Introducing the Song of Songs

Song of Songs 1-8

            The key to understanding the Song of Songs is right in its title: The Song of Songs of Solomon. The book is literally a song of songs, a collection of love songs, written by Solomon. (Interpreters argue about all of that, but that’s what I think.) Commentator Tremper Longman counts 23 discrete poems in the book.

            And they are unabashedly love songs. They extol passion; they talk without shame about sexual attraction. Author Rodney Clapp puts it this way:

The Song of Songs even more unabashedly exults in sexual beauty and desire. It is a straightforward celebration of a woman and man reveling in one another’s attractiveness, rhapsodically cataloging the other’s most favored physical features. Lips, skin, hair, eyes, breasts, legs—all are delighted in and enthusiastically celebrated… At times, of course, the later Christian tradition would attempt to ‘spiritualize’ the Song of Songs, but the text is so resolutely physical that the earthly body can never be entirely routed form it (Clapp, Tortured Wonders, p. 199).

As Clapp notes, many Christian interpreters have been embarrassed by the overtly sexual notes in the book and have tried to make it an allegory about Christ and his love for the church, but I just don’t think it works that way. To be sure, St. Paul says that human marriage is a picture of the love of Christ for His bride, the church (Ephesians 5:32), but to make the Song exclusively about that misses the point. It’s a book of wisdom, and as such it talks about human experience, and part of human experience is physical love.

            This exultation in physical love, in the Greek’s eros, stands in sharp contrast to the book of Proverbs, where eros is connected with adultery. To be sure, passion is dangerous, especially outside the bonds of marriage. But the Song of Songs reminds us that, within the Lord’s chosen design, it is a beautiful thing.