Commentary on Song of Solomon 2:8-13

For the proclaimer willing to take on a homiletical challenge, the Song of Songs (or Solomon) and the subsequent three-week foray into the book of Proverbs offer rich material on love, God, and how one might live in the created world. These texts are a seedbed for feminist interpretation, didactic instruction for faithful living, and theological connection. While the theological elements of these books—particularly the Song—have sometimes been overlooked or minimized, much fruit can spring forth if only the soil is watered.

Scholars who argue for a strictly secular meaning of the Song miss the many intertextual allusions within the poetry. It contains allusions to Genesis, Deuteronomy, and even prophetic material. At the same time, the Song is love poetry proper, meaning the sensual and erotic imagery is intentional—the poetry does depict the physical and emotional love between two people. What we have in the Song is a piece of literature that is undeniably human, and yet it speaks beyond (or perhaps above) the earthiness of human love into a vertical space of holy wisdom about love.¹

In general, wisdom literature is known for offering practical advice to the reader, but practical should not be conflated with secular. The biblical wisdom material promotes free choice and emphasizes human will, and it enfolds those choices within the larger created order in which God’s sovereignty prevails. Within this description, the Song’s love poetry strives to teach us something about the choices we might make in life (and love), and how we might live faithfully in the world God created.

The Song is also decidedly feminocentric, meaning that women’s voices (the woman lover and the chorus of women) dominate in the text and that their perspectives are kept in focus. Not only is this a key literary feature; it is also a powerful nod toward female empowerment—female voices can and do offer wisdom and theological value. We will see this carry through in the material about Woman Wisdom in Proverbs as well.²

Now that we’ve covered some of the necessary groundwork for reading the Song as a wisdom text, let’s take a look at this specific section of chapter 2.

Following the refrain in 2:7, in which the woman implores the chorus of city women not to arouse love until it desires (in other words, not until the right kind of love is present), we hear the woman conjure her lover into her mind’s eye as she imagines his beckoning invitation to her.

There is an urgency in this text, couched in the repeated use of the Hebrew term hinneh, an attention-grabbing word that defies strict translation. It calls for the reader or listener to pay attention, to spot the change in the scene, to listen carefully. The combination of hinneh-zeh in verses 8–9 and of ki-hinneh in verse 11 adds even more deictic force. More than words can describe, our ears and eyes are drawn to the man even as he is drawn to the woman in the text.

Many feminist-critical readers have interpreted the actions of the man in verses 8–9 as voyeuristic, likening him to a Peeping Tom objectifying the woman who is settled in the privacy of her home. This would be true in other contexts, but we must remember that it is the woman who has conjured him. She has imagined him to be in such a state of desire that he appears almost superhuman, leaping and bounding over mountains and hills.

The windows and lattices in verse 9 would have been small and located high on the wall of a house; they were most likely cut into the wall to provide air. His ability to reach up to them is another feat of strength and desire. The poetry uses complementary parallelisms, plural forms, and active participles in these verses to convey the excitement and intensity of the man’s desire.

His speech, too, is conjured by the woman. Verses 10–14 (the lectionary pericope stops at verse 13) encapsulate his invitation to her. The imagery evokes springtime in the Syria-Palestine region. The rainy season of winter has ended (verse 11), and blossoms and blooms have appeared (verses 12a, 13a). The song of the turtledove or pigeon (verse 12b; Hebrew tor) heralds spring in the region still today. The Hebrew poetry revels in these seasonal images; the smells, sights, and sounds of spring dance playfully around the Hebrew terms et hazamir in verse 12, which can alternatively mean the “time of pruning” or “of singing.” In any case, the “time” is right for the two lovers.

What does this conjuring scene, ripe with desire and urgency, tell us more generally or even theologically about love? On one level, perhaps we can read this description of nature as a metaphor—the woman has reached sexual maturity and is “ready” (see verse 7) for marriage/love. A feminist reading would see her conjuring him as an expression of her consent, her equal partnership in love. These two lovers revel in one another, and the woman in particular is freely imagining what love might look and feel like for her.

On another level, when we consider the Song in its entirety as a wisdom text, we see that these verses eloquently and playfully describe the results of heeding the advice offered in 2:7—wise love is one that readies itself for the right time and delights in the connections to God’s created order. That this advice comes from the woman indirectly evokes yet another image from wisdom literature: namely, Woman Wisdom (see Proverbs, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch). To be sure, the woman in the Song should not be read as Woman Wisdom; what these two figures have in common are their forthright spirits, their connectivity to God’s creation and created order, and their calls to seek out and search after wisdom and love.

Notes

1. See J. L. Andruska, Wise and Foolish Love in the Song of Songs, OS 75 (Leiden: Brill, 2019). Andruska argues that the refrain, “Do not arouse or awaken love until it desires” (2:7; 3:5; 8:4), is a key element in understanding the search for “wise love” in the Song.
2. See Working Preacher commentaries by this author for Proverbs 1:20–33 and 31:10–31.