Today in God's Word—August 2023
East Tallassee Church of Christ
August 18, Song of Solomon 1
The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s.
- Song of Solomon 1:1
The 1 Kings account of Solomon’s reign said that King Solomon wrote 1,005 songs. This little eight chapter book is one of them. We don’t know if Solomon wrote any other “hits.” The other 1,004 are lost in antiquity.
This song has all ingredients of a hit song or movie. It’s a love story, always a popular topic for the arts. It’s dialogue, professing love and expressing desire. The dialogue is mostly exchanged between the two main characters, with some commentary from a chorus, a common narrative device in ancient theatre. Like many love stories, it pairs a beautiful young country girl in love with a local shepherd, but pursued by a powerful prince or king.
Some readers question the book’s place in the canon of Scripture, asking, “That’s all fine for a romantic book or film, but what’s a story like this doing in the Bible?” Ancient Jewish communities received it as authentic and recognized it as Scripture. Long before movies and ratings, young Jewish men were not allowed to read Song of Solomon before they were 30 years old, because of the frank, erotic tone of some passages. It is surely unlike any other book of the Bible. Let’s trust that the ancient Jews who were God’s appointed guardians of the oracles of God did their job as God led them. If we believe that God inspired the Bible writers, it’s no more difficult to trust that he guided the collection and preservation of those inspired writings that have come down through the ages to us as the Bible.
The lyrics of the song or the speeches in this dialogue are mostly exchanged between unnamed speakers. But the speakers are not identified. So translators often assign identifying labels to distinguish between speakers in the passages. It’s clear that there’s a female and one or two males, and a chorus. Translators
and interpreters determine those labels from the gender and number of the Hebrew words. But other than the words of the story themselves, we don’t know for sure who says many of the lines.
Was this an autobiographical song? Was it a work of fiction, a well-known romantic tale? Was the woman really in love with the shepherd boy back home and taken into Solomon’s harem? Was the shepherding talk figurative about Solomon doing his duties as king? That seems unlikely, but we don’t know.
We do know that the lady had a good tan, but not in a culture where a tan was a fashion statement. She didn’t get it from a tanning bed or lounging by the pool. Her brothers forced her to work in the family vineyards, out in the sun. She said that she had not taken care of her own vineyard, that is, she had not protected her skin from the heat and sunlight that deeply tanned it. The other pampered women in the Jerusalem harem might have mocked her as “common” or “a country bumpkin.”
What’s the significance of this book to you and me? Scholars disagree about the value of the book and how to interpret it. Some take its expressions of love and affection quite literally, making it a guide book about intimacy in marriage. Others through the centuries have read it as a grand allegory, and find an illustration of the love between Christ and his church in its text. Some have suggested that it is the heart of the Bible, appropriately placed in the middle of the Bible, expressing the love Christ has for us and we should have for him. This last interpretation was very popular in Victorian times, when many of the classic commentaries were written and sexual matters were not discussed in public or polite company.
So as we read these chapters, we should not be surprised if we come to some different conclusion about what is written here. But there are some good lessons and powerful expressions of love in these pages that should
be helpful to us, even if we’re unsure of the exact contextual meaning.
Copyright © 2023 by Michael B. McElroy. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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