The Beloved celebrates the beauty of his Shulamite’s lips, describing them as “a thread of crimson” upon a mouth that is altogether lovely (Song 4:3). It were easy perhaps to pass by this all too quickly, passing it off, if we attend to it at all, as a kind of romantic grandiloquence which ultimately means little other than “your lips are red”; strange imagery perhaps, culturally embedded in the Ancient Near East, but nothing demanding serious theological attention, nothing but a lover’s anacreontic flourish.
I reject such a reading outright. All of Scripture is “God-breathed” (2 Tim 3:16–17) in a way that is similar to the living human person (Gen 2:7) and, as Jim Jordan puts it, the Holy Spirit doesn’t waste his breath on mere flourishes.
The Beloved’s invocation of the image of a scarlet thread makes more than an artistic comment on his lover’s mouth; it makes a theological one. He is incorporating her lips, and their shared nuptial love sustained by the image of the kiss (Song 1:2; 8:1), by way of intertextual references to those places where scarlet ribbons are woven into the fabric of God’s story: a thread tied around an infant’s wrist, textiles of the tabernacle, symbols surrounding Levitical holy water, Rahab’s scarf hanging from a window in Jericho, and so on—a cursory perusal of which is key to understanding the language of the Song.
When Zerah’s hand breaks forth from the womb, the midwife attending Tamar’s birth marks it with a thread of scarlet (שָׁנִי Gen 38:28). The gesture connects the images of birth—of dying from one world of being and being born into another—with the cluster of colors in the scarlet species: red, crimson, cinnabar, etc.
When at last, having given way to his brother Perez, Zerah enters the world he is given a name which means “rising” (זֶרַח Gen 38:30; the word used to describe the sun’s movement at dawn throughout the Bible, e.g., Gen 32:31; Judg 9:33; 2 Sam 23:4). This underscores the themes already explored (birth, breaking-forth, life). It is a sign of rising, of coming-up, of breaking-out, of dawn-break—almost, as it were, drawn-up by the tug of the thread itself.
Scarlet threads or fabrics play a role in the textiles of the Tabernacle and its furnishings (Ex 25:4). It is with scarlet and blue and purple threads that the cherubim are woven into the panels of the tent (26:1), the veil before the Holy of Holies (26:31), and the gateways of both the tabernacle proper as well as the courtyard (26:36; 27:16). Once again the crimson cord marks the ushering-in of a new world. When the people of Israel pass into the courts of the Lord who rises (or “zerahs”) upon them with light from Sinai (Deut 33:1; cf. Mal 4:2), they are entering into a sacred fane whose boundaries are marked, like the hand of Zerah, with crimson.
Crimson is also used to adorn the priestly garments (Ex 28:1–14, 31–38; cf. ch 39) which are for “glory and beauty” (28:2, 40). It is Oholiab in particular who is designated as the chief artisan in embroidery using the blue and purple and scarlet yarns (38:23). His name means “Father’s House” (אֹהֶל + אָב), and like the midwife attending Tamar, he is busy wrapping crimson threads while a new Israel—Yahweh’s son (cf. Ex 4:22–23; Hos 11:1)—is reborn in the wilderness.
It is not random that scarlet threads are used in the cleansing of leprosy ritual (Lev 14). Leprosy is multiform death: physically the body dies, socially the leper is quarantined, and ritually the leper is unable to enter into the Tabernacle. It is not, therefore, sufficient to let those whose leprosy has been healed quietly return to life. A baptismal rite is needed. The dead person shows themselves to the priest and is sprinkled with a kind of holy water made from the blood of a bird, cedar wood, hyssop, and scarlet yarn. A second, live bird is dipped into the water and used as a kind of living aspergillum to shower the new person. Once again we have the scarlet yarn in close symbolic proximity with the images of death, life, re-birth, blood, and a rising-again to life. The scarlet cord again draws the suppliant from one world into another. Now the former leper can enter the social community of the living, now the former leper can enter into the crimson-embroidered boundary of the sanctuary, now the former leper can enter the camp of Israel who bears the covenant promise.
The water for purification rites, in fact, builds on these regulations (Num 19). Along with the red heifer, scarlet and hyssop and cedar are burned beyond the camp to make the ashes mixed with the water for purification. It is a crimson thread that, in some sense, binds together the manifold images present here: whole-burnt heifer with all of its dung and viscera, cedar planks (precious commodity in the wilderness), redolent bunches of hyssop. The presence of the scarlet thread adds to this orchestra the themes explored above: death, re-birth, new life, new world.
At Jericho, Rahab plays a midwife to the spies: she gives them covering in her house and then mothers them through the window of the wall of Jericho (Josh 2:1–15). Letting them down to the ground below she is given a sign, almost a covenantal rite: “When we come to the land, you must tie this scarlet cord in the window through which you let us down, and you must gather your father and mother, and your brothers, and your whole family to your house” (2:18, LEB). Rahab’s house, like the body of Zerah or a cleansed leper, is marked with a scarlet cord. She is symbolically pulled-out of the dead world of Jericho, marked-out by the cinnabar thread, ritually purified from the leprosy of Canaanitism (6:22–25). She is pulled into the story of God’s people, woven into the fabric of salvation. Indeed! from her is descended the Christ (Matt 1:5).
Rahab’s scarlet thread is set in relief against the sin of Achan (Josh 7:1). Achan is a direct descendant of Zerah-of-the-scarlet-cord: “Achan son of Carmi son of Zabdi son of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah.” Here is an heir of the whole thread of crimson motif who in the face of Rahab’s scarlet, chooses instead to yoke with the precious items of Jericho, to defy the cherem laws. Following Lot’s wife (Gen 19:26) and anticipating the disobedience of king Saul (1 Sam 15:9), recalcitrant Achan is drawn into the world of the cherem; his contumacy effectively cuts him off from the scarlet tapestry of God’s people. He does not follow the scarlet thread; he does not rise again or break-forth like Zerah, while Rahab marries into the line of Perez.
All of this is “hyperlinked,” so to speak, in the Beloved’s description of the Lover’s lips. The simile rumbles with the thunder of it. Her mouth, the site of their shared kiss, of their nuptial dialogue, and of their mutual banqueting, is a place of life and of re-birth. Their kisses are not “mere kisses”; they are not dead things but living things. Her mouth, like the tapestried panels and gate-flaps of the Tabernacle, is a doorway to an electric encounter with the Living Flame of Love (Deut 4:24; Song 8:6; Heb 12:29; 1 Jn 4:8). Her kisses and her speech are not like the osculation or dialogue offered by Dame Folly (Prov 6:24; 7:24–26). Every kiss, as I’ve suggested before, creates a world composed of the two lovers. The Bridegroom here is claiming that the world he shares with his Bride is a world of life, not death.
Moreover, the Bride is praised in a theological register that does not dwell on a sheer voluptuousness but a vividness of color that names her as an avenue of God’s grace. Her lips mark the Beloved (and presumably their future offspring) as belonging to the promise. This moves us beyond strictly nuptial reflection: all her kisses (nuptial, paternal, filial, worshipful, etc.) carry the theological freight of God’s story. With those lips she draws others from one world and into another.
Too much? I think not. Think of the Biblical warnings about the use of the mouth to effect life or death: with lips we kiss Baals or remain faithful to Yahweh (cf. 1 Ki 19:18); with lips we lasso the world around us into life or death (Prov 18:21). Our Lord tells us plainly that it is not what passes through the lips and into the body that corrupts a person, but rather what pours out of their lips (Matt 15:11); so also James warns us about the power of speech to bring blessing or cursing (Ja 3:2–12). The list goes on.
This helps us with “application,” which is to say “tropology.” As I’ve said before, typology preaches. The way the Church lives follows the life of Jesus. He is the Head and we are the Body. And we can think of this happening on at least two levels:
First, brother or sister Christian, be like the Bride of the Song. May the Lord find your lips crimson. May your speech be salted with fire (Col. 4:6) and cherub-attended like the curtains of Solomon. May the words of your lips and the meditations of your heart be pleasing in his sight (Ps 19:14). May they be like the operations of a midwife who delivers your friends and neighbors into a new world of benediction. May your lips be clothed in priestly scarlet (Prov 31:21) as you pass the kiss of peace with those other brothers and sisters who bear the image of God (Rom 16:16; 1 Cor 16:20; 2 Cor 13:12; 1 Thess 5:26; 1 Pet 5:14).
Second, husbands and wives: kiss one another. Often. Much is made today in our sex-sick culture (simultaneously hyper-sexualized and increasingly de-sexed) of the act of sex in its merely coital form. Increasingly little, it seems to me, is made of the Kiss.
Husbands, delight in the lips of your wife. Kiss her sweetly, kiss her madly. Kiss her when you cry over tight times and difficult days. Kiss her not merely as an overture for love-making but as a regular feature of her delight in that scarlet cord which the Lord has strung lemniscate upon the mouth of your beloved.
Wives, kiss your husbands and speak well to him: to him, not just of him. Praise him. Those lips are a crimson thread with which you draw him, not coercively but becomingly (regally, O Shulamite!), into the greater glory the Lord is calling him into. With speech and kisses, you crown him with glory.
Find each within the other the new world into which God has called you to sing his praise and delight in him. May your kisses always be crimson and your speech scarlet and wine red; let them be as doorposts of your household, and like the dark-ochred tent curtains of the Temple. For in the midst of your home you guard the Living Flame of Love which burns with the very flame of Yah (שַׁלְהֶ֥בֶתְיָֽה, Song 8:6).
Go then, Christian friends, “…pleis thy makar and be mirry, and sett not by this warld a chirry” (William Dunbar, “Of Covetyce”).
Mark Brians is rector of All Saints Anglican Honolulu.