She lost him in chapter 5. In chapter 6 somebody asks her where he is and she answers without hesitating — and then he describes her using the same words he used before she failed him, which is the whole gospel in a repeated sentence.
A study in Song of Solomon 6 · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 14 min read
Whither Is Thy Beloved Gone?
“Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women? whither is thy beloved turned aside? that we may seek him with thee.”
Song of Solomon 6:1
This is the same crowd who asked her, three verses earlier, what made her man so special. She answered them for seven verses. Now they want to come along.
And she does not send them to a study, or offer to introduce them later. She answers immediately:
“My beloved is gone down into his garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens, and to gather lilies.”
Song of Solomon 6:2
Hold that verse next to the first thing she ever said about finding him, back in chapter 1:
“Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou feedest, where thou makest thy flock to rest at noon.”
Song of Solomon 1:7
In chapter 1 she had to ask where he was. In chapter 6 she is the one answering that question for other people. Same woman, same question, opposite end of it.
And now look at what stands between those two verses. Not a course, not a mountaintop experience — chapter 5. The knock she was too comfortable to answer, the empty doorway, the watchmen, the veil taken off her in the street. That is what taught her where he goes.
It is worth being blunt about this, because it is one of the few genuinely useful things anybody can tell you about the Christian life. She did not learn his whereabouts by keeping him. She learned it by losing him and going after him anyway. There is knowledge of God available on the other side of a failure that is not available anywhere else, and this chapter is where the Song of Solomon says so.
I Am My Beloved’s
“I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lilies.”
Song of Solomon 6:3
If you read this book quickly you will go straight past the most important sentence in it, because you have seen these words before and they look identical. They are not identical. They are reordered.
- 2:16 — “My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies.”
- 6:3 — “I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lilies.”
Same words. Same closing clause about the lilies, unchanged, so you cannot miss that the two sentences are meant to be compared. And the order is flipped.
In chapter 2 the first thing out of her mouth was what he is to me. A claim. Ownership, in the direction that benefits her. In chapter 6 the first thing out of her mouth is whose I am.
Nobody made her say it that way. There is no instruction in the intervening chapters to reverse the sentence. It simply comes out in a different order after chapter 5, the way things do when something has actually changed in a person rather than merely been agreed to.
Possession has become belonging. And it is not finished yet — in chapter 7 she will drop the claim on him altogether.
He Says It All Over Again
Now he speaks, and this is the part of chapter 6 that should stop a person in their tracks.
“Thou art beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners… thy hair is as a flock of goats that appear from Gilead. Thy teeth are as a flock of sheep which go up from the washing, whereof every one beareth twins, and there is not one barren among them. As a piece of a pomegranate are thy temples within thy locks.”
Song of Solomon 6:4-7
Read that beside what he said in chapter 4:
“Thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead. Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing; whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them… thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate within thy locks.”
Song of Solomon 4:1-3
It is the same speech. Not a similar speech — the same images in the same order, the goats off the same hillside, the sheep coming up from the same washing, the same pomegranate at her temple.
And everything that happened in chapter 5 happened in between.
Between the first time he said these words and the second, she heard him knock and did not get up. She raised two trivial objections while he stood outside in the wet. She opened the door too late. She lost him, hunted the city for him, and was beaten by the men who should have helped her.
And when he speaks again, his description of her has not changed by one image.
This is what “there is no spot in thee” was actually worth. Anybody can say a generous thing about someone in a good moment; the question is what he says afterwards. Chapter 4 made the claim. Chapter 6 is the receipt.
Most people carry an assumption so deep they have never examined it: that failing God moves you down a list. That He thinks less of you now, and that some amount of good behaviour will eventually restore the old rating. Chapter 6 is the Bible taking that assumption and quietly declining it. He is not grading her. He is describing her, and it comes out the same both times.
Turn Away Thine Eyes
“Turn away thine eyes from me, for they have overcome me.”
Song of Solomon 6:5
There is one line in this chapter that has no business being in a religious book, and it is this one.
He is the king. He is the one who came over the mountains, the one with sixty armed men around his litter, the one who has been doing all the pursuing since chapter 2. And he tells her to stop looking at him, because he cannot take it.
In 4:9 he said she had ravished his heart with one of her eyes. Now the same eyes have overcome him — a word for being defeated in battle, said two verses after he called her an army.
Sit with what that means if the Beloved of this book is Christ, because Scripture is not shy about it elsewhere either. God is described as rejoicing over His people with singing (Zephaniah 3:17); the wedding day is called the day of the gladness of his heart (3:11). Here He is a man asking to be spared a look because it undoes him.
Most people can believe God will forgive them. Rather fewer can believe He likes them. Almost nobody can believe He is affected by them. This verse says He is.
My Undefiled Is But One
“There are threescore queens, and fourscore concubines, and virgins without number. My dove, my undefiled is but one; she is the only one of her mother, she is the choice one of her that bare her.”
Song of Solomon 6:8, 9
Sixty queens. Eighty concubines. An uncounted crowd beyond them. And then: but one.
The arithmetic is deliberately overwhelming, and it is placed there so the last phrase can cut through it. The point is not that there were no other women. The point is that the number did not matter.
And notice which word he brings back for her: my dove, my undefiled. Those are two of the four names he called through the locked door in 5:2, when she would not open it. He is using the vocabulary of the night she failed, and using it as praise.
Then the last line of verse 9, which is easy to skim: “The daughters saw her, and blessed her; yea, the queens and the concubines, and they praised her.” The crowd he has just numbered agrees with him. Nobody in this scene is competing.
Fair As The Moon, Clear As The Sun
“Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?”
Song of Solomon 6:10
This is the most quoted verse in the book after “altogether lovely,” and it deserves its reputation.
Four images, and they are not a random pile — they brighten in order. The morning: first light, when you can tell something is coming but not yet what. The moon: real light, but borrowed light; the moon has none of its own and shines by reflecting the sun, which is exactly right for a people whose whole business is reflecting somebody else. The sun: full daylight, nothing hidden. An army with banners: not light at all any more, but force — ordered, unmistakable, flying its colors.
Dawn to noon to an army on the march. That is a description of something that grows.
That progression is why this verse has been read for generations as a picture of a movement, and why Adventists in particular have seen their own history in it. Read it against chapter 5 and the sequence is hard to miss: the knock at midnight, the empty doorway, the beating in the street — and then a company that comes out of all of it looking forth as the morning. The light in verse 10 does not begin at noon. It begins at first light, in the dark, immediately after the worst thing that ever happened to her.
And the last image is not light at all. An army with banners is a body of people who have taken a position publicly and are carrying it forward under colors everyone can read. If that is prophetic, then the banners have contents, and Scripture says what they are:
“And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people.”
Revelation 14:6
The three angels’ messages of Revelation 14:6-11, and the angel of Revelation 18:1 whose glory lightens the earth, are the most demanding thing God has ever asked anybody to say out loud. They are also, on this reading, what the banners have written on them — and it is worth noticing that the first of the three is called the everlasting gospel. The army is carrying good news. That is what it is armed with.
And here is the detail almost every treatment of this verse leaves out: the phrase is not new in verse 10. He said it himself, six verses earlier, in 6:4 — “terrible as an army with banners.” The crowd in verse 10 is repeating the Bridegroom’s own words back about her. Whatever she has become, He said it about her first, and they only noticed afterwards.
The Garden Of Nuts
“I went down into the garden of nuts to see the fruits of the valley, and to see whether the vine flourished, and the pomegranates budded. Or ever I was aware, my soul made me like the chariots of Amminadib.”
Song of Solomon 6:11, 12
Honesty is worth more than cleverness here, so: verse 12 is the most obscure sentence in the Song of Solomon, and nobody is certain what it means. Even who is speaking is disputed. Amminadib may be a name, or two Hebrew words run together meaning something like my willing people. Translations differ wildly, and any preacher who sounds confident about this verse is telling you about himself rather than about the text.
What is clear is verse 11, and it is lovely. Somebody goes down into the garden not to gather anything but to see whether the vine flourished — to check on growth. And whatever verse 12 means precisely, its shape is unmistakable: before I knew it, something swept the speaker along faster than they intended.
Leave it there. A book this rich can afford one verse we do not understand, and pretending otherwise would spoil the rest.
Return, O Shulamite
“Return, return, O Shulamite; return, return, that we may look upon thee. What will ye see in the Shulamite? As it were the company of two armies.”
Song of Solomon 6:13
Here, in the second-to-last verse of the middle of the book, the woman is given a name.
She has been my love, my dove, my sister, my spouse, fairest among women. She has never been called anything of her own. Now she is the Shulamite, and it is the only time in the Song that she is named at all.
Many readers have noticed what the name looks like. Shulamith and Shelomoh — Solomon — come from the same Hebrew root, the root behind shalom, peace; and Shulamith reads naturally as its feminine form. On that reading, when the book finally gives her a name of her own, the name it gives her is his.
I put that forward as what it is — a widely held reading of a name, not a doctrine, and there are scholars who instead connect it to the village of Shunem. But it fits the chapter it is standing in. This is the chapter where she stopped saying he is mine first and started saying I am his first. A woman who has just changed the order of that sentence is exactly the woman who would be handed his name at the end of it.
Where This Chapter Sits
Chapter 5 was the collapse. Chapter 6 is what the collapse produced, and it is the strongest evidence in the book that this is a story about growth and not a collection of love poems.
She knows where he is. In 1:7 she asked a stranger for directions to him. In 6:2 she gives the directions. The failure did that.
The possessive turns around. 2:16 led with her claim on him; 6:3 leads with her belonging to him. Same words, different order, and the order is the point.
His opinion of her did not move. He repeats the chapter 4 description word for word on the far side of chapter 5. This is the chapter that proves “no spot in thee” was not flattery.
And she is given a name. Not a compliment — a name, and quite possibly his own.
One thing worth saying plainly, because 6:10 is a verse people like to point at themselves with. It is a magnificent description and it belongs to God’s faithful people; the New Testament has no hesitation about calling the church a bride (Ephesians 5:32; 2 Corinthians 11:2). But when Ellen White applies this exact verse to the church, she attaches a condition to it that is usually left off the quotation:
“So long as they remained united, the church would go forth ‘fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners.’ Song of Solomon 6:10. Nothing could withstand her onward progress.”
Ellen G. White · The Acts of the Apostles, p. 91
She is writing about the apostolic church there — the believers at Jerusalem organizing themselves in Acts 6 — and the sentence begins with so long as. That is a caution, not a coronation. The verse describes what God’s people look like when they are united with Him and each other, and it says nothing whatever about anybody’s right to point at the verse and claim it as a title.
Which fits the chapter, because the woman in it is not claiming anything. She has just stopped putting herself first in her own sentence. The army with banners is the last thing she would have called herself, and she never does. He said it in 6:4, and the onlookers repeated it in 6:10, and she was busy telling people where to find him.
