he says it — and the second question is the one that turns a pleasant compliment into the gospel.
Consider who is standing in front of him. This is the woman who opened the book announcing that she was dark and sunburned and that her brothers had made her keep vineyards while her own went untended (1:5, 6). This is the woman who called herself a common wildflower out of the Sharon pasture (2:1). This is the woman who was asked twice to get up and come away and did not move (2:10, 13), and who then had to hunt through a city at night for a man she could have simply opened a door to.
To her he says: there is no spot in thee.
And — this is the part that should stop you — he says it one chapter before she fails him worse than she ever has. In chapter 5 he will knock and she will make excuses about her coat and her feet, and by the time she opens the door he will be gone. The verdict “no spot in thee” is not delivered at the end of the book as a summary of how well she did. It is delivered in the middle, with her worst hour still ahead of her.
That is not sentimentality. It is exactly how Paul says it works:
“Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; that he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, that he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish.”
Ephesians 5:25-27
Read the order of operations in those three verses, because it is the whole argument. He loved her first. He gave himself second. He does the sanctifying, he does the cleansing, and he supplies the water and the word it is done with. And only then is there a church without spot — which is to say, the spotlessness is something he produces, not something she brought to the arrangement. The Song puts the same thing in the language of a man talking to his wife: not you have kept yourself unblemished, but there is no spot in thee, said by the one person entitled to say it.
“Christ will clothe His faithful ones with His own righteousness, that He may present them to His Father ‘a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing.’”
Ellen G. White · The Great Controversy, p. 484
He clothes. He presents. She is the one being dressed.
One honest caution, because this verse gets abused in both directions. “No spot in thee” is not a statement that her conduct no longer matters — the next verse has him calling her out of the lions’ dens, and the chapter after this one has consequences in it that hurt. It is a statement about how he sees her while she is still on the way. A wedding dress is white before the wedding, not because the bride has finished growing up, but because of what the day is.
Come With Me From Lebanon
“Come with me from Lebanon, my spouse, with me from Lebanon: look from the top of Amana, from the top of Shenir and Hermon, from the lions’ dens, from the mountains of the leopards.”
Song of Solomon 4:8
Two words in that verse are new, and he says them twice: with me.
Go back to chapter 2 and hear the difference. There it was “Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away” — twice, and both times he was on the other side of a wall, calling in through a lattice while she stayed inside. It was an invitation issued from a distance. She did not take it.
Here he is not calling her out to somewhere. He is calling her out with him. He has closed the distance himself, and what he is proposing is not a destination but company on the road.
And look where he is calling her from. Not from a garden or a bedroom — from the lions’ dens and the mountains of the leopards. These are the high wild places on Israel’s northern edge, and they are named for what lives in them. Whatever the woman of this book is doing on a leopard mountain, he does not scold her for being there, does not ask how she got there, and does not tell her to find her own way down. He calls her to come away from it, with him, and he mentions the animals so she knows he knows.
My Sister, My Spouse
That verse also carries a word the book has never used before. My spouse.
Here is a fact worth having, because it is the kind of thing you only notice by counting. “My spouse” occurs six times in the Song of Solomon, and all six fall between 4:8 and 5:1. It is not in chapters 1, 2 or 3. It is not in chapters 6, 7 or 8. The word arrives in this passage, is used five times in nine verses as though he has just discovered it, and is never spoken again in the book.
Four of those six pair it with another word: my sister, my spouse (4:9, 4:10, 4:12, 5:1). To a modern ear the combination is jarring. To an ancient one it was ordinary affection, and it says something the single word cannot — that he wants her as a wife and claims her as family. Not one or the other. She is both the woman he is marrying and one of his own.
“Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse; thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck.”
Song of Solomon 4:9
Everything he has said so far has been about what she is. This is the first sentence in the book about what she does to him — and it is the only place the word appears, said twice inside one verse.
Then the measurement, and it is the best line in the chapter. With one of thine eyes.
Not with the seven verses of catalog he has just finished. Not with the sum of her. One eye. One link of one necklace. He has been listing her qualities at length, and then he turns around and says that it did not take the list — that the smallest possible fraction of her would have been enough, and was.
Most people can believe that God will put up with them. Some can believe He is patient. This verse is about a God who is not weighing anybody up. One glance did it.
A Garden Inclosed
“A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.”
Song of Solomon 4:12
The word garden has not appeared in this book before. It enters here, and once it is in it does a great deal of work: it turns up seven times in the Song, and every single one of them is in this chapter or after it. Watch what happens to it over the next nineteen verses, because the whole spiritual movement of the chapter is carried by one noun and the pronoun attached to it.
He begins by calling her a garden that is shut. Enclosed, sealed, private — and he says it admiringly, which is worth noticing in an age that treats every wall as a wound. Then, three verses later, he says this:
“A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon.”
Song of Solomon 4:15
Sealed in verse 12; running in verse 15. Same woman, three verses apart. A fountain sealed has become a well of living waters, and nothing happened in between except that he told her she was lovely and asked her to come with him.
And then she speaks — her only line in the entire chapter, and she has been listening to all of this in silence:
“Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits.”
Song of Solomon 4:16
Read that verse twice and watch the pronoun move.
Blow upon my garden — and then, in the same breath, let my beloved come into his garden.
She changes the owner mid-verse. He had called her a garden; she takes the word, holds it for four syllables, and hands it over. This is the single most important thing that happens in chapter 4, and it happens so quietly that most readers go straight past it. She is not asked to do this. He does not request the deed. She simply stops calling herself hers.
And notice what she asks the wind for. Not for shelter — for wind, from both directions, so that the spices thereof may flow out. A sealed garden smells of nothing from outside. She is asking to be opened up so that what is in her can get out to him. The woman who could not be persuaded to leave her house in chapter 2 is now asking weather to come through her.
The chapter ends there. But the chapter division is a later invention and it lands in a bad place, because the next sentence in the book is his reply, and it should be read without a pause:
“I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice… eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved.”
Song of Solomon 5:1
She said his garden. He says my garden. He accepts the word she gave him and walks in, and every verb is finished — I am come, I have gathered, I have eaten, I have drunk. There is no gap between her invitation and his arrival. The moment she stopped holding the deed, he was inside.
And the last thing he does there is turn to everyone else in the room: eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly. The private garden, once opened, immediately feeds other people. That is not incidental. It is what always happens when someone finally hands God the title to themselves.
Where This Chapter Sits
Chapter 3 ended with a wedding procession coming up out of the wilderness under armed guard, and a bridegroom in a garland on the day of the gladness of his heart. Chapter 4 is what he says when the two of them are finally alone, and four things have moved.
He cannot stop talking. The one sentence of 1:15 becomes seven verses of the same sentence. Whatever has changed between them, it has not made him more restrained.
He has stopped calling from a distance. In chapter 2 he was behind a wall saying come away. Here it is come with me, said twice, from beside her.
She is given a name she has not earned. My spouse, six times in nine verses and never again; no spot in thee, said before the failure rather than after the recovery.
And she lets go of herself. This is the real event. The possessive of 2:16 was my beloved is mine, and I am his — herself first, a claim staked. Here, without being asked, she calls her own garden his. That is not yet the reversal of 6:3, and it is nowhere near the surrender of 7:10, but it is the first crack in her ownership of herself, and everything later in the book comes through it.
Which leaves the chapter in a strange and very human position. She has just been told she is flawless, called family, invited out of danger, and welcomed into a marriage. She has just given herself away. By every reasonable measure this is the high point of the book so far.
And the very next scene is her lying in bed listening to him knock, and deciding she would rather not get up.
