Song of Songs: What is Love?
Published April 26th, 2006 in Song of SongsOn Sunday night, we took a deep breath and headed to a place where few seem to have travelled before - Song of Songs in the Old Testament. It only takes a brief glance to realise why. It’s a bit saucy in a few places and much of what is said would usually be confined to the bedroom…so why talk about it at all?
A few reasons:
1. People keep daring me to speak on it! Probably because they want to see if i’ll blush, but others have quite rightly said that it is part of scripture and we need to look at it.
2. A quote I read in Steve Biddulph’s book Manhood said, “What we need is not more sex-education, but more love-education.” Given that the word ‘love’ has been so confused in our culture (if we ever understood it rightly in the first place) and has become almost indistinguishable from the word ’sex’ it is little wonder that relationships are fracturing all over the place. We’ve forgotten how to love, and we need to rediscover how.
With these two things in mind, I thought it was time we looked at ‘love’ a little more closely.
We started off by looking at Adam and Eve in Genesis and how in the beginning, they felt no shame over their nakedness and sexuality. After their disobedience, the first thing they did was to cover themselves, hiding their sexuality and true selves form each other. Ever since then, two things have happened.
- Christians have kept covering themselves up to the point that love, relationships and sexuality are never spoken about openly and honestly. It has been left out of discipleship almost entirely.
- People that aren’t Christians have gone to the other extreme and thrown off every stitch of fig leaf with an ‘anything goes’ attitude to sexuality. The result we see is hollow, unfulfilling relationships based on sex and nothing else.
The Church has rightly spoken against this attitude, but has left us with a list of “don’ts”. These we know well, but when it comes to a list of “do’s” we are left a little confused and unsure. What does appropriate, God honouring love look like in relationships? What are the things we can DO to be faithful disciples and ‘good lovers’ (in the best sense of the term)?
Song of Songs is where much of our exploration will take place. A collection of poetry attributed to King Solomon of the Old Testament. The song is though to have been sung at Jewish weddings and during the Passover festival each year and has an interesting history of interpretation in Christian thinking. For most of the time, because of its raunchy nature, people have tried to interpret it allegorically, using it as a metaphor for the love between God and Israel and later between Jesus and the Church. There’s no doubt that the New Testament does use this imagery from time to time, but I think we need to remember that God’s love runs far deeper than even the most intimate expression of human love. Saying that Song of Songs is allegorical, in my mind at least, limits God’s love and sexualises it in a way it shouldn’t.
Song of Songs should thus be read as it is. An expression of love bewteen a man and a woman in a monogomous, heterosexual marriage. The language and imagery are beautiful and we can learn a lot from the love expressed there. Over the coming weeks we will look at the guys experience of love, the girls exprience of love, a couples experience of love and how we cope with sexual sins in our past when in relationships now.
But on Sunday we spent some time looking at how love is defined in Song of Songs, setting the scene for the next few weeks. We watched the Nooma “Flame”  DVD featuring Rob Pell. He mentioned how Song of Songs describes love as such a powerful thing that over and over again it says “Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires.” He also talked about three different Hebrew words for ‘love’ in Song of Songs:
- The first is raya, translated literally as ‘companion’ or ‘friend’.
- The second is ahava, a more profound love than fleeting romantic feelings. Ahava is making a decision to join your life to the life of another.
- The third is dod which is the physical, sexual element to a relationship.
Rob likened each of these ‘loves’ to flames that can never really satisfy when they burn separately. But together, they burn brightly and satisfy in the way God intended love to.
I invite you to join us on the journey over the next few weeks as we talk more about what it means for us to love in all stages of life. In the words of Rob Pell:
May you honour the way God created you.
May you have a profound sense of respect for the fact that you are a deeply spiritual and mysterious being, and that love is ultmately a profoundly spiritual thing.
May you realise that the three flames are meant to burn together.
And may you discover the big flame.
Links to the Song of Songs Series:
- What is Love?
- The Guy thing
- The Girl Thing
- The Together Thing
- Dealing With Sexual Sin in Our Past
- Answering the Questions
14 Responses to “Song of Songs: What is Love?”
- 1 Pingback on Jun 20th, 2006 at 4:50 pm
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“Song of Songs should thus be read as it is. An expression of love bewteen a man and a woman in a monogomous, heterosexual marriage.”
Matt, I really want to be able to read Song of Songs like this, but (and I could be confused, or have times out - this isn’t something I’m certain of) wasn’t Song of Songs written by Solomon, for whom the term “monogomous marriage” did not quite describe what was going on? Didn’t he have tons of wives? Other than that I agree whole-heartedly with the post: I never really liked the Song of Songs as an allegory angle that much.
Spot on. Solomon had hundreds of wives and mistresses - a bit of a ladies man you might say…
But if you read Song of Songs, Solomon is actually a third player in the book. There’s the man and the lady expressing their love for each other, and then Solomon who is portrayed as a bad egg, basically appearing on the scene to steal the lady away to be another of his wives.
If Solomon is the actual author, it seems like the Song is an expression of what love should be, not what he experienced. Almost like a confession on his part about how wrong he has it.
What do you think?
Mate!
I knew I was getting it wrong, sounds spot on. Looks like I’ll be going home to read up on Song of Songs! Just don’t tell my pastor…..
You’re right, allegorically it’s just weird. We tend to chuck in phrases in songs, to say that we’ve covered it, no need to cover it anymore! “you are the vines and we are the branches, and his banner, over me, is love”
Glad you are covering this- we tend to try and cover love as a church, and neglect these poems. We were left them for a reason!
Oh yeah- very much like poems, hard to read sometimes!
Love seems to have 2 major reactions there are those who think of the fairy tale version of love the involves a princess being swept away by her prince. Or those who have lost all hope and thrown love in the trash, along with world peace.
Me I’m a fairy tale person. Bring on the prince;)
Thanks for the ‘bad egg’ insight! I confess I’ve never thought about it much before, although have on the odd occasion mused over the selection of talking about just ‘one’ specific lover. I now get to go back and read it with the new slant and a lot more to think about.
I was just going to challenge the “bad egg theory”- but then I read Song of Songs again. This really holds up in the earlier chapters, where the lover is looking through the lattice.
But then we come to chapter 6 (v8), where the lover says: 60 queens there may be, and 80 concubines, and virgins beyond number, but my dove, my perfect one, is unique…
I guess it’s poetry, and you can interpret poetry in many different ways.
My take is that Beloved is being courted by JoeSchmo Israelite, and also by Solomon. So perhaps lover is used for two people? What do other bibles say? I assume the italicised headings are not part of the bible, rather something that depends on translation. I know that spanish bibles often have different titles at different places to the english NIV.
I enjoyed Sunday’s service, and am really looking forward to this series!
(and I agree Pam- bring on the prince!)
Yep, the headings are a later addition, and in reality, nothing more than a ‘best guess’. There is always some confusion as to who is saying what and when, so some translations will have different headings in different places.
Having said that, it doesn’t really change the beauty of the poetry and the expression of love that’s there.
There is a fourth player in the Song that I neglected to mention too. It’s the ‘friends’ or the ‘crowd’. Those that are celebrating the love and marriage of the man and woman, but they play a fairly minor role.
I’m referring to four different comentaries in my prep for this series, and all four take a different approach to the interpretation. In the end, I’ve chosen what seems to make the most sense to me, but be aware that there are always alternative views.
hurry up with the next sermon notes! I have a _good_ comment!
Hey Matt. Very nicely written.
Thanks Paul!