Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hey, Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for The Bible Recap.
Today we finished our 13th book of the Bible. We just keep moving past these milestones, you guys. Congratulations! We read through the whole book of Song of Solomon, or Song of Songs, depending which version of the Bible you're reading. This book is incredibly layered, and there's a lot of uncertainty about several aspects of it. For instance, we don't know if Solomon wrote it, or if it was written about Solomon, or if it was just written during the time of Solomon.
If it was written about Solomon, it would have to be about his relationship with his first wife, because the book describes a monogamous relationship, and he eventually had a thousand women in his harem, 700 wives and 300 concubines. And we'll see how well that goes for him. And here's another confusing thing. People have argued for centuries over whether it's a story about human love or if it's an allegory about God's love for his people.
Personally, I tend to think it's both. Much like how David can write a song about his own personal misery that is also a prophecy of the coming Messiah. But that's just my opinion. Most commentators believe that ancient Jews regarded it as love poetry that belonged in the wisdom literature of Scripture. And in fact, from what I understand, young Hebrew boys were even forbidden to read it because it was too risque.
For the sake of today's conversation, we'll look at it like the ancient Jews did, literally. But it's also helpful to consider that there does seem to be lots of content that can serve as an illustration for us. If you hold to the romantic interpretation of the book, you can see that it follows the progression of the ancient Jewish relationship from courtship to wedding feast to wedding, then marriage.
Much of the book is a conversation, and there are four primary speakers—the shepherdess, her entourage, the shepherd, and King Solomon. The shepherdess carries most of the conversation, and in fact, she speaks more than any other woman in Scripture, followed closely by Esther. We open with her expressing her love for the shepherd. She also acknowledges that she's not conventionally attractive, but she knows she's beautiful nonetheless.
She's dark-skinned like nearly everyone in the region, but her ancient Near Eastern culture values light skin because that means you aren't working class or poor. You get to spend your days inside, not in the fields in the heat of the sun. Bronzer does not exist in this culture. She lets this attractive, sought-after man know that she's interested in him, and he reciprocates. This kind of reminds me of Ruth and Boaz.
Despite the fact that her appearance doesn't align with the cultural standards, he happens to find her more attractive than the rest, and he lets her know repeatedly and at length. Maybe he's trying to reassure her, or maybe his praise is effusive because he just can't contain it. Three times in the book, she speaks to the other women of the town and begs them, "'Do not stir up or awaken love until it pleases.'"
This can be interpreted lots of different ways. Maybe it means, don't initiate things with a man, let him come to you, as though she may have regretted letting him know she was interested. Or maybe it means, stay sexually pure until marriage. Or maybe it means, fix your mind on other things and God will bring you a relationship in His own timing. Maybe it means all those things. They aren't mutually exclusive and there's wisdom in all of them. But whatever it does mean, she's adamant about it.
She also spends a good deal of time praising the shepherd to other people. She can't stop speaking highly of him, even behind his back. She thinks about him all the time and even has a dream that she can't find him and goes out looking for him in the city streets at night. Later, she has another nightmare, it seems. As she's telling it to her friends, they ask her to tell him why this man is so spectacular, because single women always want to know these things.
So she seizes the opportunity and goes on about him for so long that they're probably like, okay, we get it already. His legs are alabaster columns, blah, blah, blah. But then they're like, so when do we get to meet him? Maybe they want to see if he's all she says he is or if she's been catfished.
It's unclear exactly when the wedding happened in this story, but there was probably a week-long wedding feast happening during a lot of this time. Then when the day of the actual ceremony arrives, her brothers speak up. They describe two types of women. A door, a woman who opens herself up for men without much discretion, and a wall, a woman who keeps herself closed off to men sexually. Her brothers want to be able to protect her. She reassures them that she has been a wall.
And that seems really consistent with the advice she's been giving to the daughters of Jerusalem all along. And even the shepherd seems to acknowledge this himself in 4.12 when he says, And no, she's not his actual sister. I just have to clarify that since we're still in the Old Testament. What was your God shot today? Mine was the very existence of this book in Scripture. It shows me that God affirms His good design for marriage and sex—
This book flies in the face of two juxtaposed ideas in the world today. Number one, that sex is dirty and bad and God is disgusted by it. And number two, that sex isn't a big deal.
This book reminds me that despite all the emotional and spiritual brokenness of a lot of the world's sexuality, our Creator had good things in mind when He invented relationships, marriage, and sex. He's not trying to steal joy from people by putting certain boundaries around those things. He invented them. And like any inventor, He wants us to know how to use what He made so that we don't break it or harm ourselves and others. It is a big deal.
He graciously tells us how these things he invented can function optimally for his glory and our joy. And he's where the joy is. Tomorrow we launch into the book of Proverbs, so we've linked to an eight-minute overview video in the show notes. Check that out if you've got the time.
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