Manna Praxis

Song of Solomon: Love as Strong as Death

Introduction

Today’s Passage: An Overview of the Whole Book

You are about to walk through a book unlike any other in the Bible, and it is well to know at the outset what kind of book it is. It is not a story with a plot that runs from a beginning to an end, and it is not a letter of instruction, and it is not a collection of laws. It is a song, or rather a garland of love songs, sung back and forth between a bride and her groom, and it celebrates with unhurried delight the beauty, the longing, the tenderness, and the faithfulness of the love that a husband and wife are given to share. Scripture, you will find, is not embarrassed to sing of wedded love. It knows that God Himself made man and woman for one another, blessed their union in the garden before ever sin entered the world, and called the whole of His creation very good. And so, tucked among the prophets and the psalms, the Bible keeps one book that does nothing but praise the goodness of that gift, plainly and beautifully and without apology. Read it slowly, and read it reverently, for it is holy ground of a gentle kind.

As you read, hold this: Scripture sings without shame of covenant married love as a pure and holy gift of God, and in that faithful love it lets us glimpse a greater one: the LORD’s own devotion to His people, love as strong as death.

The name and what it means

The Hebrew title of the book is שִׁיר הַשִּׁירִים (shir hashirim), pronounced sheer hah-shee-REEM, and it comes from the word shir (Strong’s H7892), which simply means a song. But the title says more than “a song.” It is the same kind of phrase the Bible uses when it says “holy of holies” for the innermost room of the temple, or “King of kings” for the highest of all kings. “Song of Songs” means the finest of songs, the choicest and most excellent of them all, the one song lifted above every other. And the book has long carried a second name too, the Song of Solomon, for it is bound up with Solomon, the son of David, the king to whom God gave wisdom beyond measure and who, we are told, composed a thousand and five songs. Whichever name you use, the meaning is the same. Of all the songs a heart could sing, this book claims to hold the best: a song of love, given as a gift and received with joy.

The world of the book

The Song is poetry, and Hebrew love poetry at that, so it works the way poetry works and not the way a history works. It moves by images rather than by dates, and it paints with the colors of the land the poet knew: the vineyards and the flocks, the mountains of Lebanon and the wildflowers of spring, the doves and the gazelles, the fragrant spices carried in from far countries. Two voices carry nearly the whole of it, the bride and her beloved, calling to one another, praising one another, seeking and finding one another, and now and then a chorus of onlookers, the daughters of Jerusalem, answers back. You will not always be able to say for certain where one scene ends and the next begins, and that is no fault in your reading. The book was never meant to be diagrammed like a map. It was meant to be felt, the way a song is felt, as it rises and falls and returns again to its dearest themes.

For as long as God’s people have kept this book, they have also heard in it something deeper than the love of a man and a woman, true and good as that love is. The prophets, again and again, sang of the LORD as a faithful husband to His people, and mourned Israel’s unfaithfulness as a bride’s betrayal. And the apostles, looking on the love of Christ for His church, reached for the same picture, calling Christ the Bridegroom and the church His bride. So the church has long read the Song on two levels at once, and rightly so: first as the honest and holy celebration of married love that it plainly is, and then, through that window, as a glimpse of the greater love it faintly mirrors, the covenant love of God for His own. We will hold both together as we walk, taking care not to explain away the plain beauty of the one, nor to miss the deeper beauty of the other.

The shape of the book

The Song does not march in a straight line, but it does move, gathering its themes and returning to them until, at the very last, it names the truth the whole book has been singing toward. These are the movements you will pass through.

This walk will carry us through the Song in order, one chapter at a time. You are welcome to read more than one chapter when you sit down, but keep them in their order, for the book is building, movement by movement, toward its final and greatest word.

The one thread to carry

Everything in the Song is climbing toward one verse near the end, the verse that gives our series its name. When you reach it, you will find that all the longing and delight of the earlier chapters were preparing you for it: love that is faithful, love that is fierce in its devotion, love that will not let go.

Song of Solomon 8:6 (BSB) — “Set me as a seal over your heart, as a seal upon your arm. For love is as strong as death, its jealousy as unrelenting as Sheol. Its sparks are fiery flames, the fiercest blaze of all.”

That is the truth the Song sings of married love, and it is a truth worth carrying into every marriage and into every home. But it is not the end of the matter. When the apostle Paul wrote of husband and wife becoming one flesh, he lifted his eyes past the marriage itself to the greater love it was made to picture all along, the love of Christ for the people He gave Himself to save.

Ephesians 5:31–32 (BSB) — ““For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, but I am speaking about Christ and the church.”

So carry both of these with you as you walk. The Song teaches you to honor and delight in the good gift of married love, whether that gift is yours today or not, for it is God’s gift and it is very good. And it teaches you, through that gift, to lift your eyes to a love stronger still, a love as strong as death that has already passed through death for its bride and will never let her go. Read the Song for its beauty, love the Giver more than the gift, and give thanks.