Israel’s sins are like scarlet, but they shall be like wool, Isaiah says.  Scarlet?  What’s wrong with scarlet?  Why not “black”?

Though scarlet is a color in the tabernacle curtains (the word is used 25+ times in Exodus), Isaiah seems to be referring to the association of scarlet with prostitution.  Rahab puts out a scarlet cord through her window, and Tamar’s son Zerah has a scarlet cord wrapped around his wrist.  Israel has been an unfaithful bride, a scarlet woman.

But then we have Solomon describing his bride in these same terms - her mouth is like a scarlet thread.

And it’s not the only connection of the bride of the Song with the bad girls of the Bible.  The bride is veiled (4:1), like Tamar (Gen 38:15).  She wanders the streets at night calling out for her man, like Lady Folly in Proverbs.

In part, this is making a point about love.  When Jesus was filled with the zeal of His Father’s Spirit, people thought he was mad.  The bride of the Song is filled with the same madness: Twice she says that she is sick with love, driven mad by her longing for her lover.  There is an essential difference between lust and proper desire, but the difference is not that proper desire is weaker than lust or that proper desire always behaves properly.

The Song is also reflecting the large patterns of biblical history.  The Song is not subversive.  Or, rather, it is no more subversive than the rest of the Bible, which shows us prostitutes and questionable women ingrafted into the genealogy of Jesus.  The Bible is not the story of the good girl who earns the hero’s love.  It’s the story of the woman in scarlet regarbed in white, the harlot made over into the bride.