Song of Songs: The Love Poem in the Bible

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Its first line ties it to Solomon, but the Hebrew can mean by, for or about Solomon. The poets are unknown.

When: Debated. Some of the poems may be old. Its language has late features, and many scholars date the collection to the 400s to 200s BC.

Where it fits: Its title points to King Solomon’s time (1 Kings 4:32 says he wrote 1,005 songs). But many scholars think the collection took shape long after the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC.

Where I quote it: Never.

If you only read three chapters: It has only eight. Read all of it, out loud if you dare.

Words to Know

Song of Songs — a Hebrew way of saying the greatest song, the way holy of holies means the holiest place.

Beloved — what the two lovers call each other.

Allegory — reading a story as a picture of something else. For centuries this book was read as a picture of God’s love.

Shulammite — the name given to the woman in a single verse of the poem (Song of Songs 6:13). Its meaning is uncertain.

The Book in Brief

The Song of Songs is a collection of love poems, eight chapters long. There is no plot. A woman and a man speak, and a chorus called the daughters of Jerusalem joins in now and then. Gardens, vineyards, spices, gazelles and mountains fill its pictures.

In chapter 1 the woman longs for the man’s kisses and tells the daughters of Jerusalem that she is dark but lovely. In chapter 2 she calls him an apple tree among the trees of the wood, and he calls her to come away, because winter is over and spring has come. Chapter 3 tells of a night when she goes looking for him in the city and finds him, and then describes King Solomon’s carriage on his wedding day. Chapter 4 is the man’s long praise of her beauty, and she invites him into her garden.

In chapter 5 he knocks at her door at night. She is slow to open, and he is gone. She searches the city, the watchmen beat her, and she describes him to the daughters of Jerusalem. Chapters 6 and 7 bring more praise and a dance, and she says that she belongs to her beloved. In chapter 8 she asks him to set her as a seal on his heart and says that love is as strong as death and no flood can drown it. The book ends with her calling him to come away like a gazelle on the mountains of spices.

The Song of Songs is a collection of love poems. A woman and a man long for each other, search for each other, praise each other’s bodies in detail, and meet in gardens and vineyards at night.

It is not subtle. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth; for your love is better than wine (Song of Songs 1:2). That is the first line after the title.

God is never clearly named in it. The only possible mention is a single syllable near the end.¹ There is no law, no Temple, no prayer, no moral at the end. And it is in my scriptures.

Go deeperEgyptian love songs older than the Song of Songs

The Song of Songs is not the only love poetry from the old world. Egypt has the closest parallels. More than three thousand years ago, in the 1200s and 1100s BC, Egyptian poets wrote love songs on papyrus and on broken pieces of pottery. The best known are on the back of a papyrus called Chester Beatty I.²

They sound a good deal like the Song. The lovers call each other brother and sister, as the man in the Song calls the woman my sister, my bride (Song of Songs 4:9–10). The lovers fall sick with longing. Each praises the other’s looks and wishes to be near.

Nobody can show that the poets of the Song ever saw an Egyptian poem. Scholars who have studied the two side by side, such as Michael Fox, speak of a shared kind of poetry, not of copying. But the comparison tells you something plain. Love poems like these were an old art in the ancient world, and the Song belongs to that art. It was not written as a puzzle to be decoded. It was a love poem, and the people who first heard it knew what it was.

Her voice

Notice who does most of the talking. It is the woman.

She speaks first. She speaks most. She goes looking for him. By night on my bed, I sought him whom my soul loves (Song of Songs 3:1). Once, when she goes out searching the city streets at night, the watchmen find her and beat her (Song of Songs 5:7). She keeps looking.

She says, I am dark, but lovely (Song of Songs 1:5).

And the love is mutual. My beloved is mine, and I am his (Song of Songs 2:16). Nobody owns anybody here. In a world where a wife was often treated as her husband’s property, that line meant something.

Go deeperOne poem or many?

Is the Song a single poem, or a heap of separate ones? Scholars have argued about it for a long time.

The Hebrew text carries no labels saying who is speaking. Readers work it out from the grammar, because Hebrew uses different forms when speaking to a man and to a woman. The scenes change without warning, though. She is in a bedroom, then in the city streets, then in a vineyard, with no story linking them.

Some scholars see an anthology, a book of love songs gathered by editors. Roland Murphy, whose commentary appeared in 1990, took that view. Others, among them J. Cheryl Exum (2005), find a pattern too tight to be an accident. Three times the woman tells the daughters of Jerusalem not to stir up love until it is ready (Song of Songs 2:7; 3:5; 8:4). Twice she says that she and her beloved belong to each other (Song of Songs 2:16; 6:3). And the same plea returns in chapter 2 and in the last verse, asking him to be like a young deer or gazelle on the mountains (Song of Songs 2:17; 8:14).³

Whichever side is right, the refrains do their work for a listener. The songs were meant to be heard, and the same longing keeps coming back.

Strong as death

Near the end comes the line people read at weddings:

Set me as a seal on your heart, as a seal on your arm; for love is strong as death. Jealousy is as cruel as Sheol. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a very flame of the LORD. Many waters can’t quench love, neither can floods drown it (Song of Songs 8:6–7).

Strong as death. In my scriptures, death is the one power no one escapes. This poem says love is just as strong.

The argument over the Song

Teachers after me argued over whether this book was holy. The great teacher Akiva defended it with a famous line: All the Writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.⁴

Another early Jewish ruling warned that anyone who sang the Song in a banquet hall like an ordinary love song would have no share in the world to come.⁵ Think about what that tells you. People were singing it at parties. It was a love song before it was anything else.

The allegory

The way the Song stayed holy was by being read as a picture.

My people came to read it as the love between God and Israel. It is still read in synagogues at Passover.

Christians read it as the love between Christ and the church, or between Christ and the soul. Origen, a great Christian scholar of the 200s, wrote a long commentary on it. In the 1100s, a monk named Bernard of Clairvaux preached eighty-six sermons on the Song and only reached the beginning of chapter 3.⁶

A bishop named Theodore of Mopsuestia, around 400, said it was simply Solomon’s love poetry. More than a century after his death, his writings were condemned by a church council, and his reading of the Song was among the things held against him.⁷

I will not tell you the allegory is wrong. People have found God in this book for two thousand years, and the scriptures use marriage as a picture of God and Israel again and again. But you should know that it was a love poem first, and that you are allowed to read it that way.

What I would say

I never quoted the Song. But I went to weddings. My first sign in John’s gospel was at a wedding in Cana, where I made sure the wine did not run out (John 2:1–11).

More than once I compared the kingdom of heaven to a wedding feast (Matthew 22:2; 25:1–13). When people asked why my friends did not fast, I said, Can the groomsmen fast while the bridegroom is with them? (Mark 2:19).

The first page of the scriptures says that God made people male and female, and looked at everything that had been made, and, behold, it was very good (Genesis 1:31). Bodies were good. Love was good. Desire was part of creation, not a mistake in it.

The Song of Songs was kept in the scriptures by people who could have thrown it out. They did not think the body was something to be ashamed of before God. Neither should you.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Song of Songs 8:6–7.

You will find: “love is strong as death,” and “a very flame of the LORD,” the one place where this book may name God.

Then read the whole Song and count how much of it is spoken by the woman.

The Short Version

• The Song of Songs is a collection of love poems, frank about desire, and God is never clearly named.
• The woman speaks first and most, and the love is mutual: “My beloved is mine, and I am his.”
• Love is strong as death. Many waters cannot quench it.
• Teachers argued over it. Akiva called it the Holy of Holies, and people sang it at banquets.
• It was kept holy by being read as an allegory, but it was a love poem first.