Essentials of the Song of Songs - Lesson 4

In the lectures that follow this course, Essentials of the Song of Songs for Biblical Training, we're going to be walking through the text of the Song of Songs in a manner that would give you an ability for yourselves to read through the text and understand what's going on in each of the different parts and sections of this particular song. Perhaps the most difficult issue related to interpreting and understanding the Song of Songs is the identification of who is speaking to whom throughout the song at different times and in different places. In fact, you could see this at work in many of the standard Bible translations that exist today.

If you take a look at the NIV translation, for example, there will be in there headings that describe who's talking to whom, okay? These are editorial suggestions that are sometimes right and sometimes perhaps not right. The ESV will have a different set. The NET will have a different set.

The King James will have a different set. And one of the things that we learn from that is that the Song of Songs is really difficult to interpret and that one of the keys is trying to figure out who is talking to whom. Well, I've been working on this particular song for some 15 plus years and it really has been a labor to figure out every single text who is talking to whom so I understand the difficulty.

So in these lectures, I'm going to try to walk you through the text as best as I can and provide you with the findings that I've felt to be very helpful in my own study and teaching that I use to go through the Song of Songs and to understand it. So just by way of summary, remember this. The Song of Songs teaches that the covenant of marriage that God created in Genesis chapter 2 was designed to be rock solid in terms of commitment and white hot in terms of intimacy and that those marriages that work in this post-Genesis 3 world, those marriages that work to hold the rock solid and the white hot together can better, but of course not perfectly because of Genesis 3, better resist temptation, endure hardship, and promote wholeness.

And so that's what we're going to do in a Christian life. We want to protect and bolster marriages and we want to resist temptation, endure hardship in this world, and promote wholeness in the context of this broken and wrecked world. So I'm really excited about the Song of Songs.

I think it's a wonderful book and I invite you to study it with me in this lecture and then the one that To do it, we're going to need your Bibles. So get out your Bibles, whatever you're using, and then you are going to want to download the outline that I have provided for this course with biblical training. It's a Roman numeral outline and you'll see that it has four main sections because the Song of Songs has four main sections and so we're going to tackle it that way.

Now, the Song of Songs is just that. It's a song and like all songs, they're poetic and they're highly repetitive. And so the poetic repetitive nature of the song can make it challenging to see is there any cohesion or structure.

In fact, some scholars would argue that there is no cohesion or structure to the Song of Songs and I just can't imagine a world in which my Bible has a book in it where there's no cohesion and structure. And so even a book as dealing with this as catastrophic an event as something like the Book of Lamentations is one of the most highly structured books in the Hebrew Bible. And so I just can't imagine a world in which that's not the case.

And I have found it to be so with the Song of Songs. One of the things you'll notice if you just would read through the Song of Songs in one sitting, it's not that bad, it's eight kind of short chapters, is you'll notice that much of the language and imagery of Chapter 1 appears in Chapter 8, the last chapter. And that's one of the ways in which the song resolves certain issues.

The problem is set forth and comes up in Chapter 1. Then you have all the different things that happen in Chapters 2 through 7 to the woman in the harem with Solomon and a So for example, you can see in Chapter 1, the woman is set out to work in the vineyards of her family, but she has her own vineyard, her body, and she's not able to keep it up because of the job she has to do with her family, right? She's too busy to care for herself. In Chapter 8, Solomon has a great big vineyard, right? And she's being invited to be a part of that, but she has her own vineyard again, her body, and she refuses at this time to let it be taken into the context of Solomon's harem. Things like the mother and the brothers, anger, all kinds of imagery you will see in Chapter 1 will appear back in Chapter 8. So there's a keeper, the woman is the keeper of the vineyards in Chapter 1, but Solomon has keepers in his vineyards in Chapter 8. And so the language and imagery is meant to show you that the Song of Songs has a unified message and a unified plan and has a particular structure that's working through that.

And so careful reading and exegesis will allow you to see that. Okay, now I've said that the Song of Songs has four sections, and if you look at the outline that we've provided through biblical training, you can see those four sections set forth in Roman numerals 1, 2, 3, and 4. And you'll observe that Section 3 is the largest section, running from Chapter 3 all the way into Chapter 8, and then that particular part is divided into two. There's Subsection 1 and Subsection 2. Now, before we work through this song, we've got to ask the question, Miles, how do you know that there are four sections to the song? Right? What evidence do you give us besides, you know, kind of your anecdotal impressions? The song is structured, and this is a great thing and easy to see if you're attentive to it, the song is structured by the so-called adjuration texts that appear 3.5 times in the song, 3.5 times in the song.

The adjuration text in your English Bibles goes something like this, I adjure you, daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles or the does of the field, if you arouse or do not arouse or awaken love until it's ready. So perhaps you're familiar with that text if you've read through the song before the course or if you've just been perusing the particular literature as a part of this course. Now, let's look now at our screens and let me highlight to you those 3.5 adjurations and where they are in the text so you can take a moment and mark them in your Bible in such a way that it will allow you to kind of at least get the macro structure of the song down because that's the first step in learning how to know which parties are present in the song and who is speaking to whom and that's what we want to tackle here, okay? The first adjuration appears in 2.7, the second one in 3.5, and the third one in 8.4. Then you'll also see on your screen right here that there's a fourth adjuration which I've designated as .5, all right, it's .5. That is, it's not like the other three but it is like the other three.

In this sense, it's not the same syntactically or linguistically but it is related in such a way that it breaks the third major section in half, all right? So we have part one, part two, part three. Part three is broken in half by this third adjuration right here and then part four begins or part four begins with that fourth adjuration right there. So I want to comment on these two just for a moment because these texts right here are key to the interpretation of the Song of Songs in terms of what the woman's doing, all right? Each of these adjurations are spoken by the woman.

Each of these adjurations mark a transition or hinge in the song. When you come across this adjuration, you're finishing one section or part and moving into the next part, okay? So that's one of the ways in which you can become a faithful and good reader of the text is by following these adjurations. Secondly, in terms of translation, you will observe in most English translations that the translations you're reading in your Bible are slightly different than the ones I've provided for you here on the screen, all right? The reason for that, I've translated these a little more woodenly, not necessarily to contradict the other translations, but to be slightly more transparent in such a way to allow you to see some of the subtle shifts and nuances that are taking place in the song, all right? So I want to tell you something about these.

First, you'll observe that I don't use the language, I adjure you. The word to adjure or an adjuration is kind of a strong request, a strong request. And what's going on in these so-called adjuration texts is not a strong request, but it's putting the daughters of Jerusalem under an oath curse, an oath curse.

And so let's look at the first translation, for example, on your screen, Song 2-7, where it says, not I adjure you, but I put you under oath, O daughters of Jerusalem. The daughters of Jerusalem are the women in the harem who are training with the woman of the song to enter into harem life. So she's putting them under oath and she says, by the gazelles or by the does of the field, if you incite or if you provoke love before it's willing, dot, dot, dot, may you be cursed.

Let me comment on a few things here. Number one, line one, I put you under oath. The verb here, the verb to swear in Hebrew, shavah in the Hefeel stem, right, occurs as the first word in all four of these so-called adjuration texts, 2-7, 3-5, 5-8, 8-4.

All right. We're going to translate them as I put you under oath because that's exactly what's happening in this context. Okay.

In the second line that we have in 2-7 and 3-5, there is this odd mention of gazelles and does of the field, gazelles and does of the field. That is, these are the witnesses of the oath. These are the witnesses of the oath curse.

Okay. Now, the interesting thing is, is never in the ancient world would you invoke, or at least in Israel, would you invoke a deer or a gazelle to serve as a covenant witness, right, or an oath witness. That is just odd, right? Like it's like, you know, by the golden retrievers and the house cats of the field, you know, I adjure you like, they're not going to do anything if you break the oath.

Okay. What scholars recognize is that the word gazelles and does of the field are hidden or veiled references to God himself. The word gazelles corresponds to the word tzavahoth in terms of Yahweh tzavahoth or Yahweh of hosts, Yahweh of armies.

One of his titles is he is the mighty warrior of Israel. And then the word does of the field is a veiled reference to El Shaddai. That is gazelles and does of the field look like Yahweh tzavahoth and El Shaddai.

And so it's kind of a hidden, poetic, lyrical, cool way of invoking God as the witness of this oath curse without actually like being offensive or affronting to the women in the harem training camp. Okay. So we could say something like this, I put you under oath daughters of Jerusalem by Yahweh of hosts and El Shaddai, which ramps up the seriousness of this particular text, because what it's saying is God is going to oversee this oath curse.

And if you break it, he's going to come and enact it. Okay. And then it says this, if you incite or if you provoke love before it is willing dot, dot, dot.

Now in your translations for song two, seven, song three, five, and song eight, four, all of these like incite or provoke love texts are translated this way. Do not arouse or do not awaken love. Do not arouse or do not awaken love.

And that's an okay translation. And it's a possible or valid translation, but it is slightly misleading to our modern Western ears in this way. In the ancient world, when you put someone under oath, you would always give the if part, but never the then part.

If you do this or don't do that, then may you be cursed. The speaking or even the writing of the curse part was considered taboo. In fact, it's called a language taboo, right? It's like there are certain words in certain families or in certain contexts you don't say, you don't swear in church or you don't tell, you know, in our family, you couldn't tell your brother or sister they were stupid or dumb.

That was just, that was taboo. All right. In the ancient world of Israel, you would never speak the curse because it could in their minds enact the curse.

Does that make sense? It's the same thing. Like for example, at a particular time in Israel's history, they stopped using the divine name, Yahweh, and they would only say Adonai. It became a language taboo to speak the divine name.

And so they would just use the word Adonai or Lord. In the same way, these oath curses have a language taboo where you would not speak the oath curse or the curse part of the oath curse. And so that's why I've put them in parentheses in the places where they would be in the first two adjurations.

So if you can read the first one, I put you under oath daughters of Jerusalem by Yahweh of hosts or by El Shaddai, if you incite or if you provoke love of what's willing, may you be cursed. So I want you to feel the weight, right? This is an arresting text, an arresting statement in its context, and it's supposed to arrest the reader because that's the hinge or the transition point, right? And so you can see Song 2-7 and Song 3-5 are almost identical. Song 5-8 and 8-4 are slightly different because they're progressing the text in a particular way.

Song 5-8 is a transition seam in the third part between two subsections. And so it's different, right? It says, I place you under oath daughters of Jerusalem. So that line marks the transition.

But then it says, if you find my beloved, what will you tell him? It's a question that says, tell him that I'm sick with love or lovesick. And lovesickness is a prominent theme in the Song of Songs because the woman is absent from her beloved and absence from the beloved makes someone lovesick, okay? And then finally, the last one where it says, I put you under oath of daughters of Jerusalem, why would you incite or why would you provoke or force love before it's willing? And then it's the question. And then that leads us into the woman's climactic wisdom instruction, all right? So the Song of Songs is carefully structured and beautifully nuanced in terms of both how the adjurations or oath curses work, but also in terms of how they structure the song.

So they're really quite lovely and wonderful. And so you'll see in our outline, if you turn back to your outline, you'll see that if I can just show, you can see at the end of the first section, there's oath curse one. At the end of the second section, there's oath curse two.

At the end of the first middle section, or you can see at the end of this first subsection of part three, there's the oath request that breaks that in half. And then again, the oath curse at the end of that section, before you get into part four. The oath curse, I've just conveniently put them at the end of each section, but they could just as well be the beginning.

So in your mind, think they're the hinge. They're both the end of one section and the beginning of the next. Okay, does that help? I hope it does.

Now let's look together at the outline. And what you can do here is you're going to have your outline out and your Bible out. And we're going to kind of work through this text together.

And I'm just, what I'm going to try to do is I'm going to walk you through the Song of Songs as best as I can in the time allotted and to try to show you in some sense, I don't want to say I'm going to tell you the story of the song because it's not a story. It's a wisdom thought experiment, but I'm going to show you the flow and the development of the song. Okay.

And I don't want to use the word story too, because sometimes stories sound like there could be make-believe, right? This is the real and true account of something that happened and something that Solomon is writing about. So let's begin with part one. It begins in chapter one, verse two, because we're going to take the superscript.

We've talked about that already and put it, you know, kind of on the front cover of the book, right? The Song of Songs, which was composed by Solomon. We begin with A in verses one, or we begin with A in chapter one, verses two to four, where the harem presents the woman with an infamous lover. Let him kiss me, or may he kiss me, or would that he kiss me with some of the kisses of his mouth, for your lovemaking will be more intoxicating than wine, right? No wonder the maidens or the virgins love you, because he's so famous and such an incredible lover Solomon is that we'll don't know who it is yet, right? But we're going to discover who it is.

Here's an important thing to realize. Maybe you can like write this down in a notebook or somewhere key. In this first part, the invitation to harem life, there is no male figure present.

There's a male figure spoken of, talked about, but in this section, gang, there's no male figure, right? So if you're looking in your Bibles and you're saying he's any anytime you say he said in there in your Bibles or some the male or the groom or the man speaks, it's incorrect. All right, I guess that's the least delicate way to put it. There's no male figure in the song until part two.

All right, and then that male is only there in part two, and then the male figure of part three comes and goes. All right, so key feature here is that in part one, no male figure is speaking. And so the text opens with the woman in the context of the well, you can say it this way.

Wisdom literature just throws you in to the interpretive fire, right? And it just begins and it asks you to delay trying to answer every question and just go with the song and discover as you go and then reread or re-sing the song as you go. So the text begins with the acclamation of an infamous lover, okay? Would that he kissed me with some of the kisses of his mouth, for your lovemaking will be more intoxicating than wine. In the next section, B, verses five to eight, the woman responds that she's unqualified.

So in A, the infamous lover passage, the harem is talking to the woman, either collectively or maybe through a harem attendant. It could be either one. Hebrew can use the singular or plural in either way, okay? In B, the woman responds and says, I am unqualified.

So this is her talking at this point. She's saying that I am dark, but lovely. My brothers, well, the sons of my mother were angry with me and so they put me to work in the vineyards, manual labor, and therefore I've not been able to take care of my own body.

I'm not a woman suited for the royal harem life. I'm a blue collar, manual labor, country girl, okay? In C, the harem responds with a bit of temptation by way of what's called royal endowment. They say, hey, don't worry.

This is the harem talking now. Don't worry. We will perfume and decorate you to such a degree that you will be lovely and acceptable to the king.

All right? They're going to get on Instagram and Facebook and all the other wonderful social media platforms. They're going to get all the best, latest and greatest perfumes and spices and lovemaking devices and train the woman to become a part of Solomon's harem, okay? That's what's going on here. You'll see this theme over and over and over again, where both the harem and Solomon are trying to convince the woman that she's beautiful and lovely and acceptable enough to be in the harem.

The woman will over and over again respond with, no, I'm not interested, okay? That's exactly what happens. We've gone from the infamous lover description by the harem in A, the woman responds in B, the harem responds in like terms in C, saying, don't worry, we'll give you gold and jewelry and spices and perfumes. And then in D, the woman in 1-6 responds with the first declaration about the nature of exclusive love.

That is, she is committed to her beloved, the one, and not to the whole idea of this temptation of Solomon's harem to becoming one of many, all right? Now, within this particular text in D, not all of these little subsections have exclusively one person talking in them, all right? And I'm not going to be able to cover all of them, but I will illustrate one of those here for you, so you can kind of get a sense of how you can carefully read the biblical text and make sense of this. Once I give you kind of one or two, as time permits, hopefully you'll be able to pick up on the exchange. We will also produce through biblical training a more detailed outline of the Song of Songs, something much more significant and robust, and that comes in the discourse charts that we've published with the other course, the longer course on the Song of Songs.

But we'll see here, I'm going to turn to my discourse charts, and you can just turn in your Bible to chapter 2, and we'll just look at the first few verses here. This is where the woman first begins her steadfast opposition to harem life by talking about the unique nature of her beloved. And so she says in 2.1, Hey, I am the rose of Sharon, the lily of the valleys.

But then the harem responds in 2.2, Like a lily among thorns, so is my friend among the daughters, which is a short form for the daughters of Jerusalem. And then in 2.3, it's back to the woman, like an apple tree among the trees of the forest, so is my beloved to me. And then more about the beloved, and then she says, I am lovesick for him because he's not here.

All right, I'm lovesick for him because he's not here. So I guess I could say, if you want to look at your screen real quick, you can see that in 2.1, that's the woman speaking. Then in 2.2, just the first line of 2.2, that's the harem speaking.

All right. Then in 2.3, it's back to the woman. All right.

So some of these things have to be slightly nuanced within each of the little poetic units of the text in these different sections, in the different parts of the song. But mostly you'll find that the divisions here have one speaker primarily, but you have to be careful. You have to be careful.

Okay. And then this first section ends with that oath curse in chapter two, verse seven, that we've spoken of. All right.

And so that's the hinge here. So it begins with the harem's declaration of an infamous lover. The woman responds that she's unqualified because she has not grown up in a royal household, and she's not suited for royal life by way of her manual labor, blue collar upbringing.

The harem says, don't worry, in verses nine to 17, we will beautify you. Recall that in the book of Esther, for example, in chapter two, harem training like this was over a year long process, right? Six months of lotions and aloes, six months of spices and perfumes and instruction in how to please the king. All right.

So the woman is initially taken into the harem here and she feels unqualified, but the harem has a year or more perhaps to get her ready. All right. And then the woman responds, this is not for me.

I belong to my beloved. He belongs to me. Therefore, if you arouse or if you incite love before it's ready, may you be cursed.

That's the end of the first part. Fairly simple at this point. But the key is this, you must understand, you must, must, must understand that there is no male figure present in this first part of the song, right? And that changes everything.

That changes everything. Because what you'll see is with the advent of each major adjuration, so in two, seven, three, five, and eight, four, right? With the advent of each major adjuration, the very next verse is going to describe someone who comes, right? And after the first adjuration, a beloved shepherd arrives. After the second adjuration, the King Solomon arrives.

And after the third adjuration, major one, the woman arrives coming out of the wilderness with her beloved leaning on her, all right? Tracking who is present in the song helps you to identify who can and cannot be speaking. In fact, you can think of this, there are only four possible speakers in the song throughout the whole thing. The woman can speak and she speaks all the time.

She is the hero of the story. She's the wisdom teacher of the song. The beloved will speak on occasion in part two, all right? In part three, Solomon will speak.

And then in part four, the woman will speak and she'll speak predominantly by herself then. But in the other parts, you can have the daughters of Jerusalem speaking as well. So you can have the woman speaking, the daughters of Jerusalem speaking, the beloved boyfriend or the beloved shepherd speaking, and Solomon.

Those are your only four options, okay? They're your only four options. And in part one, there are only two of those parties present, the woman and the daughters of Jerusalem. Now, let me pause for a second and just put it this way.

When I'm talking about the daughters of Jerusalem, perhaps that's a new term for you. If you read through the song just kind of quickly in one sitting to kind of get a sense of what's going on for this course, you'll see the word daughters, daughters of Jerusalem, daughters of Zion one time. And the daughters, specifically the daughters of Jerusalem, are, I can say it this way, the virgins without number training to become a part of Solomon's harem.

In harem life back in the ancient world, there would be two houses, the house of the women and the house of the concubines, the house of the women and the house of the concubines. The house of the women were all of those virgins taken into the harem complex to train for the possibility of harem life. And if you were selected to be with the king and you were with the king, then you would be moved from the house of the women to the house of the concubines and there you would live out the rest of your days.

You would be a permanent member of the household of Solomon as one of his royal wives or concubines, which you can see from 1 Kings 11. Now, how do we know that the daughters of Jerusalem are the virgins in training? The key text for that is Song of Songs 6, 8, and 9, where it specifically identifies that the woman is present in the harem. This identifies the setting of the song.

The text says this, there are 60 queens and 80 concubines and virgins without number. All right. Then in the very next verse, it says, the queens and the concubines praise her, the daughters extol her.

All right. So you can see queens, concubines, virgins without number, queens, concubines, daughters. All right.

And so the daughters of Jerusalem are the virgins without number. So in the Song of Songs, the woman is in the harem, right? But the woman is in the house of the women, not the house of the concubines. They're all in the same complex, but there's like two sections, right? You can think about it this way, two different locker rooms, right? You know, like at a football stadium, there's the home team and the visiting team.

Well, the visiting team, the visiting team, they're the virgins without number. They're there visiting. They may not make it to the other side and become the home team.

If after their year of training or whatever the duration is, they're not acceptable or not selected, they'll leave. All right. But once you get into the home team locker room, you're in the home team locker room for the rest of your life.

All right. And that's what this woman is trying to avoid, right? She's still a virgin and she's still able to get out in the visiting team locker room. But once she's in the other one, she's not there.

So when I say daughters of Jerusalem, I'm meaning the virgins in the house of the women that are training to become a part of Solomon's harem, which for most women, especially the daughters who are there in this song, this is a desirable thing, a desire of life and luxury and opulence. Right. And so you can think about it in the ancient world.

If you were a woman in the ancient world, you were married likely before you were 20. You were giving birth as long as, you know, as, as your body can permit it. Right.

You were living a manual labor life of, of, of hard labor. You didn't have food for more than a week. You didn't have clothes for more than a week kind of thing.

And you didn't, you know, it was, it was a difficult and hard life. But if you were to live in Solomon's palace, you would have all the food, all the clothing, all the spices, all the entertainment, all the diversions and pleasures you could ever imagine. He was the richest, most powerful, smartest man in the whole world at the time.

And it would have the life of absolute luxury. You could think about living, you know, in the royal kingdom of such and such in the royal palace, being, you know, being a favored member of that house for the rest of your life. It would be amazing.

And that's what the woman's confronted with here. Okay. That takes us to the end of the first major section, the invitation to harem life.

So you can think of this part as this, this first part as the, as kind of, in some sense, the introduction to the song. It's the introduction song. You're just immediately captured and captivated by the song.

And if you're reading it carefully, you should be curious, like what's going on, who's talking, how can we figure this out? And you have to keep that curious mindset as we progress to the next three sections or parts of this song.