A Commentary in Simple English on Song of Songs

The Fifth Poem: Chapter 5:2-Chapter 7:10

This poem begins with the girl’s dreams. This is like the third poem. That began in 3:1 with a dream. There too the young woman is in the city. So she is here in 5:2. This fifth poem is much longer that the third one.

Solomon is not named at all in this poem. Yet 6:8 sounds like a time fairly early after he became king. In 6:13, the ‘Shunamite’ may be Abishag of Shunem. (See 1 Kings 1: 1-4 and 14; and 2:13-22.) She had been David’s nurse in his old age. Her place in Solomon’s court must have been a strange one. This also sounds like a time soon after Solomon became king. 7:5 too speaks about the king. Perhaps this song is the young woman’s dream about Solomon’s court.

Verses 2-9

In verse 2, the young woman is half-asleep but she starts to tell her story to us. See Matthew 25:1-13. She heard a knock on the door. She also hears a voice. She knows whose voice it is. [5.1] In Palestine someone you did not know would knock on the door at night. A friend would call out. See also Luke 11:5; Matthew 7:7; Revelation 3:20; Acts 12:13-16. Her lover asks her to open the door so that he can come in. He speaks very kind words to her. It may be that his head is wet because he has had a long night journey to find her.

In verse 3, the girl gives the reasons why she does not want to open the door. They are weak reasons. They are really only excuses.

In verse 4, the lover tries to open the door from the outside. This makes the girl excited. She felt desire for her lover. She got up and went to the door. Perhaps we should think that the myrrh made the bolt move more easily. She had been much too slow. By the time she had opened the door, her lover had gone. She found that the city was not a safe place at night (verse 7). Maybe it was not safe for her lover to stand too long at her door.

There is a picture here of Christ and His church. Our Lord calls to us. We answer Him much too slowly. The church is often half-asleep. We lose so much good that we might have had. We must be quick to answer Him when He calls to us.

Sometimes we pray, and we do not ask God for as much as we should. Our prayers are too small. God gives answers to our prayers and much more too. Yet we only look for the things we have asked for. We are not as thankful as we should be.

So (verse 6) the girl opens her door. She goes out into the dark streets. She looks for her lover but she does not find him. Then in verse 7, as before (3:3) the watchmen find her. In 3:3, they took no notice of her. Now they hit her and take away her thin, light clothing. It seems that they hit her so hard that they made her bleed. Perhaps they did not want a woman to shout out in the streets in the middle of the night. Their work was to ‘watch the walls’. Perhaps their work was not to keep people out of the palace. They were there to keep Solomon’s many women inside. This is the one place in the Song where men assert their authority over a woman.

In verse 9, the girl speaks to ‘the daughters of Jerusalem’. These are the women in the palace. Notice four questions. Here in verse 9, the question is ‘how’. In 6:1 the question is ‘Where’. In 6:10 it is ‘Who’. Then in 6:13, the question is ‘Why’. The women do not help her to find her lover. They do not say anything about the watchmen who beat her.

The Christian should be able to tell people in what way Christ is better. He is better because he loved us when we were sinners. He is better because he loved us enough to die for us. He is better because he won the battle over death and rose again. He is better because He is now in glory with God the Father. He is better because He gives us his Spirit. He will bring us to glory too.

Verse 10 - Chapter 6:1 This is the second part of this poem.

Here the girl speaks. She tells the ‘daughters of Jerusalem’ how wonderful the man that she loves is. She works her way down from his head to his feet. What she says about him is far more than could be true of any man. Only our Lord Jesus can be spoken about like this! When we look at 7: 1-6, the man talks about the girl he loves. He begins with her feet and he works his way up to her head. What he says about her is more wonderful than any woman deserves.

So in verse 10, the girl says that the face of her lover is ‘radiant’. It shines or glows. Then it is ‘ruddy’. It has the healthy colour of a man who works in the open-air, like Adam in Genesis. He is ‘manly’. He is a man that people would notice. Everyone would want to look at him, even if he was in a big crowd. [5.2] In verse 11, the girl speaks of his head. There are two words for gold here. Perhaps this means ‘solid gold gold’ or ‘gold which shines’. Then his hair is black and full of waves. There are no grey hairs there: he is still young.

His eyes (verse 12) are like gentle birds or ‘doves’ as they look at the girl. It seems that the doves are on a bank above a stream of water. Some people guess that the last part of the verse is about the man’s teeth. They are pure white, even and straight.

In verse 13, it seems that he does not need to use ‘after-shave’. Perhaps although he is young he has a beard. His lips are like flowers that are as red as blood. ‘Arms’ in verse 14 is a word that means anything below the elbow. Here we may think of the fingers with gold rings on them. But perhaps we should think not of rings, but of finger nails. In the gold rings there are costly stones. The stones are from somewhere far away beyond the sea, from Tarshish. [5.3] His body is like ‘ivory’. The ‘tusks’ or huge teeth of elephants provided ivory. His body is smooth and shiny. The ‘sapphires’ or ‘lapis lazuli’ are blue stones. Lapis lazuli was fairly common at that time.

Verse 15 moves down to the legs. They are like very fine stone. Then the feet are like pure gold. Every part of her lover is of the very best quality.

In Daniel 2, the king has seen a dream or ‘vision’. Daniel has to tell him about it in verses 31-35. The king had dreamed of a great statue. Its head was made from gold. Then each part was less good. The feet were cheap. They were made from iron and clay. This is not the way that the girl sees the man she loves. In every part, he is the very best.

That, of course, is how a Christian should feel about the Lord Jesus. There may be some good things that we can say about other people. Everything about Jesus is good. Go back to verse 10. Jesus is the Second Adam (1 Cor 15:45). He is ‘chosen out’ or outstanding. He is not just the man we have chosen as the only one who can save us. He is the one man that God the Father chose from all men of all ages. He was the one man who would share the nature of God. He is both Son of God and Son of Man. Other kings wore a crown made from gold. Our Jesus not only has the crown on his head. His head is pure gold.

What the lover says is full of beauty (verse 16). ‘He is altogether lovely’ (NIV) is ‘He is all desires’. He is everything that the girl really wants. We all have desires (Jas 1:14, 15 and 4:1,2.) Yet we also have good desires (Psa 145:19; Psa 37:4; Isa 26:8). Then she adds that he is the one for whom she feels such love. Also he is the one to whom she has given herself up. He is not only her lover. He is also her friend. It is good when a husband and wife are close friends as well as lovers.

Just talking like this about her lover has made her feeling of love grow stronger. It will make our love to Christ stronger if we talk to other people about Him.

In 6:1, it is the ‘daughters of Jerusalem’ who speak. They answer the girl. They say: ‘The man you love may be just as wonderful as you say that he is. But where is he? If you do not know where he is, he is no help to you’. So they want to know which way he went. Then they can look for him with her.

Chapter 6: 2 and 3

Here we have the third part of the poem. The fifth part is in 6:11-13, which matches it in some ways. The ‘daughters of Jerusalem’ ask: ‘Where has your lover gone?’ People ask Christians: ‘Where is your God? Here is my ‘god’. I made it myself’. It is a piece of wood. Or it may be a carved stone. See Psalm 42:3,10; 79:10; Joel 2:17 and Micah 7:10. There is a good answer in Psalm 115:2 and 3.

We do not know whether the girl wanted the ‘daughters of Jerusalem’ to join in the search for her lover. She knows where he is, and it seems that she goes to find him. In verse 6, she says that he has ‘gone down’ to his garden. We know that the Egyptians used to live on the first floor of their houses. So they would go down to the ground floor to reach their gardens. That may be the picture here. He is busy and she is left alone, but verse 3 is still true. They belong to each other, even though they are not together. Yet it seems that they do meet, for in the next verses, he speaks in praise of her.

The glory of a Christian’s faith is that he still believes in Christ even when he seems to be far away.

6 verses 4-10

This is the middle part of the fifth poem. We should expect it to be important. In verses 4-9 it is the lover who speaks. We can see that quite a lot of verses 5-9 is rather like 4:1-5. There the lover praised his bride once before.

We need to think about verses 4 and 10 together. In verse 4 we have two cities. One is called Tirzah. Little Tirzah is beautiful. Jerusalem is more important and lovely. Now we expect an even grander city to come next. The Hebrew says nothing about troops or an army. So perhaps we could think of Zion with flags or ‘banners‘, which hang on the city walls.

When we come down to verse 10, we read about someone who is like the dawn, the moon and even the sun. Then the last words of the verse are the same as the last words of verse 4. There is really nothing about ‘stars’ or an army there. We need something grander than the sun. So perhaps this is Zion, the City of God in the heavens. [6.1]

For Tirzah (verse 4) see 1 Kings 15:33, 16:6 and 23 and 2 Kings 15:14. After Solomon died, his kingdom broke into two parts. Tirzah seems to have been the capital of Israel, the northern part, until about 880B.C. No one would write about Tirzah and Jerusalem like this after the time of Solomon. Perhaps here the girl looks out through a window and can see the man she loves.

So in verse 5, the lover asks the girl not to look at him, because she wakes such strong desires in him. Her black hair runs down over her shoulders like a flock of goats. Her teeth (verse 6) are white. She has a full set of teeth with no ugly gaps. As in 4:3, we should perhaps think of cheeks rather than ‘temples’. (Verse 8) It is 1 Kings 11:3 which tells us about the great number of women in Solomon’s palace. That verse tells us too how these women turned his heart away from God. The numbers here are not so great. This suggests an early time in Solomon’s forty years as king.

We can see that this poem only speaks about her head. In 4:1-5, the lover spoke of her breasts. This must be because here she looks out through a window. Only her head can be seen. (See verse 10.)

The lover only wants the one girl. Her love is all that he wants. (Verse 9) He is not jealous of Solomon. As in other places the lover speaks about the girl’s mother, not her father. She is the only daughter, and she ‘shines’ to her mother. Verse 10 tells us what the women in Solomon’s court said about this one girl. We had the question: ‘Who is this?’ in 3:6 and we shall find it again in 8:5. She looks out or rather ‘down’ from a window. She is like the morning sky. She is as ‘fair’ or beautiful as the full moon, which is called ‘The White One’ here. She is bright as the sun, here called ‘The Heat’. Then there is something more. This can only be the City of God (Rev 21:10 and 11).

Now we could hardly speak even about a very beautiful woman like this. The words are too strong. They only fit the church of God in the glory it will enjoy with Christ. This is not yet ours, but it shall be.

Verses 11-13

This is the fifth part of this poem. It matches verses 2 and 3. There too the lover ‘went down’. Verse 11 is not difficult, but verses 12 and 13 are very difficult indeed. In verse 11 it is the lover who speaks. He has gone down, probably down from his house to a small wood of nut trees. There is a narrow valley where water flows in the bottom in wet weather. It is spring and the bushes in the valley, the grape vines and the fruit trees grow well.

When the Holy Spirit begins to work in our hearts, Christ watches. He is pleased to see new desires for goodness and holiness, which start to grow in us. He is pleased with them, just as we in England like to see new growth in the spring.

In verse 12 the girl seems to dream again. She was happy and pleased. She was in a chariot, perhaps with a prince. She wants to go away from Jerusalem and the women in the palace. We can only guess at what happens in verse 13. It seems that the palace women call the girl to come back. ‘Shulammite’ could perhaps mean ‘Solomon’s lady’. It could mean ‘the girl from Shunem’. If so, this may be Abishag who was David’s nurse in his last days. (See 1 Kings 1:1-4 and 2:13-25.) This is a very old idea. Then in the second half of the verse someone else answers. ‘You do not really want to look at this girl. There is so much else to see. There is a dance with two groups or “armies” of women dancers’.

Some people think that there is then one woman dancer that everyone in the palace watches. She is the woman spoken about in the poem in the next chapter. Everyone is so busy that the Shulammite girl is at last able to escape. In 7:11 she is back in the country with her lover.

Chapter 7: 1-6

Here we have part six of this poem. In part two, the girl spoke about her lover. She began with his head and worked her way down to his feet. Now we hear a man speak in praise of a woman. He begins with her feet and works his way up to her head. She is the daughter of a prince (verse 1). She comes from a great family but it seems she dances on her own now. Either the girl’s legs are round or perhaps as she dances they go round and round. Her clothing is probably light and thin and it does not hide much from sight. So in verse 2, we should probably think not of her ‘navel’ but of her womb. Then the lover’s eye moves up to her waist and breasts.

Verses 4 and 5 are full of pictures. It may be that if we understood the Song of Songs better we would find crowds of pictures like this in other verses. First, the girl’s neck is like a tower. Many people groups think that long necks are beautiful. In 4:4 the girl’s neck seems to have had strings of ornaments on it, so that it was hidden. Now her neck can be seen and it is the colour of ivory. Ivory, of course, was costly and it was white.

Heshbon was a city in what is now the Kingdom of Jordan. This is east of the River Jordan. ‘Bath Rabbim’ means ‘daughter of big crowds’, but it was probably the name of a village not far from the city. The road from the city gate ran between two man-made pools of water. These pools were deep, cool and still. Her eyes were like that. Her nose was like a tower of Lebanon. This does not mean that it was big. We do not know of a tower that looked towards Damascus, and the thought may be of white cliffs. The Anti Lebanon mountains are of white limestone, and look out towards Damascus to the east.

Mount Carmel is a mountain on the coast of Palestine. The same Hebrew word means both ‘head’ and mountain top. It may just be that her hair is like a mass of trees, which grows on the mountain. The girl’s hair falls freely on to her shoulders. It is not fixed or fastened up in any way. No good Jewish woman would let her hair down like that in public, but this is not public. Then ‘like royal tapestry’ (in NIV) is only a guess. At the foot of Carmel there were beaches. On the beaches there was a very special shellfish. People gathered these and they made a purple dye from them. This was the purple dye, which cost so much that it was used to make the fine clothes of kings. The girl’s hair is said to be like this cloth. Her hair is not the purple colour but it shines and is fine. When the top of water moves gently, it ‘ripples’ and this is probably the picture in the word ‘tresses’. Her hair ripples on to her shoulders. The Hebrew also speaks about ‘a king’ here, not ‘the king’. This may not be Solomon. [7.1] Verse 6 rounds off this part of the poem.

Verses 7-10 This is the last part of the poem.

The man no longer just looks at the woman as she dances. Her arms wave in the air like the leaves or ‘fronds’ of a palm tree, with bunches of dates below them. Now he takes hold of the woman and makes love to her. Verses 9 and 10 show that she is ready and willing.

Christ’s desire is to have his church. Before God made the world, the Son of God asked the Father for the church, his bride. The Son came into the world and he died a death full of shame. This was to save his church. His desire will not rest until all his people are with him in glory. Verse 10 is another verse that we can well use at the Lord’s Table.

Verse 10 is the ‘chorus’ which marks the end of the fifth poem.