Song of Solomon 4

Big idea: The book's first descriptive poem, working downward from her eyes, and then a second movement that turns her into a landscape — a locked garden, a sealed spring, an orchard of imported spices. The last word of the chapter is hers, and it unlocks everything the poem has just described.

Her invitation at the end of the chapter is answered by his first line in the next: I have come into my garden. The two chapters are one poem with a chapter break through it.

4:1–7 — You are all beautiful

The form has a name in Arabic love poetry, wasf, and it works by comparison to things that are ORDERED, ABUNDANT or FORMIDABLE rather than by describing shapes. A flock streaming down a hillside is what hair looks like in motion; teeth like a newly washed flock, every one with a twin and none missing, is a way of saying they are white, matched and all there. The neck is a tower hung with shields, which is about bearing.

¹ Behold, you are beautiful, my love. Behold, you are beautiful. Your eyes are like doves behind your veil. Your hair is as a flock of goats, that descend from Mount Gilead. ² Your teeth are like a newly shorn flock, which have come up from the washing, where every one of them has twins. None is bereaved among them. ³ Your lips are like scarlet thread. Your mouth is lovely. Your temples are like a piece of a pomegranate behind your veil. ⁴ Your neck is like David’s tower built for an armory, on which a thousand shields hang, all the shields of the mighty men. ⁵ Your two breasts are like two fawns that are twins of a roe, which feed among the lilies. ⁶ Until the day is cool, and the shadows flee away, I will go to the mountain of myrrh, to the hill of frankincense. ⁷ You are all beautiful, my love. There is no spot in you.

4:8–16 — A garden locked

He calls her 'my sister, my bride' five times in this passage, which is affectionate convention in Egyptian love poetry rather than a family relationship, and asks her to come down from mountains named for lions and leopards. Then the metaphor she will spend the rest of the book living in: a garden with a wall, a spring with a seal, planted with spices that in the real world would have come from India and Arabia — an impossible garden, deliberately.

⁸ Come with me from Lebanon, my bride, with me from Lebanon. Look from the top of Amana, from the top of Senir and Hermon, from the lions’ dens, from the mountains of the leopards. ⁹ You have ravished my heart, my sister, my bride. You have ravished my heart with one of your eyes, with one chain of your neck. ¹⁰ How beautiful is your love, my sister, my bride! How much better is your love than wine, the fragrance of your perfumes than all kinds of spices! ¹¹ Your lips, my bride, drip like the honeycomb. Honey and milk are under your tongue. The smell of your garments is like the smell of Lebanon. ¹² My sister, my bride, is a locked up garden; a locked up spring, a sealed fountain. ¹³ Your shoots are an orchard of pomegranates, with precious fruits, henna with spikenard plants, ¹⁴ spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with every kind of incense tree; myrrh and aloes, with all the best spices, ¹⁵ a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, flowing streams from Lebanon. ¹⁶ Awake, north wind, and come, you south! Blow on my garden, that its spices may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and taste his precious fruits.

Scripture text: World English Bible (public domain).

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