The book opens with a woman who wants him, cannot find him, and is convinced she is not much to look at. Everything that happens over the next seven chapters is measured from here.
A study in Song of Solomon 1 · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 14 min read
She Speaks First
“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.”
Song of Solomon 1:2
The first voice in the book is hers, and the first thing she does is want him. No introduction, no scene-setting. Straight in.
But read the verse twice, because something happens in the middle of it that is easy to miss and worth a great deal.
She begins in the third person: let him kiss me. She is talking about him, to somebody else, the way you talk about a person who is not in the room. And before the sentence is finished she has switched to the second person: for thy love is better than wine. Now she is talking to him.
That small grammatical stumble is the truest thing in the chapter. It is what longing actually sounds like — you start describing someone and end up addressing them, because thinking about them at length makes their absence unbearable and you speak as though they were there.
It also sets a marker for the whole series. She begins the book talking about him. By chapter 7 she will be saying come, my beloved, let us go forth — giving directions to his face. The distance closes, and it starts closing inside the second verse.
Verse 3 adds the sense that carries the whole chapter: “Because of the savour of thy good ointments thy name is as ointment poured forth.” A sealed jar of perfume smells of nothing. It has to be broken and tipped out before a room knows it is there. She says his name is like that — not stored, but poured.
Draw Me, We Will Run After Thee
“Draw me, we will run after thee: the king hath brought me into his chambers: we will be glad and rejoice in thee, we will remember thy love more than wine: the upright love thee.”
Song of Solomon 1:4
Count the pronouns. Draw me — singular. We will run after thee — plural. One woman is drawn, and a company runs.
That is not a slip either. It is how this works. Nobody is drawn as a committee; the drawing is personal, one at a time. But nobody who is genuinely drawn runs alone for long. Her being pulled starts other people moving, and the verse shifts from me to we without pausing to explain.
And notice she asks to be drawn. She does not say I will run. She has already discovered what everyone discovers eventually — that wanting to want him is not the same as being able to move, and that the first thing to ask for is the pull itself.
Mine Own Vineyard Have I Not Kept
“I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem… Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me: my mother’s children were angry with me; they made me the keeper of the vineyards; but mine own vineyard have I not kept.”
Song of Solomon 1:5, 6
First, what she is actually saying, because the English has aged and people read a modern quarrel into it that is not there.
She is describing sun-darkened skin from outdoor labor, and she says so in the same breath: because the sun hath looked upon me. In her world the leisured stayed pale and the working poor did not, so what she is embarrassed about is that she looks like someone who has been put to work in a field. It is a class anxiety, not a racial one. And her very next words are but comely — she will not let the self-criticism stand unqualified even while she is making it.
Then the line that does the damage, and it is one of the saddest sentences in Scripture:
They made me the keeper of the vineyards; but mine own vineyard have I not kept.
She was set to work on everybody else’s ground and her own went untended. Note that she does not deny it or blame her brothers for the outcome — she blames them for the assignment and takes the neglect as her own.
Anyone who has worked in a church will feel that verse land. It is the exact shape of a life spent maintaining other people’s spiritual welfare while one’s own quietly goes to seed — committees kept, classes taught, ground broken for everybody, and nothing growing at home. The book puts that confession in chapter one, before anything else happens, which suggests it is where a great many people start.
And it is worth holding on to for chapter 8, because the book comes back to it. In 8:12 she says, at the end of everything, my vineyard, which is mine, is before me. It gets kept eventually. Not here.
Tell Me Where Thou Feedest
“Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou feedest, where thou makest thy flock to rest at noon: for why should I be as one that turneth aside by the flocks of thy companions?”
Song of Solomon 1:7
This is the most important verse in the chapter for anyone following the story, and the reason is what it reveals about where she is.
She does not know where he is. She loves him — O thou whom my soul loveth, and she will use that phrase five times in this book, four of them in one frantic paragraph of chapter 3 — and she has to ask for his address.
Hold that beside a verse five chapters later. In 6:2, without asking anyone, she says flatly: my beloved is gone down into his garden, to the beds of spices. She simply knows. Between chapter 1 and chapter 6 something happens that turns a question into a statement, and what happens is chapter 5 — the night she loses him.
That is the growth this book is charting, and it is not a straight line upward. She learns where he goes by losing him once.
Her second worry in the verse is social: why should I be as one that turneth aside by the flocks of thy companions? She does not want to be found wandering among other people’s flocks looking for him, like a woman with no settled place. It is the anxiety of somebody who belongs to him privately and has no public standing yet.
How He Answers Her
Now watch what he does with all of that, because it is the most instructive thing in the chapter.
She has just told him she is sunburnt, overworked, neglected, unsure where he is, and afraid of looking foolish. He does not address a single one of those points. He does not reassure her that her skin is fine, or tell her the vineyard can be recovered, or explain his whereabouts at length.
“If thou know not, O thou fairest among women, go thy way forth by the footsteps of the flock… I have compared thee, O my love, to a company of horses in Pharaoh’s chariots. Thy cheeks are comely with rows of jewels, thy neck with chains of gold.”
Song of Solomon 1:8, 9, 10
His first two words to her in the entire book, after her list of defects, are “O thou fairest among women.”
He answers her self-assessment by contradicting it, without argument, as a plain statement of what he sees. And then he gives her the only practical instruction in the chapter: go thy way forth by the footsteps of the flock — follow the tracks. You will find me where the flock has already been going. It is not a mystical answer. It is a footpath.
The comparison to Pharaoh’s chariot horses will strike a modern reader as an odd compliment, and it is worth knowing what he means. Egyptian chariot teams were the most magnificent animals in the ancient world, bred and trained beyond anything else on the road, and turned out in worked harness. He is not comparing her to livestock. He is comparing her to the most splendid thing anyone in that century had ever watched go past.
Which is the pattern the whole book will follow. She keeps describing herself as field labor. He keeps describing her as royal.
The Spikenard
“While the king sitteth at his table, my spikenard sendeth forth the smell thereof.”
Song of Solomon 1:12
Stop on that verse, because a thousand years later somebody did exactly this.
A king. Sitting at his table. And spikenard — a specific and very costly import, not perfume in general — filling the room with its smell.
“And being in Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at meat, there came a woman having an alabaster box of ointment of spikenard very precious; and she brake the box, and poured it on his head.”
Mark 14:3
John adds the detail that completes the correspondence: “the house was filled with the odour of the ointment” (John 12:3).
Same three elements, in the same order, a millennium apart. The Song is not predicting Bethany; it is describing what love does when it has something precious and somebody worth spending it on. Mary simply did it.
“She had sought to avoid observation, and her movements might have passed unnoticed, but the ointment filled the room with its fragrance, and published her act to all present.”
Ellen G. White · The Desire of Ages, p. 559
Published her act. That is the difficulty with fragrance and the reason the image keeps returning in this book. It cannot be done quietly. She wanted to go unnoticed and the smell told the room.
And it answers verse 3. She said his name is as ointment poured forth. Here she is the one pouring, and the two verses belong together: what has been poured on you is what you eventually pour out.
Where This Chapter Sits
This series will keep track of one thing from chapter to chapter, because the book is not a collection of love poems but a story with movement in it: how the relationship changes.
So here is the starting position, to measure the rest against.
She wants him, and says so before anything else. That is the one thing already fully in place, and the book never asks her to want him more.
She talks about him before she talks to him. Verse 2, inside a single sentence.
She is preoccupied with her own unfitness. Sunburnt, overworked, her own vineyard unkept. Chapter 1 is the only chapter where she spends this much time on her defects.
She does not know where he is, and has to ask. Compare 6:2, where she will state it without asking anyone.
And she has not yet said that he is hers. This is the marker to watch most closely. There is no possessive statement anywhere in chapter 1. The first comes in the next chapter — my beloved is mine, and I am his (2:16) — and even that one puts herself first. It will take until 6:3 for the order to reverse, and until 7:10 for her to drop the claim altogether and rest on the fact that his desire is toward me.
Possession, then belonging, then being wanted. That is the road, and it starts here, with a woman who is sure of only two things: that she loves him, and that she is not much to look at.
He tells her, in verse 8, that she is the fairest among women. The book has 109 verses left to convince her.
