He knocked. She did not want to get out of bed. By the time she opened the door he was gone — and out of the worst hour of her life came the most beautiful description of him in the Bible. This is also the chapter that waited three thousand years for October 22, 1844.
A study in Song of Solomon 5 · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 16 min read
I Am Come Into My Garden
The chapter opens on the best moment in the book, and almost nobody reads it that way, because the chapter break falls in the wrong place.
At the end of chapter 4 she finally let go. He had called her a garden; she took the word and gave it back to him — “let my beloved come into his garden.” The very next sentence in the Hebrew is his answer:
“I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice; I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk: eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved.”
Song of Solomon 5:1
Every verb is completed. I am come. I have gathered. I have eaten. I have drunk. There is no delay anywhere in the sentence. She opened, and he was in.
And then he turns to the room and says eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly. Whatever happens in the rest of this chapter, hold on to the fact that it begins here — with the doors open, the table set, and other people invited in.
What follows is the hardest passage in the Song of Solomon.
I Sleep, But My Heart Waketh
“I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying, Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.”
Song of Solomon 5:2
Six words in and the whole spiritual condition of most Christians is on the page. I sleep, but my heart waketh.
She is not an unbeliever. She is not cold. Her heart is awake — she hears him, recognizes his voice instantly, knows exactly who is at the door. She is simply asleep, and the two halves of her are not in agreement.
Then listen to what he calls her through the door, because he stacks up four names in a row and not one of them is a reproach: my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled. He is standing outside in the dark asking to be let in, and his opening move is a pile of endearments. He does not lead with a complaint. He never does.
And then the detail that should ruin you a little: “my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.” He is wet. He has been outside long enough for the night to soak his hair. He does not say let me in because I am your husband or let me in because I have a right to. He says, in effect, it is cold out here and I have been waiting.
Remember where he told her he would be. One chapter earlier: “Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, I will get me to the mountain of myrrh” (4:6). He said he would be out in the dark until morning. He was.
I Have Put Off My Coat
“I have put off my coat; how shall I put it on? I have washed my feet; how shall I defile them?”
Song of Solomon 5:3
There are verses in the Bible that indict you without raising their voice, and this is one of them.
Look at what the two objections actually are. I have taken my coat off. I have washed my feet. That is the entire case. Not danger, not distance, not doubt about whether it is really him — she has already said it is his voice. Two pieces of mild personal inconvenience, both of them undone in about fifteen seconds.
And notice the shape of both sentences. She does not say no. She asks a question: how shall I put it on? how shall I defile them? This is not refusal. It is the far more common thing — the reasonable-sounding difficulty raised in place of an answer. She is not rebelling against him. She is negotiating with herself, in bed, while he stands in the rain.
Anyone who has ever known perfectly well what God was asking and found themselves suddenly interested in the practical obstacles has been in this verse.
Myrrh On The Handles Of The Lock
“My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him. I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh, and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock.”
Song of Solomon 5:4, 5
He does not argue with her excuses. He reaches through.
My bowels were moved for him is the King James way of saying that something turned over inside her. It is a physical word, and it is the right one: the argument did not move her, and the sight of his hand did.
Now the detail everyone misses. When she finally gets to the door, her hands come away covered in myrrh. Where did it come from? She was in bed. It is on the handle. He left it there — he had touched the lock, and the perfume he was carrying stayed on it after he had gone.
He said in 4:6 that he was going to the mountain of myrrh. He came back with it on his hands. And the only reason she ever finds that out is that she is too late.
This is one of the truest things in the book. The evidence that God came is very often something you discover after the moment has passed — the residue on the handle, not the hand itself.
He Had Withdrawn Himself, And Was Gone
“I opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone: my soul failed when he spake: I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he gave me no answer.”
Song of Solomon 5:6
She opened the door and there was nobody there.
Read the four clauses in order, because they are a description of a particular kind of night that many believers know from the inside. I sought him, but I could not find him. I called him, but he gave me no answer. This is not the absence of God as an idea. It is the absence of God as an experience, arriving immediately after a moment of obedience that came slightly too late.
Two things must be said about this verse, and the order matters.
The first is that the Bible let it stand. Nobody sanded this off. The book that contains there is no spot in thee also contains he gave me no answer, and it puts them one chapter apart.
The second is the exact wording, which is the key to everything that follows and is worth reading slowly: he had withdrawn himself, and was gone. Not he had given up on her. Not he had ended it. He had gone somewhere — and the book will tell us where. Hold that thought; we come back to it below, and it is the most important sentence in this study.
The Watchmen Smote Me
“The watchmen that went about the city found me, they smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took away my veil from me.”
Song of Solomon 5:7
She has met these men before. In chapter 3 she was out searching the same streets, and “the watchmen that go about the city found me” (3:3) — she asked them if they had seen him, and the text records no reply at all. They were useless.
They are not useless now. Same men, same city, same woman looking for the same person, and this time they smite her, wound her, and take her veil. The escalation between the two scenes is deliberate and it is the reason the two searches are in the book at all.
Who are they? The Bible does not leave the word open. Watchman is the prophets’ own term for a religious teacher, and they use it constantly — sometimes as an honour and sometimes as a charge:
“Son of man, I have made thee a watchman unto the house of Israel: therefore hear the word at my mouth, and give them warning from me.”
Ezekiel 3:17
“His watchmen are blind: they are all ignorant, they are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark; sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber.”
Isaiah 56:10
So the picture is not obscure. The men whose job was to guard the city are the men who beat the woman who was looking for the bridegroom. And the specific injury is worth naming: they took away her veil. They did not merely fail to help her — they publicly humiliated her. A veil is what you are wearing when you are a bride. They took the bridal thing off her in the street.
Keep that image. In a moment it is going to acquire a date.
A Prophecy That Waited Three Thousand Years
Everything above stands on its own as spiritual counsel; you can preach this chapter to any believer in any century and it will find them. But there is a reading of Song of Solomon 5:2-8 that goes further, and I hold it: this passage is a prophecy, and it was fulfilled in the space of about twenty years in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Let me say plainly what kind of claim that is before making it. This is an argument from the text and from documented history. It is not something the Spirit of Prophecy teaches — Ellen White quotes this book often, and quotes 5:10 and 5:16 constantly, but she never once comments on verses 2 through 8. So nobody should present this reading as though she taught it. It has to stand on the words themselves and on what actually happened, and I think it does.
The knock (5:2). In the early 1840s a Baptist farmer and preacher named William Miller, working from the 2300 days of Daniel 8:14, concluded that the cleansing of the sanctuary — which he understood as the return of Christ — would fall about 1843 or 1844. The movement that grew around this preaching crossed every denominational line in the northern United States; the people in it were Methodists and Baptists and Presbyterians and Congregationalists who had heard something and could not un-hear it.
The Millerites themselves reached for a wedding text to describe what was happening to them, and it was not this one — it was the parable of the ten virgins:
“And at midnight there was a cry made, Behold, the bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet him.”
Matthew 25:6
They called it the Midnight Cry, and they were right to. But Song of Solomon 5:2 is the same event from inside the house: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh.
A note on the date, because precision costs nothing and protects everything. The specific day — October 22, 1844 — was not William Miller’s. It was worked out by Samuel S. Snow, who presented it at the Exeter, New Hampshire camp meeting in August 1844, arguing from the Day of Atonement in the seventh month. Miller himself was slow to accept it and only endorsed it in early October, weeks before the day. It is a small correction and it is worth making, because an argument that can be checked should be checkable all the way down.
The excuses (5:3). The Millerite record is full of exactly the coat-and-feet objection — believers who agreed with the message and were reluctant to bear the cost of it: the standing in the community, the pulpit, the family, the business. How shall I put it on? How shall I defile them?
The empty doorway (5:6). October 22, 1844 came, and passed, and Christ did not appear. They had opened the door and there was nobody there. What they wrote afterwards reads exactly like Song of Solomon 5:6 — and this is the verse the passage lives or dies on, so read it once more with the date attached: I opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone.
The watchmen (5:7). Then came the part that hurt worse than the disappointment. The ministers of the churches these people had come out of — the watchmen, the keepers of the walls — turned on them from the pulpit. Adventist believers were mocked in sermons, expelled from congregations, and made a public joke in the newspapers. They had been publicly identified as a bride waiting for a bridegroom, and the men whose office was to guard them took that veil off them in front of everybody.
That is the sequence, in order, in eight verses: call → delay → obedience too late → apparent absence → public humiliation by the religious establishment. I do not know of another passage in Scripture that fits 1844 as closely, and I do not think the fit is an accident.
Two more corrections to the history, offered in the same spirit as the one about Snow.
The little group that remained did not take the name Seventh-day Adventist in 1863. The name was chosen by vote at Battle Creek on October 1, 1860; what happened in May 1863 was the organizing of the General Conference. Two separate events, three years apart, and both worth keeping straight.
And they were indeed remarkably young — but the youth belongs to 1844, not to 1863. In the autumn of the Disappointment, Ellen Harmon was sixteen, James White was twenty-three, J. N. Andrews was fifteen, and Uriah Smith was twelve. By the time the church organized they were adults with children. The conspicuous exception in both years is Joseph Bates, a retired sea captain who was fifty-two in 1844 and who is the reason the Sabbath reached the rest of them at all. God did not build that movement out of young people only. He built it out of whoever would stay.
And one thing must be said clearly, because it is easy to get wrong and costly when you do. The hero of this story is not the movement. It is not a denomination, and the point of the prophecy is not to award anybody a trophy. God used the Advent believers of the 1840s exactly as He used Martin Luther, who never kept the Sabbath, and Cyrus, who did not know Him at all. Being used by God is an assignment, not a promotion. The Bride in this book is God’s faithful people across every age, and any remnant is something that participates in her — never something that replaces her.
He Had Not Left. He Had Moved.
Now we come back to that sentence, because the Song does something in chapter 6 that almost every treatment of this prophecy leaves out, and it is the strongest thing in the whole argument.
Chapter 5 ends with her wounded, veil-less and unanswered. Chapter 6 opens with the daughters of Jerusalem asking her a question — “Whither is thy beloved gone?” (6:1) — and this time, unlike chapter 1 when she had to ask a stranger where he pastured his flock, she knows:
“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
Put the two verses side by side and the shape of the whole thing appears:
- 5:6 — “my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone”
- 6:2 — “my beloved is gone down into his garden”
He had not abandoned her. He had gone somewhere, and she found out where.
That is precisely what happened after October 22, 1844, and it is the reason there is an Adventist church at all. The small group who kept studying did not conclude that they had imagined the whole thing. They concluded that they had been right about the date and wrong about the event. Daniel 8:14 does not say then shall the Lord return. It says:
“Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed.”
Daniel 8:14
The sanctuary in question was never the earth. It is the one Hebrews describes:
“For Christ is not entered into the holy places made with hands, which are the figures of the true; but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us.”
Hebrews 9:24
Christ had not failed to come. He had moved — from the holy place to the most holy, into the final work of atonement that the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16 had been rehearsing for fifteen centuries. The door she opened was empty because he was not standing outside it any more; he had gone into his garden to do something. (Ellen White sets out this whole discovery in The Great Controversy, in the chapters on the Disappointment and the sanctuary; it is the hinge on which everything afterwards turns.)
This is why chapter 5 is not a tragedy. Read alone it is a story about losing God through laziness. Read with 6:2 in view it is a story about growth through loss — because the woman who in 1:7 had to ask a stranger where he was is, by 6:2, the one answering that question for other people.
She learned where he went. She only learned it because he left.
What Is Thy Beloved More Than Another?
There is one more thing in this chapter, and it may be the best thing in the book.
After she is beaten in the street, she turns to the other women and begs them: “if ye find my beloved… tell him, that I am sick of love” (5:8). And they ask her a question that sounds almost cruel, given the state she is in:
“What is thy beloved more than another beloved, O thou fairest among women? what is thy beloved more than another beloved, that thou dost so charge us?”
Song of Solomon 5:9
What makes yours so special? Asked of a woman who has just been rejected at a door, hunted through a city, and assaulted by the authorities.
And she answers it. For seven verses she answers it, and it is the only extended description of him in the entire Song of Solomon:
“My beloved is white and ruddy, the chiefest among ten thousand… His mouth is most sweet: yea, he is altogether lovely. This is my beloved, and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem.”
Song of Solomon 5:10, 16
Stop and take in where this is placed. The greatest description of the Bridegroom in the Bible comes out of the worst hour of the bride’s life. Not from the wedding procession of chapter 3. Not from the garden of chapter 4. From the street, with her veil gone.
These are the two verses Ellen White reaches for more than any others in this book, and she always applies them to one person:
“Moses’ life of toil and heart-burdening care was irradiated with the presence of Him who is ‘the chiefest among ten thousand,’ and the One ‘altogether lovely.’”
Ellen G. White · Education, p. 69
And then the payoff, in the first verse of the next chapter. Having heard her describe him, the daughters of Jerusalem say:
“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
They want to come. They were bystanders in chapter 5 and they are searchers in chapter 6, and the only thing that changed was that a wounded woman told them what he was like.
If you are looking for the biblical pattern of how the last message actually reaches the world, it is here, and it is not a strategy. Somebody who has lost him, been publicly humiliated over him, and gone looking for him anyway describes him to the people standing around — and they ask to come along.
Where This Chapter Sits
Chapter 4 was the summit: no spot in thee, my sister, my spouse, and a woman handing over the deed to her own garden. Chapter 5 is the fall, and it is placed immediately afterwards on purpose.
She loses him by degrees, not by rebellion. There is no betrayal in this chapter. There is a warm bed, a mild inconvenience, and a delay of perhaps a minute. The Song is far more worried about drowsiness than about wickedness.
The watchmen turn. In chapter 3 they had nothing for her; here they take something off her. The book is honest about the fact that the people appointed to guard the city are sometimes the ones who hurt you in it.
And she starts to testify. This is the growth, and it is the last thing you would have predicted. Up to now every word out of her mouth has been about her longing, her searching, her unworthiness. Here, for the first time, she talks at length about him — and other people join her because of it.
The possessive has not moved yet. My beloved is mine, and I am his still stands from 2:16, herself first. But it is about to: in 6:3 it flips to “I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine” — and the thing that flips it is this chapter. She stops leading with her claim on him after the night she found out what it is like not to be able to find him.
That is the whole argument of the Song in one chapter, and it is why the Great Disappointment belongs in a love song. She was late, and it cost her, and it hurt, and the men who should have helped her made it worse — and none of it was the end, because he had not left, he had moved, and finding out where he went made her someone other people would follow.
He is still altogether lovely. She says so with her veil gone.
