The book of Song of Songs

Main theme

Exclusive, ardent and pure married love, willed and blessed by God; and beyond it, an image of the Lord’s unfailing love for his people.

Outline

1. Song of Songs 1-2 — Budding love

   Desire, compliments and the first refrain: do not awaken love before its time (1:1–2:7).

2. Song of Songs 2-3 — Springtime and the search

   The beloved calls, the bride seeks him by night and finds him (2:8–3:5).

3. Song of Songs 3-5 — The wedding

   Solomon’s procession, the beauty of the bride and the union in the “garden” (3:6–5:1).

4. Song of Songs 5-8 — Love tested and restored

   The door opened too late, the painful search, then a love renewed and more mature (5:2–8:4).

5. Song of Songs 8 — The seal of love

   Love stronger than death, purity kept and the final appeal (8:5-14).

Key points

• The refrain “Do not stir up or awaken love until it pleases” recurs three times (2:7; 3:5; 8:4): love has its hour, and must be neither forced nor anticipated.
• The formula of belonging progresses: “My beloved is mine, and I am his” (2:16), then “I am my beloved’s” first (6:3), and finally “his desire is toward me” (7:10): from possession to trusting surrender.
• The “little foxes, that spoil the vines” (2:15): the small neglects that destroy a love in bloom.
• The bride is “a garden inclosed, a spring shut up, a fountain sealed” (4:12): purity kept, opened to the bridegroom alone on the wedding day (4:16–5:1).
• “Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee” (4:7): the bridegroom’s gaze, an echo of the Church “without spot or wrinkle” (Eph 5:27).
• The crisis of the door (5:2-6): the bride is slow to open, loses the presence of her beloved and has to seek him, at the cost of the watchmen’s blows (5:7).
• The beloved appears by turns as a king (1:4; 3:11) and as a shepherd (1:7; 2:16); the bride is named only once: the “Shulamite” (6:13).
• The summit of the book: “love is strong as death… Many waters cannot quench love” (8:6-7).

Jesus in Song of Songs

Read in the light of the New Testament, the Song points to the “great mystery” of the union of Christ and the Church (Eph 5:31-32). Jesus is the Bridegroom (Matt 9:15; John 3:29) who sees his bride as “all fair,” without blemish (4:7; Eph 5:27), who knocks at the door for fellowship (5:2; Rev 3:20), and whose love, stronger than death, was proved at the cross. The book makes us long for the marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev 19:7).

Did you know?

• The name of God does not clearly appear in the book: the only allusion is the expression translated “a flame of the LORD” (8:6), which in Hebrew contains the shortened form “Yah.”
• “Song of Songs” is a Hebrew superlative, like “Holy of Holies”: it is “the most beautiful of songs” among the “thousand and five” that Solomon composed (1 Kgs 4:32).
• In Judaism, the Song is one of the five “scrolls” read at the great feasts: it is read at Passover, the feast of deliverance and of spring (cf. 2:11-13).