I think there’s a layer to the Song of Songs which has been largely unexamined. The Song is about Christ and his church, Yahweh and Israel, the nature of the marriage covenant, and the marriage of the couple in the Song. But while the Song is “of Solomon” (or to Solomon, or in the style of Solomon), the primary speaker is the bride. Depending on the method of counting, she has 268 lines of text to his 129 (the daughters of Jerusalem have 25 lines). The whole Song is told, more or less, from the bride’s point of view. And what she sings is the story of how her husband has loved and redeemed her.
In contrast to the way we tell love stories today, this song opens with a woman’s adoration of a man. “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!” She exclaims (1.2). She extols his virtues to the daughters of Jerusalem, who rejoice with her. But all is not perfectly well. She fears she is not as appealing to him as he is to her. “I am very dark, but lovely,” she says (1.5). She sounds as though she is trying to convince him. Why is she dark? Because the sun has looked upon her. Her brothers forced her into servitude, working in their vineyards while her own was unkept (1.6). Her situation is precarious. If he does not take her, she may be forced to prostitute herself, veiling herself beside the flocks of his companions (1.7; cf. Genesis 38.14–15).
Happily, he does return her affection. She is his “lily of the valleys,” beside which all other women are as brambles (2.1–2). Their love for each other during this section of the Song deepens and grows. He begins to provide for her, care for her, tenderly embrace her (2.3–6). She has to urge the daughters of Jerusalem to remain pure until the time for love, as her relationship to her love becomes more sexually charged (2.7). And as their relationship deepens, they become betrothed. “Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come away” he says to her (2.13), and she is his. She gives a foretaste of her marriage vow— “My beloved is mine and I am his” (2.16).
Some dissonance comes to disrupt her joy, however. The bride has a disturbed dream the night before her wedding. “On my bed by night I sought him whom my soul loves; I sought him, but found him not” (3.1). In her dream, she goes through the city and searches for him. She asks the watchmen for help, but apparently receives none. Eventually she does find him, and clings to him. This dream belies her fear that the groom will not actually be hers. She wakes up to discover it was just a dream; now, the groom arrives for the wedding (3.11), and everything is right with the world. In chapter 4 the bride and groom are married. His vows are represented by a description of her beauty; hers, by her longing and acceptance (4.16b). At the conclusion of the wedding ceremony, she is a garden unlocked, a fountain unsealed, and the groom drinks his fill of her sexual delights (5.1).
Shortly thereafter, however, the bride has another, darker dream. This time, she dreams that her husband has come to her door, but by the time she opens it, he is gone (5.6). Her soul fails her— this is what she had feared! In her dream, she runs across the formerly ambivalent watchmen. Now, they are not only unhelpful but actively violent (5.7) uncovering her just as her brothers had forced her to work uncovered in the harsh sun. Awaking from her dream, she goes to the daughters of Jerusalem with her fears (5.10). When they ask her why she loves him, she extols his beauty, as he had hers (5.10–16). Whether he returns her love or not, she loves him. Her companions ask her where he has gone; she tells them sadly that he “has gone down to his garden to the bed of spices, to graze in the garden and to gather lilies” (6.2). Once, she was his garden. Hers was the bed of spices he delighted in. She was his lily, his only lily among the brambles. Not
anymore, she fears. She ends by repeating her marriage vow, and concludes, “he grazes among the lilies” (6.3). Those words, usually a poetic turn of phrase accompanying her description of him as a deer, now take on a darker significance. She fears her lover, her husband, has gone after other women.
He arrives at this time, and tenderly comforts her. He repeats (in essence) his marriage vows. He describes her beauty again (6.4–10). She is not persuaded. She leaves, perhaps seeking other lovers. Her companions, the daughters of Jerusalem, urge her to return (6.11–13). Her husband finds her, and repeats his vows a third time (7.1–9), expressing his desire to have sex with her. This does persuade her, and she repeats her vows again, this time with one important difference: “I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me” (7.10). Before, she was able to affirm the legality of their love, but was not convinced of his desire. She now believes that what they share is not merely legal obligation, but covenant love in all its fullness.
The falling action of the Song is the companionship of the bride and groom (7.11–13). This refers possibly to their joint household productivity, their attempt to have children, or perhaps more sex. Regardless of the specific meaning, it is a picture of marital health. These short lines summarize their life together: productivity, love, beauty.
The last chapter functions as an epilogue. Years have passed, and the couple are now old, and happily reminiscing about their years together. She wishes they had known each other since infancy (8.1). They are old, and must lean on each other to walk (8.5). She remembers their early love, before they were wed (8.5; cf. 2.3–7). She implores him to love her unto death and the grave, the way Yah loves.
At the very end, the bride is an old woman giving counsel to the young women about love. When she is asked what advice she would give to an unattractive young woman, she reminisces that though she was beautiful, her beauty was not the climax of her marriage: “I was a wall, and my breasts were like towers; then I was in his eyes as one who finds peace” (8.10). The sweetness of her marriage, she recalls, has been that her husband has quieted her fears, and in his eyes she has found peace.
As the curtain falls, her husband wanders into the garden looking for her (8.13), and she invites him to bed the way she did when they were younger (8.14; cf. 2.17). The enduring sweetness of marital love meets the passion of sexual love, still strong in their twilight years.
The journey of the bride from fear to peace mutually informs the larger themes of the Song. First, we see the relationship between Yahweh and Israel through the eyes of the bride. Canonically, the Song belongs to the period of the writings, collected and edited after the exile. Israel is the bride who has prostituted herself, who is darkened through oppressive labor. She fears the Lord has cast her off forever (“Can these bones live?”). In the Song, Yahweh tenderly comforts his people, speaking peace to them. The bride’s vow (I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine”) are reminiscent of God’s great covenant promise, repeated again and again, as a husband to his fearful bride: “I will be their God, and they shall be my people” ( Jeremiah 31.33). They have not been cast off. His covenant with Abraham still holds, and he will still bring about blessing to the nations through Israel.
How does Yahweh comfort his people? In Jesus’ coming to purchase for himself a bride, not only from Israel but from all the families of the earth. We are the bride, who have loved the appearing of our Lord Jesus. We are those whom he has loved, with whom he has entered into covenant. We are the company of those who are amazed, still, that he has loved us more than we have loved him. We are those who need, week by week, to come into his banqueting house, hear his covenant promises, and to be refreshed by his love. The Song reminds us, as we need so much to be reminded, that the Lord’s love for his people is not merely legal, but full covenant love: “I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me.” In Jesus’ love for his bride we see “flashes of fire, the very flame of Yah” (8.6).
All this provides insight into the nature of our marriages, as pictures of Christ and the church. Women can tend toward fear in the marriage relationship, and not every man is as pure as the groom in the Song, or the greater Groom. Explorations of this theme in the Song can pastorally address the fears of women, the vanity of women, and the lusts of men. When a man is unfaithful to his wife, he exposes her to the violence of a world without his loving protection. When a woman doubts her husband without cause, she is leaving his protection. Her anxiety is not benign, but the seed of greater sin. Seeing the existential dimension of the relationship between bride and groom in the Song leads to fertile ground for pastoral counseling in marriage. He needs to comfort her, to repeat his vows with his lips and with his body. He needs to desire all of her, and reassure her that she is his lily among the brambles. She needs to trust him in return, and to seek her comfort in him.
What a husband and wife find in the fullness of their covenant love flashes with the flame of Yah. It tells the story of a cast-off bride whose lover found her, paid for her, and redeemed her; who became in his eyes as one who finds peace.