Essentials of the Song of Songs - Lesson 6

This is going to be our final session together on the essentials of the Song of Songs for biblical training, and it's been great so far to think about what is the book Song of Songs as a kind of a poetic wisdom composition in the Orthodox wisdom literature of the Old Testament in the tradition of Solomon that kind of corresponds and correlates with Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs, all Solomonic in origin and nature, and all instructing God's people how to live in God's world according to His word. And so we love this literature, and we're trying to revive or restore the Song of Songs to the church, right? We've talked about at the very beginning that the Song of Songs in some sense was functionally decanonized in the life of the church. That is, it's in our Bibles, but we ignore it because we don't know what to do with it.

And my hope is that in this course, even this brief course with three hours, that we've, in some sense, maybe provided you a key to unlock the wonders of the biblical text and the message that's in it, that God intended the covenant of marriage in Genesis chapter 2 to be rock-solid in terms of commitment and white-hot in terms of intimacy, and that marriages that work and promote both of those aspects, rock-solid and white-hot, can better, but not perfectly of course in this world, endure hardship, resist temptation, and promote wholeness. That's the message of the Song of Songs, and so we want to unpack how that message has come to us. And in our interpretation of the Song of Songs, we've seen that it's not a wedding song, a cultic funeral song.

It's not an allegory. It's not a veiled political comment on the times. It's wisdom literature.

It's the correlate to Proverbs 1 and 9, where in Proverbs 1 and 9, a young man is being asked to make a decision between two women, Lady Wisdom and Lady Folly, and one leads to life and one leads to death, but they're both enticing. In the same way, in the Song of Songs, a woman is being asked to make a decision between Mr. Wisdom, the beloved shepherd, and Mr. Folly, Solomon, the royal rascal, and both are enticing, to be honest, right? Solomon comes with lavish enticement, lavish temptation. He's the richest, most powerful man in the entire world, and he is offering this woman a life of luxury and ease beyond comprehension, especially in the ancient world.

And so the woman of the song is definitely the hero of the song and the wisdom teacher, because she rejects Solomon and chooses the Genesis 2 marriage of the beloved shepherd. And in this fourth part of the song, we get kind of the climax. We get the final adjuration.

We get the arrival of the woman. We get the rejection of Solomon, and we get kind of the wisdom instruction. So let's walk through that.

The great thing about this fourth section is that it all is coming to us from the woman. So there's no need to kind of, in some sense, guess who's talking to whom. Remember, in part one, no male figure is present.

The conversation is between the daughters of Jerusalem, that is the women training or preparing for harem life, and the woman. In part two, the beloved shepherd arrives leaping over the mountains and bounding over the hills, but he cannot get into the harem because it would have meant certain death. So the woman expresses her commitment and sends him away.

In part three, Solomon arrives with his portable love shack, billowing perfume and incense and smoke, in some sense, like enough perfume to knock you over. And he comes and he woos and entices from chapter three all the way through the end of chapter seven and leading into chapter eight, at least where that section is. Finally, in this fourth section, you're going to see this fourth part, the arrival of the woman with the beloved shepherd, wisdom instruction in verses six to ten, the rejection of Solomon in 11 to 12, and the invitation to the wisdom of biblical marriage in 13 and 14.

That's what we're looking at, the arrival of the woman, her instruction, the rejection of Solomon, and her invitation to us to embrace with humility and faith the instructions she's laid before us. So let's take a look together at this verse. What we'll do, or this section, what we'll do is I'll lead you through.

I mean, because this is the last section, and it's, in some sense, the most important part of the song, I'm going to lead you through it part by part, and then I'll pause at the end to comment more specifically on the wisdom instruction of rock solid and white hot, temptation, hardship, and wholeness. So let's begin. The text begins with another question, which is used to provoke the arrival of someone.

It says, who is this coming up from the wilderness in 8.5, leaning upon her beloved? Okay, now the expression there, leaning upon her beloved, identifies the two people coming up from the wilderness, the beloved and the her, that is the woman of the song, leaning upon her beloved. And she says, under the apple tree I aroused you, there your mother conceived you, there she labored, there she gave birth to you. Now, commentators kind of debate what that means, under the apple tree I aroused you, there your mother conceived you.

Here's what we know from the song. In the beginning, the beloved shepherd is like an apple tree among the trees of the forest. That is, he's the only fruit bearing tree among them.

And she desires to sit in his shade and to taste his fruit because it's sweet to her mouth. So the apple tree imagery is that the shepherd is unique and the shepherd is desired by the woman. Okay, and then it says, there your One, it's, this is the place where she wants to conceive with the beloved.

Or it could just mean, I've known you since birth, since the very beginning, and you're still my one true love. And perhaps both of those things are meant here. Again, this is a song and the metaphors and the images are meant to be figurative.

And perhaps it means a little bit of both, we don't know. But we know it's an expression of the woman's affection in terms of beauty. And then she says, and here's her wisdom instruction, place me like the seal over your heart, like the seal on your arm, for love is strong like death, it's zeal fierce, like the grave.

That's rock solid. Then it says, its flames are the very flames, its flames are flames of fire, the very flame of Yahweh. That's white hot.

Okay, then in verse seven, many waters are not able to quench love and rivers cannot wash it away. That's the hardship. Then it says, if a man were to give all the wealth of his house for love, it would truly or utterly shame him.

That's the temptation. Then it says, we have a younger sister, and she does not have breasts. What will we do for our sister on the day that she is spoken for? If she is a wall, then we will build upon her a battlement of silver.

And if she is a door, we will barricade her with a board of cedar. Meaning that the woman of the song intends to pass along her instruction to her younger sister or to any younger woman who might encounter her experience, right? Oftentimes, commentators struggle with what to think about this when it says, we have a younger sister and she doesn't have breasts. Now, the fact that she says that we and not I, means that she's talking more globally or corporately about her community, or perhaps in the context of her family.

But my guess is it's more global in terms of we that is, you know, we as the people of Israel have younger sisters, and they're not sexually mature yet. And so what will we do? If she's a door, we're going to barricade it. If she's a wall, we're going to barricade it.

That is, we are not going to allow this younger generation, this next generation to give in either. We're going to protect them from what the woman's going through. So this is one of the ways in which we know that the wisdom literature was meant to be passed on.

And it tells us this, which is very interesting just to comment on for a second. Gang, think about this. The Song of Songs was written to instruct young girls in terms of what to expect and what to anticipate and what to pursue in the context of marriage.

Right? Think about that again. The Song of Songs was written really to instruct young female women, meaning this. In certain contexts and cultures that have appreciated the Old Testament for many, many generations, they would not allow people, especially men, to read the Song of Songs until they were 30.

All right? Because it's spicy and it's explicit. And the moment you start reading about this stuff, your mind starts thinking about certain things. Right? One of the reasons I know that this song was written for women was because the minute you start talking about breasts, men can only think about one thing and all other kind of instruction kind of fades away.

And so, but women have a better capacity to think about how these things work. They're not as visually geared, perhaps, as men are in general, not globally. Right? So this instruction was meant to help the next generation who's coming up to make wise and good decisions.

And so it, part of the message of the song at the end here, the woman of the song in her wisdom instruction is telling us that this song belongs with the people of God to instruct young people. Right? It's not, it's not for the, it's, you can teach it in adult Sunday school, but it's probably too late. You can teach it in your silver seniors class, but it's probably too late, not too late to appreciate God's design and the beauty of marriage and all that stuff, but it's too late to make the decision.

Right? We need to use the song of songs to fortify the next generation, to build upon them a battlement of silver, a battlement of wisdom instruction so that they can resist the hardship and the temptation and the brokenness that the woman has experienced in this song. It's an act of love that she's presented this to us. And so I'm very thankful to the Lord for even in the midst of Solomon's folly, that the Lord allowed his wisdom to stay with him.

So he could write this song for us and he could teach us the lesson that this woman taught him, right? This woman took Solomon to school. And so Solomon is taking us to, or Solomon is asking us to listen to her message. If Solomon, the wisest man in all the world can learn something from the woman in the song, then we should be encouraged that we should be able to listen humbly to the message and the wisdom of the woman of this song.

And that's what that part is talking about here. And then it says, because this woman has followed this instruction in verse 10, it says in this way, I have become in his eyes like one who both brings forth and finds wholeness. The Hebrew word there is shalom, right? And that's where we get in our message that this kind of love promotes wholeness, right? It resists temptation, endures hardship and promotes wholeness or shalom.

And that shalom we'll talk about in a little bit, goes back to the one flesh relationship. But I can comment that here in terms of the translation, that you have this sense, your translations in NIV or ESV or whatever, King James, NASB, will be different than mine here. I say in this way, or you could say then, I have become in his eyes.

And then I have like one who both brings forth and finds wholeness. Well, there's just one verb there in Hebrew, but that one verb has two possible meanings. It can mean either to bring forth or to find.

And as you will find, if you take the longer course, that one of the things that the author of the Song of Songs does is he uses words that can mean two things. And we're not asked to decide between one or the other, but we're asked to appreciate both aspects of that particular word. And so here, the woman who brings forth wholeness also finds it for herself.

And the one who finds it then has the ability to bring it forth. So it's a beautiful statement about what's going on here. That's the wisdom instruction that spans six through 10.

And in the midst of that wisdom instruction, there's the discussion of the younger sister that is intended to encourage us to pass this instruction on to the younger next generation. Following the woman's wisdom instruction in 11 and 12, we get the rejection of Solomon and harem life. And I love this part.

And it's, I don't know how commentators have overlooked it for so long. This is an explicit rejection of Solomon in the context of the Song of Songs. And so here we have in 8.11, it says, Solomon had a vineyard in Baal Hamon, and he gave the vineyard to its keepers, each one to bring its fruit for a thousand pieces of silver.

Now remember from chapter one of the song, the sons of the mother were angry with the daughter, her, the woman of the song, and made her a keeper of the vineyards. And now we've returned to the vineyard theme here again, but it's not the family vineyards, but Solomon's vineyards. All right.

And it says Solomon had a vineyard at Baal Hamon. Now, key to understanding this text is that there's no such location in Israel called Baal Hamon. Baal Hamon is not a location, but a designation for Solomon's harem.

Baal Hamon in Hebrew means husband of a multitude. You know, the word Baal, like Baal and Asher from the Bible, the word Baal in Hebrew can mean Lord, Master, Husband, or Baal, that kind of ancient Near Eastern pagan deity. In this context, the Baal Hamon, you could think it's the husband, and he's the Lord of a multitude.

The Lord of the multitude is the harem from 6, 8, and 9, 60 queens and 80 concubines. And are you ready? Virgins, what? Without number. Now think about this.

The Bible is able to count large numbers quite well, right? Think about in 1 Kings 11, right? 1 Kings 11, he had 700 royal wives, 300 concubines, right? Think about how many animals Solomon sacrificed on the day of the dedication of the temple, hundreds of thousands or whatever, 100,000, something like that. The Bible is not afraid to count. But in this particular instance, the virgins are so numerous that they're uncountable, right? Kind of like Solomon's wisdom.

Solomon's wisdom surpassed all before him and all after him, right? So you can think about these great numbers or like Abraham's offspring, like the stars of heaven, right? Things like that. And so it's just a remarkable statement to hear that the virgins were uncountable. And that's the multitude that they're talking about here.

Solomon had a vineyard. He was the husband or master of a multitude. And he gave the vineyard over to keepers.

That means those are the harem attendants and the warrior eunuchs that are mentioned in the song. And then it says each one would bring in its fruit for a thousand pieces of silver, okay? That's the bride price that would have been paid to take a woman into the harem, right? You couldn't just grab women and put them in your harem. Does that make sense? That is Solomon.

Solomon would have people who would go out and procure women for him and they would pay money to the family to bring those women in, which means not only would it be beneficial to the woman to have this kind of life and luxury, but it also radically benefit the family to receive a thousand pieces of silver from Solomon. Now, a thousand pieces of silver back in that day would be just an enormous amount of money. And in the day when you lived agriculturally bound to the land and some years were great, some years were not so great, you didn't have a lot of money, didn't have a lot of security.

And so to have a thousand pieces of silver would have been a game changer for any family. And so it is a massive temptation. And then it said each one would bring in a thousand pieces of silver.

And then she says this, my vineyard, which belongs to me, remains before me. Now, remember in chapter one, the family had a vineyard and they put her to work in it, but she said, and because of that, I couldn't take care of my own vineyard. That is my body.

And so it got tanned by the sun. I'm a manual laborer. I'm not qualified or suited.

We return again to the woman's singular vineyard, that is her body. And she says, my vineyard, which belongs to me, remains before me. Meaning she has not given into Solomon.

She has not given into the harem. She has protected her body. She's protected her body.

Remember, she is a wall and her breasts are like towers. She's a fortified city against the enticement of the harem. And then after that, she says, hey, the 200 are for those who keep its fruit.

That is pay your attendance, keep your money. I'm not interested. All right.

And I love this particular text. It's just, you know, the Song of Songs is a wonderful illustration of saying very strong things in kind of an elusive, nice, nuanced manner that kind of leads you through. And there's a sting to it, but there's kind of a gentle sting or there's like, oh, some arousal in it, but it's a gentle arousal.

It's not crude or rude in any sense. And it's an amazing thing to have a song that talks about sexual intimacy and body parts and even like sexual union and sexual arousal without being rude or crude. And so it's a great challenge for us in terms of how we communicate this song and pass it along to the next generation.

Finally, the invitation of the woman to come away. Here, the woman invites us as the readers, you know, well, we could say Solomon is the author through the woman, invites us as the readers to accept, believe, and live in light of this instruction. Like I always think to myself when I am working in the biblical text and trying to study, I say, Lord, help me understand it.

Lord, help me to believe it to be true. And then Lord, help me to live in light of it. And that's what this section is about.

I want you to understand the Song of Songs. I want you to believe its message and I want you to live in light of it. And so here's the woman's invitation.

She says, the one dwelling in the gardens, or the one dwelling in the gardens, the woman, friends listening to your voice, that's us, we're listening. She says, hear me. And then she just says, come away, my beloved, and be like a gazelle or young stag on the mountains of spices.

That is, watch us go away into the sunset together. I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Grease, but you could see at the very end, you know, the couple go away and the car flies away off into the wilderness with the couple in their arm and arm. Whatever kind of image you have of riding off into the sunset, this is one of those images, right? It's the storm has passed.

The wilderness is behind us. Solomon is gone. The woman comes with her beloved shepherd and they go away onto the mountains of spices.

That's the message of the Song of Songs. Let's take a minute then before we conclude and consider the message a little more carefully in this chart from Song of Songs 8, 6 to 10 that you can see on your screens. Here, I have summarized the message in the very right-hand column called instruction.

And I've showed you the translation in the left column in terms of how I'm correlating the text of the Song of Songs, which is poetic and ancient. And then kind of like Miles's modern kind of attempt to contextualize and summarize in a way that's memorable so that anytime anyone asks you about what is the message of the Song of Songs, you can say this, hey, God wants marriage to be rock solid in terms of commitment and white hot in terms of intimacy. And if we can keep rock solid and white hot together, right, we can better, but not perfectly, of course, endure hardship, resist temptation, and promote wholeness.

That's the message of the song. It's great. You can say it in less than 15 seconds to someone who's asking you a question about the Song of Songs in a way that's enticing and will lead you carefully through the book.

So first, let's begin. Let me give you just a little bit of instruction. Maybe just fill this out a little bit for you so that you kind of have some teeth to the instruction of the song.

Let's look at the translation. Well, let me say, let's begin with the first instruction point. The commitment of marriage, my friends, should be rock solid.

The commitment of marriage should be rock solid. What do I mean by that? Well, it comes from this. Place me like the seal in your heart, like the seal in your arm, for love is strong like death, obstinate like the grave with zeal, something like that.

Now, here it is. First, place me like the seal in your heart, like the seal in your arm. In the ancient world, you would mark the ownership of things like documents or vessels with seals, even like scrolls or even tombs or things like that.

You would mark them with seals, things that you would make impressions like with a seal, you're pressing clay. So each person had their own distinctive seal. It'd be like their driver's license or their passport.

But of course, back in those days, you didn't have driver's license or passports, you had seals. And they were a little kind of round, hardened clay or stone things that you would use to mark your signature. Now, you would wear them on your wrist or around your neck.

So you think about the whole Judah and Tamar event where he leaves his seal and his staff with Tamar. He's leaving his credit card and his authority stick with her, something like that. Here's my ruling staff and my credit card.

If I don't come back, you'll know who I am, kind of thing. And so when the author says, place me like the seal on your heart, that's the seal that you wear around your neck. Or place me like the seal on your arm, that's the seal that you would wear around your arm.

Now, those seals in the ancient world marked ownership and access, whoever was the owner of the seal owned the vessel and could use the contents. And the unsanctioned breaking of the seal or the unsanctioned usage would have been met with penalty, curse, even sometimes seriously death in the ancient world. And so that's what the woman is saying is, I want to be united to you in a one flesh relationship where you belong to me and I belong to you.

It's not saying that I own you in this kind of negative way, but that when you become married, you enter into a covenant of a one flesh relationship, something that God does for you. And it's this covenantal seal and the seal is strong like death, obstinate or fierce like the grave, meaning it should not be tampered with by any human. And it's an irreversible condition.

That's what's going on there. Make our love committed to such degree that everyone knows we're committed and no one messes with it. Everyone knows we're married and no one messes with it.

It's fierce. It's strong, right? The grave does not give up its inhabitants. Sheol does not render free those who go down there, right? Once you're in, you're in.

And that's the message there. It sounds a little creepy, perhaps, right? Let me put it this way. You know, I haven't seen the Valentine's card or the little candy hearts that say, I love you like death, baby.

Fierce like the grave. Does that make sense? But again, this is the modern world. The ancient world was very familiar with death and they knew it was an irreversible state.

And so they're saying, hey, let's belong to each other in an irreversible state. And that's what's going on. The commitment of marriage should be rock solid, right? And of course, that's the first step.

But it also says it's flames or flames of fire, the very flame of Yahweh or the hottest possible flame. And this is the language of, this is where I get the language of white hot intimacy. I mean, in the Song of Songs, it's very clear that the white hot nature of the song is all of the sexual intimacy that's being described in every chapter.

Does that make sense? And the fact that the flames are the flames of Yahweh mean that both in terms of origin, that is, love comes from Yahweh. He is the one who makes us one flesh. And in terms of degree, it's the hottest possible heat.

Marital intimacy should be white hot. Now, in terms of contextualization or application, we've got to understand that intimacy runs the gamut on a continuum. And there are all kinds of ways to be intimate with a spouse.

And I want to just make sure that you just don't think it's like wild sexual activity, but also the holding of hands, kissing is mentioned in the song, affection, love, expressions of love. So you could think about shared responsibilities, watching a movie together, serving your spouse. All of these things are intimate, inhabiting their worlds.

Those are all intimate activities. I treat my spouse in certain ways that I treat no one else. I do things with my spouse that I do with no one else.

And those are all intimate things from handholding to hugging or to kissing in certain ways, and then even sexual intimacy. So I want you to understand that in the context of commitment, there's a spectrum of intimacy and the Song of Songs is inviting you to participate in all of that. Commitment fuels the intimacy and intimacy strengthens the commitment.

I like to use the illustration of a furnace. If you have a furnace, you can put fire in it. Let's think of the furnace as the commitment of the marriage covenant.

And let's think of the fire in it as the heat of marital intimacy. When your intimacy or your fire is inside the furnace, the heat can get hotter and hotter and hotter, and it becomes purifying, right? But if you take the fire out, it can burn or harm, or it can just go out. And so one of the things the Song of Songs helps us to see is that if you keep your intimacy in the context of the furnace of marriage commitment, then you will maintain and provoke the heat to last for a lifetime.

And I love that imagery of the fire and the furnace keeping them together. And I hope that I can be faithful in that capacity for as long as the Lord allows me in my own marriage to keep the heat of sexual intimacy in the furnace of marital commitment. Next, for those marriages who work hard at both commitment and intimacy, and I'd like to say for a moment that both commitment and intimacy take work.

That is, we often think in our world, you've got to work to be committed. You've got to think about it, do things, be committed, etc. But I also want to say, yeah, you've got to work to be intimate, right? Sometimes you don't feel like being intimate.

Sometimes you don't feel like being affectionate. Sometimes you might not feel like saying, I love you, or I want to hug you or kiss you or express verbal affection, but you've got to work at it just as much as commitment. So I would say, don't be duped that intimacy just happens, right? Keep commitment.

You've got to work on commitment and you've got to work on intimacy and work on intimacy and work on commitment and keep stoking the fire in the furnace for as long as you can. And marriages that will work to do this, the Song of Songs teach us, can better endure hardship, resist temptation, and promote wholeness. That is, when the text says, many waters cannot extinguish this love and rivers cannot flood it, meaning the heat of sexual intimacy should protect the covenant of marriage to such a degree that even if waters flood over your furnace, the fire is not going to All right.

And that's because love and commitment and intimacy and oneness is something that God gives us, right? What does Jesus say in Matthew 19, what God has joined together, let no human being separate. So the one flesh union of marriage is something that God does for us in that particular estate. And so many waters cannot extinguish.

So the waters are the hardships of life, right? And every marriage is going to swim in the waters of hardship without a doubt, without a doubt. And so we need to maintain commitment and intimacy as a means of staying afloat in the floodwaters of hardship. Marriages will also experience temptation, the temptation of adultery, the temptation to let love diminish, the temptation of non-satisfaction, the temptation of saying, I don't have what's good enough and someone else has something that's better.

All those kinds of temptations are out there for us. And you, and you can't buy love. You think about if a man would give all the wealth of his house for love, it would utterly scorn him.

So the woman is being tempted in the song by all of the wealth and opulence of Solomon. So she's experiencing hardship. She's in the wilderness and storm of the harem.

She's experiencing temptation. She's experiencing the temptation to enter into and accept harem life. And what she's saying here is my commitment to my commitment and desire for intimacy with my beloved is one of the ways in which I'm going to ward off the temptation of Solomon.

And thus, while you have rock solid commitment and white hot intimacy, you prevail in hardship and temptation to the degree that God gives you grace to do so. And this type of love will ultimately promote wholeness or Shalom. That is the one flesh union.

That is the marriage covenant created in Genesis two. If the woman would have engaged in the harem life of Solomon, she never would have had the exclusive lifelong one flesh union that God intended in marriage. She would have been one of a thousand, one of a thousand, and she would have not experienced that intimacy in any measure in terms of Genesis two life in the harem at all.

It would have been lost to her. And so all of the women in Solomon's harem were prevented from experiencing the beauty and the joy of Genesis two. They were living in the corruption of first Kings 11.

And that song says they want you not to experience this. What I like about this is this particular message. And I'll just conclude this way is that the Bible and wisdom literature wisely upholds the pre-fall ideal of what marriage is, but it also recognizes the ravages of sin and the corruption of the marriage covenant from Genesis three on.

And so it's, it doesn't say, well, because we've screwed it up so bad, don't worry about Genesis two. It says Genesis two still works even though Genesis three has happened. And here's how we can navigate it.

Maintain commitment, maintain intimacy, and together work to endure hardship, resist temptation, and promote shalom or wholeness in the context of this broken and wrecked world.