Theopedia

Song of Solomon

“My beloved is mine, and I am his; he grazes among the lilies.”

— Song of Solomon 2:16

Overview

The Song of Solomon, also called the Song of Songs or Canticles, is a book of Hebrew love poetry. Along with Job, Psalms, and Proverbs, it belongs to the Old Testament’s poetical books, and Ecclesiastes falls into the same division.1 Its title uses the Hebrew idiom for a superlative, so that “the Song of Songs” means “the most excellent of songs.”2 The book has always held a place in the Hebrew canon.3

Author and Date

Tradition ascribes the book to Solomon, on the strength of 1 Kings 4:32, which credits him with composing 1,005 songs.2 Some interpreters have also argued from internal evidence for when in Solomon’s reign the book was written: comparing the description of a royal pool in 1 Kings 7:34 with Song of Solomon 7:4 has led them to place its composition well after Solomon’s marriage to Pharaoh’s daughter.2

Historical and Literary Context

The book is not a single continuous drama but a series of descriptive scenes built on dialogue between a bride and her beloved.3 Jewish tradition held it in such reverence that, in the report of one seventeenth-century English divine, “before thirty years of age none would study it.”2

Structure

The Song of Solomon runs to eight chapters of continuous dialogue between the two lovers, with the bride’s companions, “the daughters of Jerusalem,” occasionally speaking as well.2 Its governing theme is the separation of the bride from her beloved and their reunion.3 The book’s imagery of gardens, spices, fruit, and animals is meant to be read for its overall scope, not mined for a hidden meaning in each individual picture.3

Major Themes

The Goodness of Marital Love

Read in its plain sense, the Song of Solomon celebrates the delight a husband and wife take in one another. Bavinck writes: “The Song of Solomon celebrates the intimacy and power of love.”4 This belongs to a wider biblical witness that marriage, and the “satisfaction and delight” of the “sexual embrace” within it, is good and God-given, alongside texts such as Genesis 2:23-25 and Proverbs 5:15-19.5 The young man’s own words capture this delight: “Behold, you are beautiful, my love; behold, you are beautiful; your eyes are doves” (Song of Solomon 1:15). On this reading, Scripture “celebrates romance within appropriate moral parameters,” acknowledging both the reality of physical attraction and its proper place inside marriage.6

The Allegorical and Typological Reading

Alongside this literal sense, Jewish and Christian interpreters have long also read the Song as picturing the covenant marriage between God and his people. Barrows traces this figure back through the Pentateuch, where idolatry is described as spiritual adultery (Exod. 34:15; Deut. 31:16), through Psalm 45 and the prophets (Isa. 54:5; 62:5; Jer. 2:2; 3:14; Hos. 2:16, 19-20), into the New Testament’s picture of the church as “the bride, the Lamb’s wife.”3 Leigh likewise records that “many of the Ancients refer it to the spiritual Marriage between Christ and the Church, or every faithful soul.”2 Strong describes the same transmission: “the Song of Solomon, as Jewish interpreters have always maintained, is an allegorical poem describing, under the figure of marriage, the union between Jehovah and his people: Paul only adopts the Old Testament figure, and applies it more precisely to the union of God with the church in Jesus Christ,” citing Ephesians 5:31-32.7 Barrows cautions that this spiritual application should stay with the song’s main scope rather than press a hidden meaning into every particular image it uses.3

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References

  1. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), chap. 21, “The Poetical Books,” 265. ↩

  2. Edward Leigh, A Systeme or Body of Divinity (London: A. M. for William Lee, 1654), 37. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  3. Barrows, 292-93. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  4. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 5, “Holy Scripture.” ↩

  5. Ken Magnuson, “6. Sexual Ethics,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2020). ↩

  6. J. Alan Branch, 50 Ethical Questions: Biblical Wisdom for Confusing Times (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2021), chap. 21, “What, If Anything, Does the Bible Say about Dating?,” 106-109. ↩

  7. Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology (Philadelphia: Griffith & Rowland Press, 1909), 3:796. ↩