And the Song of Songs is in the Bible.
Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis asks this question about Song of Songs: “Is it the least ‘biblical’ book in the Bible, or the most?”
This question has led scholars to answer in both extremes over the centuries. Premodern teachers almost unanimously agreed: this is a sacred poem. In the modern period, the opposite conclusion was nearly always reached: this is a secular poem (source).
Where they differed was on how to read the Song of Songs. Most premodern Jews and Christians read it allegorically—that is, they saw the two lovers as representing God and Israel, or Jesus and the church. Most modern scholars point out that neither God nor Israel, not to mention neither Jesus nor the church, are mentioned in this work, which for them is to be read in its plain sense as a secular love poem between a man and a woman.
As is so often the case with either/or answers, there is a third way.
What if the Song of Songs is both a love poem shared between two human beings and a look at the relationship between God and God’s people?
Let’s back up for a moment. A lot of what I’m relying on here comes from Ellen Davis, whom I’ve mentioned, and from Robert Jenson. Jenson is not a Biblical scholar but a theologian, and yet he was asked to write about the Song of Songs for a Bible commentary series.
Both of these scholars point out that the language of the Song of Songs is full of language and images that connect it to the Bible. Song of Songs was written relatively late compared to other books of the Old Testament, and it was clearly composed within the same community—that is, Israel. Even the title of the book uses a Hebrew formula designed for the superlative, one that is usually reserved for the divine—like “King of Kings,” “Lord of Lords,” or “Holy of Holies.”
What’s more, the fact that the Song of Songs is in the Bible makes it canonical. When I say something is canonical, I mean it is part of a canon, or a larger work—in this case, Jewish and Christian Scripture. For Jenson, this automatically makes it sacred in nature. Whether it started as a religious poem or a secular one doesn’t really matter. It comes to us as a part of a whole, and despite the differences between it and other books of the Bible, it is not really so out of context, even with all its talk of antelope and vineyards and breasts.
Jenson also questions the dichotomy between the “plain sense” and the “allegorical sense” of the Song of Songs. The “plain sense” as it is often understood is what we might call the “literal sense”—at face value, this is a poem about human love. The “allegorical sense” might also be called the “spiritual sense,” or the metaphorical way in which that poem might be read as talking about the divine. More recent scholars have been willing to say that both senses can be read alongside one another, but Jenson has a different take.
He points out that there is a difference between reading something allegorically and that work being itself an allegory. If you read something allegorically, you read the plain sense and then compare it to something else by metaphor. If something simply is an allegory, then its plain sense is that something else. This is a love poem between two human beings that is about God’s relationship with God’s people.
So maybe we don’t have to decide whether this is secular or sacred. Maybe the two are linked.
If human intimacy and communion with God are tied together in a secular-scared love poem, what does that mean for us?
Let’s take a look at the relationship between the lovers in the Song of Songs. Chana and Ariel Bloch point out that this poem is voluptuous and yet “full of innocent delight.” The lovers give of themselves fully, in total joy and trust. Their desire is erotic yet pure, and their relationship is one of equality. In fact, if there is a dominant person in this relationship, it is the woman.
These lovers might as well be in the Garden of Eden. This is the love that God intended for human beings to share, the love that Adam and Eve shared before sin and distrust separated them. Too often, the church talks about sexuality (or doesn’t talk about it) as if it is dirty and shameful. But sexual intimacy is part of what God called “very good” when he created humanity. Sex is sacred.
Ellen Davis says, “genuine intimacy brings us into contact with the sacred.” If we ever experience the purity, joy, equality and trust of the lovers in the Song of Songs, we catch a glimpse of God’s original purpose for human intimacy. And what’s more, we see something of what it means to have intimacy with God.
Now, this is where things can get tricky. We cannot look at human eroticism and project what we see there on to God. That would be like looking at a human father to know what it means to call God “Father.” If your father was harsh or distant or abusive or absent, you might hear God called “Father” and think that God is all of those things. In the same way, if eroticism for you has meant manipulation or dysfunction or rape, it would be difficult if not impossible to imagine genuine intimacy with God analogous to human intimacy.
But Jenson points out that intimacy is original to God, not to us. Rather than looking to humanity for the paradigm, we should look to God—and the Song of Songs combines the two in such a way that intimacy and eroticism as God intended it and as God offers to us can inform and shape human sexuality.
My favorite part of the Song of Songs comes in chapter 8.
Set me as a seal upon your heart,
as a seal upon your arm;
for love is strong as death,
passion fierce as the grave.
Its flashes are flashes of fire,
a raging flame.
Many waters cannot quench love,
neither can floods drown it.
If one offered for love
all the wealth of one’s house,
it would be utterly scorned.
“Set me as a seal upon your heart.” Jenson says that this “seal” is about identity. When the woman asks her lover to set her as a seal, he says, “We do not have here a simile; the woman wants to be her lover’s seal. That is, she asks him to take her as the visible mark and surety of his own identity; she petitions to be indispensable to his being who he is. They are to be ‘one flesh.’”
Adam and Eve came from one flesh when God fashioned Eve out of Adam’s rib, and Genesis says this is why a man and woman become “one flesh.” Chana and Ariel Bloch say that this “cleaving” is about healing the wound of separation.
Jenson says, “Christ’s death has made us the seal of his identity: he died ‘for’ us, in identification with us. Now he is not who he is without us.” Christ comes to us, his church, as a groom to a bride, seeking to heal the wound of separation for all.
The medieval mystic Julian of Norwich says this: God “loves us and delights in us, and so he wishes us to love him and delight in him.” The innocent, joyful love we find in the Song of Songs is the love that God has for us and the love that God wants us to have for him.
According to Julian, God says this to us: “My darling, I am glad you have come to me. I have been with you always in all your sorrow, and now you see my love and we are joined in joy.” May we be joined in joy to God and to one another, constantly seeking the mutuality, innocence, intimacy, purity, eroticism and love that we see in the Song of Songs. Amen.