Essentials of the Song of Songs - Lesson 1

Welcome to a class offered by Biblical Training called Essentials of the Song of Songs. The Song of Songs is a book located in the Old Testament, and perhaps it's not something that you've considered much or thought about much or perhaps even read in a long time. But in this course, we want to consider briefly the nature and the message and the significance of the Song of Songs in the life of the Church.

My name is Myles Van Pelt, and I am a professor of Old Testament and Biblical Languages at Reform Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi, where I've been teaching for some 23 years now. And one of my favorite things to do is to take the lost books of the Old Testament and make them alive again for people who are interested in the good news of the gospel from the Old Testament and how to think and live biblically in our own particular culture from the Old Testament. The Song of Songs is a bit of a challenging book in some sense.

There was a day when the Song of Songs was highly esteemed and used regularly in the life of the people of God. In fact, in the first century AD, one famous rabbi, Rabbi Akiva, wrote, all of the writings of the Old Testament are holy, but the Song of Songs is the holy of holies. And I wonder if that's what we think about the Old Testament, like all of the Old Testament, all of the Bible is great, but if I had to just pick one spot to land, it would be the Song of Songs.

My guess is you probably don't feel that way. In fact, in our day and age, the Song of Songs has become what one scholar has said is functionally decanonized, meaning that the Song of Songs, though we recognize it as existing in our Bible, the canon of scripture, we kind of ignore it. We sweep it under the rug or keep it in the back room.

We're not really interested in its message because we don't understand what it's trying to communicate to us. There's a sexual language and sexual imagery in it, and we probably think, hmm, this is probably not a book for the church or for, you know, public reading or for family devotions or something like that. And so we kind of ignore it.

But I'm here to tell you that the Song of Songs is a wonderful book that we need to recover in the life of the church. We want to functionally return it to the people of God and give it back to the church in such a way where it can be used, loved, and appreciated. I always think to myself when I'm studying the Bible, I want to understand what it says, and that's what I want to help us do here in this little brief summary course.

And I want to believe what it says, and then I want to live in light of what it says. So in this course, we're going to touch on each of those things. We want to understand the Song of Songs.

I want to convince you that the message of the Song of Songs is true and relevant, and then I want to help us live in light of the Song of Songs, how to think and live biblically. That is, the Word of God should have a positive impact on how we think and live. And I think the Song of Songs will surprisingly, I hope, impact you in a positive way.

So in this course, we want to, in some sense, recover the Song of Songs as orthodox wisdom literature concerning marriage in the Old Testament. In fact, as far as I can tell, the Song of Songs is the only book in the entire Christian canon of Scripture that deals with a single topic, marriage. All of the other books in the Old Testament deal with a vast array of topics.

You can think of all the different things the book of Proverbs might cover in life, or all the different things the Psalms cover. Think about all the different topics that Isaiah is trying to cover in his prophecy, or all the different things Leviticus or Genesis covers. There's just a host and a myriad of information that we're trying to assemble and collate and make sense of.

Well, in the Song of Songs, we're really talking about one thing, the marriage covenant that God created in Genesis chapter 2, and the fact that it's been broken and violated because of the fall in Genesis chapter 3. And so we want to figure out how to navigate those waters together. Before I begin specifically digging into the Song of Songs, I just want to mention briefly that because the Song of Songs is in the Old Testament, it has an authoritative value to the believer that must be understood. And I'm just going to give you five quick points from the New Testament that should encourage you as a believer in Christ to return to the Old Testament in general, but to the Song of Songs specifically.

For example, let me just state that the Song of Songs is God-breathed literature. The Song of Songs is God-breathed literature. In 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17, Paul says to Timothy, all scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching and all the other things that are involved there.

And when Paul is saying to Timothy, all scripture, that's a reference to the Old Testament because the New Testament hasn't been written yet. So all scripture is God-breathed. So the Song of Songs is inspired literature.

It comes from the mouth of God and was intended to be authoritative in the life of the believer. Because the Song of Songs is inspired literature, it's both living and life-giving. That is, scripture, all of scripture, but the Old Testament, and now in this course, the Song of Songs, is living and life-giving.

Hebrews 4.11 says, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword. And we can think of Psalm 119.25, my soul clings to the dust, but give me life according to your word. So we want the Song of Songs to be an inspired, life-giving book in the life of the believer.

We also believe that the Song of Songs is a part of a larger corpus of scripture called the Old Testament. And the Old Testament has divisions and sections that are useful and meaningful, right? And the Song of Songs happens to appear in the third section of the Hebrew Bible. There's the law, there's the prophets, and the writings.

So covenant, covenant history, and covenant life. And if I can just show you for a second that the Song of Songs lives in that third section of the Hebrew Bible in the category of writings, which is covenant life, how to think and live in light of God's covenant in the world of common grace after the fall. All right? And so I'm going to just point and circle this section right here.

This is the third section of the Hebrew Bible, the writings, and it has six books in it. And you can see the Song of Songs is the fifth of those books. And all of those books, Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ruth, Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes are wisdom books.

And they're written to help us navigate this world wisely as we await for the consummation of the ages. And so I'm excited to talk about this book because it's a practical book. All of the books in the third section of the Hebrew Bible are highly practical.

And so we're going to be given instruction about how to think and live about marriage in our particular world and context. And so I'm excited to do that very thing with you. We also want to understand that even though that the Old Testament was written originally for a Jewish or Israelite audience some 2,000 years ago, or really over 2,000 years ago for part of it, we can think of the Song of Songs being written around maybe, you know, the mid-900s B.C., so let's say 3,000 years ago.

The Song of Songs is still radically relevant today because it's about the topic of marriage. And marriage spans the entire canon of Scripture from Genesis 2 to Revelation 21 and 22, so we can't get away from it. But also that the Old Testament, according to the New Testament, was written for our instruction.

So Romans 5, sorry, Romans 15, 4, and 1 Corinthians 10, 11. The Old Testament was written for our instruction that through endurance and encouragement we might have hope. And it was written that we might have this provoked in us.

And so the goal of this course is to encourage you and give you hope in the context of marriage instruction so that you might be able to better endure in this world. So the Old Testament and the Song of Songs is God-breathed literature that's living and life-giving. The authors of the Old Testament were guided by the Spirit of Christ.

The Song of Songs exists in the third section of the Hebrew Bible, and it was written for Christians. Never, ever think that the Old Testament was not written for Christians. The New Testament is explicit that these things were written for us in order that we might have endurance, encouragement, and hope.

So the question is then, what is the message of the Song of Songs, and why would that message be relevant to us? Okay? And we're going to talk about this at some length as we go through the Song of Songs later in this summary course, but it's good to begin by stating up front what exactly we're aiming at. So I'm going to put up a slide here on the screen, which constitutes a summary of the Song of Songs from Song of Songs 8, 6 to 10. And all wisdom literature in the Old Testament is written in such a way that the answer to the problem proposed exists at the end.

And so you read the entire book, like Job or Ecclesiastes or Song of Songs, you find the answer at the end, and then you have to go back and reread the entire corpus in light of that. To do that, we're going to give you the instruction, the message, the good news of Song of Songs at the beginning of the course, then we'll back up and go through the whole system, and we will then come back and restate the thesis or the teaching of the Song of Songs. So hopefully this will inspire you to study the book and perhaps take some of the other courses that exist at Biblical Training, either the Song of Songs course that I've done that's a little bit larger than this one, or the Old Testament courses that have those songs, the song instructions embedded in them.

But let's begin by just stating this. I love this part. I like to say it over and over again.

My family has heard this a kabillion times and could probably recite it to you verbatim, but here it is. The message of the Song of Songs is this, my friends. The Song of Songs teaches us that the covenant of marriage, as created and instituted by God in Genesis chapter 2, was originally designed to be rock-solid in terms of commitment and white-hot in terms of intimacy, and that marriages that work to maintain rock-solid commitment and white-hot intimacy can better navigate the ravages of sin in a post-Genesis 3 world and so better endure hardship, resist temptation, and promote wholeness.

The Song of Songs teaches that God created marriage to be rock-solid and white-hot and that marriages that work to maintain the rock-solid and white-hot nature of that covenant can better, not perfectly because we live in a sinful world, endure hardship, temptation, and promote wholeness. Now the very interesting thing about this is the fact the Song of Songs mentions hardship, temptation, and wholeness or brokenness means that the Song of Songs was written for our instruction in a post-Genesis 3 world. So it holds up the original ideal of Genesis 2 marriage and then how to navigate best that marriage covenant in light of our fall in Genesis chapter 3. So the Bible is, the Song of Songs is very clear that there's a standard for marriage.

It recognizes sin and corruption of the human heart in the context of the fall and therefore how to protect the marriage covenant in this broken, fallen world. And you can see on the chart that the exposition there, the instruction on the right column is an interpretation of the instruction you see or the text in the left column where it says, place me like a seal on your heart, like a seal on your arm, for love is strong like death, fierce like the grave, its zeal is extreme, its flames are flames of fire, etc. And when we get to the Song of Songs, and we work through the text and the outline of the text, we'll come back and we'll explain what does rock-solid commitment look like? What does white-hot intimacy look like? What does hardship, temptation, and brokenness look like? And how do you achieve wholeness? Does that make sense? That's what the message of the Song of Songs does.

And it does it over the course of eight chapters or 117 different verses. Does that make sense? So that's what we're aiming at here in the Song of Songs lectures. So as we begin our study of the Song of Songs together, we need to answer two other kind of preliminary questions as we approach the book.

The questions are, who wrote the book? And what type of book is the Song of Songs? We've already mentioned it to be wisdom literature, but there are different kinds of wisdom literature. The Book of Psalms is, in some sense, wisdom literature. Proverbs is another kind of wisdom literature.

Ecclesiastes is another. Song of Songs is another. Even Ruth is a wisdom narrative.

And so there's all different kinds of wisdom literature. We need to want to talk about what kind of song is the Song of Songs and how do we make sense of that? So let's begin with who wrote the book. According to the superscription of the book, that is what appears in the first verse of the book, the Song of Songs was written by Solomon.

The opening superscription goes this way, literally or wouldn't it, the Song of Songs, which was composed by Solomon, or the Song of Songs, which is by Solomon. And so two things to note here. Number one, the designation or the title of the song as the Song of Songs means the best song ever.

You might know this from other readings that you've had, expressions like the King of Kings or the Lord of Lords, meaning the highest King or the greatest Lord or God of Gods, the greatest Elohim in the heavens, right? Yahweh is the God of Gods. And in the same way, the Song of Songs is a superlative construction, meaning it's the best song ever. And then it says that this best song ever was written by Solomon.

Okay, the Song of Songs, which is by Solomon. Now, this is an amazing declaration that the Song of Songs was written by Solomon for two reasons. Number one, we know from 1 Kings 4 that Solomon was the wisest man of all time and that he wrote, in addition to 3,000 Proverbs, which is a corpus of literature three times the size of the book of Proverbs, and he wrote 1,005 songs, and that the Song of Songs is the best of those songs written by Solomon.

Now, what kind of evidence is there for the Song of Songs as Solomonic in its origin and authorship? We've already mentioned the fact that the title or the superscription lists Solomon as the author. Good. Next, his name explicitly appears seven times in the book.

All right. The king is Solomon in the book, and it's explicitly stated, and so there's no need to doubt what king is being mentioned here. Next, there are word plays on Solomon's name all throughout the book, even constructions that are unique to the Song of Songs.

That means they don't occur anywhere else, and so they're eye-catching and arresting to the reader. And then you're thinking, like, why would that be there? And it's because, oh, it was written by Solomon, and it's one of those kind of internal fun clues. For example, in Song of Songs 1-7, there's this crazy unique construction, Shalama, and it's the combination of three different words, that and to and what, and that weird construction just means why.

It's the question, the interrogative pronoun, and so you would wonder, like, why in the world is that in there like this so weird? Well, it's the exact same consonants for Solomon's name. Solomon's name in Hebrew is Shalomo, and this is Shalama, and so the reader would, a Hebrew reader would immediately see that this awkward construction is an intentional play on words on Solomon's name. Or think of the word Shulamite in 7-1.

The word Shulamite appears twice in the Song of Songs, and there's no such place as Shulam. The woman's not from Shulam. What it means is someone who belongs to Solomon.

Shulamite and Shlomo or Shulama, again, are a play on words on Solomon's name. So there's all these wonderful little tricks within the song itself that are not just explicit, but implicitly Solomonic in nature. We also notice that there is royal imagery all throughout the song.

There's the king's chambers, his bed, his crown, his harem. All of the spices and the flora and fauna correlate with what we know from Solomon in 1 Kings 1-11 where we have the account of his life. He was a trader in spices and flora and fauna and building projects, and he had the largest harem of all time.

700 royal wives and 300 concubines. And the song explicitly mentions his harem. In 6-8 it says 60 queens and 80 concubines and virgins without number at that stage in his career.

We also can see with Solomon's world we have mentions of the chariots of Pharaoh, Jerusalem, the Tower of David, and all that kind of business. And so all of the language and imagery employed in the song correlate with Solomon. We also note that Solomon was a gifted literary author, right? God gave Solomon by his request wisdom beyond measure that outmatched any human being before Solomon and any human being that would come after Solomon.

And his ability to look at life and explain things was unmatched and remains unmatched. And so there's no one better qualified to be the author of the Song of Songs than Solomon himself. There are also other connections with Solomon related to some of the other books that he was associated with.

Two such books in the wisdom literature corpus in the writings correlate with Solomon. Proverbs 5 and Proverbs 7 are related to the Song of Songs in a particular way. And then Ecclesiastes is also another book.

In fact, in Proverbs 1 it says these are the Proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel, right? And then in Ecclesiastes 1 and then 1.1 and 1.11 and 1.12 it says this is Kohelet, king of Israel, ruler in Jerusalem, all right? And so it really correlates well. And so Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs are all Solomonic in origin, all right? We know that Proverbs he collected, Ecclesiastes he composed, and Song of Songs he also composed. And there are many connections between the books Proverbs and the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs.

In fact, that can kind of lead us into a little bit in terms of the genre of the Song of Songs. The genre of the Song of Songs as wisdom literature, according to the superscription, is simply this. If it's called the Song of Songs, which was written by Solomon, it's a song.

It's music. And it's lyrical, it's got imagery and metaphors and figures of speech. It's a wonderful kind of genre.

So the overarching genre of the Song of Songs is wisdom literature. How do you live in God's common grace world, right? According to his covenant of grace. And then it's wisdom literature, but it's also a song.

And so like any other song, you've got to interpret in light of that genre. So there's going to be things that are repeated, themes that carry out throughout the song, there's going to be a message and a climax kind of thing. And so we're going to see all those different things.

But even so, we can think about the Song of Songs may appear unique to us, but it's linked with things like Proverbs 5, where Proverbs 5, 18 to 20 says, let your fountain be blessed and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely dear, a graceful doe, let her breast fill you at all times with delight, be intoxicated always by her love. I mean, that language is right from or out of or correlating with the Song of Songs. Or think about Proverbs 7. It ends with Lady Folly, her house is the way to Sheol, going down to the chambers of death, which you might think weird that there's like this love literature kind of thing, like Lady Wisdom and Lady Folly mentions death.

But in the Song of Songs 8.6, in fact, in the climactic wisdom instruction says, true love is strong like death and unrelenting like Sheol are the grave. So there are all kinds of literary connections. There's the fountains and the water and the breasts and intoxication, springs, hands, all these kinds of things and images that show up in Proverbs 5 and 7 also appear in the Song of Songs.

And so it's a wonderful thing. In fact, I want you to think of this and we'll talk about this as we talk about the interpretation of the song in a minute, that Proverbs 1-9 is the correlate to the Song of Songs in this way. Proverbs 1-9 was written to instruct young men to make the right choice between two women, Lady Wisdom and Lady Folly.

Both are enticing and intoxicating, but one leads to life and one leads to death. In the Song of Songs, a young woman is asked to make a choice between two men. We'll say Mr. Wisdom and Mr. Folly.

And in the song, both are going to be characterized as enticing and desirable, but one will lead to life and one will lead to death. So not only is the genre not entirely unique to the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, but the mode of instruction or the way in which instruction occurs is correlated between Proverbs and Song of Songs, which connects together by way of their author and collector, Solomon. It's really cool stuff.

And then think about Ecclesiastes, and this is going to be a very helpful thing. You might say, hey, how can Solomon be the author of the Song of Songs if we know that that joker had a thousand wives? Who is he to instruct us in the covenant of marriage as created by God in Genesis 2? He blew it. He failed.

He's the ultimate violator of the Genesis 2 ideal. And my answer to that question is, you're right. He did blow it.

He did fail. And he is the ultimate violator of the Genesis 2 ideal. But we get an answer to this problem in Ecclesiastes 2, again, another book that Solomon wrote, where Solomon in Ecclesiastes is conducting a wisdom experiment in pleasure.

He's trying to, in some sense, live a life of such extreme pleasure to determine if there's any meaning in that pleasure. And so it says in Ecclesiastes 2 verses 1 all the way to the end of verse 9 and things like that, that he built gardens, and harvested wood, and he bought and sold slaves, and he traded in spices, and he built buildings, and he commanded men, and he brought in male and female slingers into his house. And at the very end he says, and concubines and even more concubines, which is kind of a euphemistic translation for what appears to be breasts and even more breasts, because of the idea of exploiting concubines sexually in the marriage, kind of violation of that covenant.

But it says in Ecclesiastes chapter 2, and I think this is a very key and important thing when you're considering Solomon as the author of the Song of Songs, it says in Ecclesiastes 2 verse 9, the author writes, yet in all of this, in all of his excessive pleasure, like say wine, women, and song, it says in all of this, my wisdom stood with me. My wisdom stood with me. And another place in Ecclesiastes 2, 1 to 9, it says wisdom remained with my heart, or you could also translate that mind, meaning that God gave Solomon the gift of wisdom, and it was an irrevocable gift.

And even in the midst of his extreme folly, he maintained his wisdom and was able to write about his folly in such a way to help us avoid the same mistakes that he made. So he is a wise man. He did live a life of folly, but by God's grace, God gave him a gift.

God gave him a gift to instruct us, the church, in the way of wisdom from a man who had all of the resources to experience the most extreme levels of folly ever. So it's not like we're being instructed by someone who had no experience with all of the folly of life. We're being instructed by a person who experienced all of the folly of life in the extreme.

He was the richest, most powerful man in the world at the time. There were no limits to his pleasure, no limits to his resources. And he writes to us and says, hmm, I've learned a lesson and I want to pass it on to you.

And this is the lesson that we want to cover in this particular course today.