The Love of Loves in the Song of Songs

The Love of Loves in the Song of Songs

by Philip Graham Ryken
The Love of Loves in the Song of Songs

The Love of Loves in the Song of Songs

by Philip Graham Ryken

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Overview

Guiding readers through the Song of Songs verse by verse, this fresh, practical explanation will reveal important insights into romance, marriage, friendship, and human sexuality that are relevant today.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781433562532
Publisher: Crossway
Publication date: 02/28/2019
Pages: 208
Product dimensions: 5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.54(d)

About the Author

Philip Graham Ryken (DPhil, University of Oxford) is the eighth president of Wheaton College. He preached at Philadelphia’s Tenth Presbyterian Church from 1995 until his appointment at Wheaton in 2010. Ryken has published more than fifty books, including When Trouble Comes and expository commentaries on Exodus, Ecclesiastes, and Jeremiah. He serves as a board member for the Gospel Coalition and the Lausanne Movement.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

You're the One That I Want

The Song of Songs, which is Solomon's.

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!
For your love is better than wine;
your anointing oils are fragrant;
your name is oil poured out;
therefore virgins love you.
Draw me after you; let us run.
The king has brought me into his chambers.

We will exult and rejoice in you;
we will extol your love more than wine;
rightly do they love you.

I am very dark, but lovely,
O daughters of Jerusalem,
like the tents of Kedar,
like the curtains of Solomon.
Do not gaze at me because I am dark,
because the sun has looked upon me.
My mother's sons were angry with me;
they made me keeper of the vineyards,
but my own vineyard I have not kept!
Tell me, you whom my soul loves,
where you pasture your flock,
where you make it lie down at noon;
for why should I be like one who veils herself beside the flocks of your companions?

If you do not know,
O most beautiful among women,
follow in the tracks of the flock,
and pasture your young goats beside the shepherds' tents.

I compare you, my love,
to a mare among Pharaoh's chariots.
Your cheeks are lovely with ornaments,
your neck with strings of jewels.

We will make for you ornaments of gold,
studded with silver.

While the king was on his couch,
my nard gave forth its fragrance.
My beloved is to me a sachet of myrrh that lies between my breasts.
My beloved is to me a cluster of henna blossoms in the vineyards of Engedi. (Song 1:1–14)

Picture the scene. A teenage girl is engaged to be married to a young man from her village somewhere on the outskirts of Jerusalem. After a period of formal betrothal, the bride price has been paid, and the couple is eager to join in holy matrimony. The smell of fresh meat rises from an open flame — goat meat, perhaps, or maybe even a fatted calf. The entire community comes out to witness the sacred vows and then to celebrate with the happy couple and their proud families. The wedding feast will last for an entire week — seven days of singing and dancing.

As the festivities begin, skilled musicians tune their instruments, and a soloist begins to sing a familiar melody. Her voice gives public expression to the bride's passionate love, soon to be consummated in the privacy of the wedding chamber:

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!
For your love is better than wine;
your anointing oils are fragrant;
Your name is oil poured out;
therefore virgins love you. (Song 1:2–3)

A bridal chorus takes up the happy refrain: "We will exult and rejoice in you; we will extol your love more than wine; rightly do they love you" (Song 1:4). Then a male voice returns to the melody and sings, "O most beautiful among women. ... Your cheeks are lovely with ornaments, your neck with strings of jewels" (Song 1:8, 10).

The scene we have just imagined is the most likely setting for the Song of Songs. Weddings in ancient Israel lasted as long as a week, and singing was always part of the festivities. From its presence in Holy Scripture, we may infer that the Song of Songs was at the top of the charts in those days. What wedding would be complete without it? For the people of God, singing these popular, emotional songs expressed a communal vision for marriage.

Prelude to the Song of Songs

These superlative lyrics were written by King Solomon — or were they? The phrasing of the title, which reads, "The Song of Songs, which is Solomon's" (Song 1:1), may indicate that Solomon is the author, but it might just mean that the song was dedicated to him or in some other way associated with him.

If Solomon is the author — after all, we know that he wrote more than a thousand songs (1 Kings 4:32) — then he must be telling us to do as he says, not what he did. I say this because the Song of Songs is all about an exclusive relationship between one man and one woman, yet we know that King Solomon married seven hundred wives and had three hundred concubines (1 Kings 11:3). So if this is his book, he must have been writing with the chastened wisdom of his later years, when he finally realized what a massive mistake he had made by not being a one-woman man.

The perspective of this book contrasts sharply with Solomon's life experience in many ways. Rather than seeing sex as a conquest and marriage as a political alliance (see 1 Kings 11), the Song of Songs views marriage as a romance and sex as the seal of a sacred covenant. The author — whoever he was — dedicated his song to Solomon in order to cast a divine vision for marriage that stood against the idolatries of his contemporary culture.

This biblical song can do the same thing for us. We live in a culture that believes every desire should be satisfied. The Song of Songs aches with sexual desire, but it surrenders sex to the glory of God by securing the satisfaction of its desire within the bridal chamber. Pico Iyer was right when he said that this book "presents us with the taste of love, unfootnoted — and asks us to unlock the door according to our purity." Our culture impatiently pushes past the erotic to experience the pornographic. By contrast, the Song of Songs presents adult themes with parental guidance. Its language is often sexually provocative but never spiritually impure.

To preserve this purity, we need to read the book in its proper context: covenant matrimony. The Song of Songs is not just Solomon on Sex, to borrow the title of one recent commentary. Instead, it is about sacred marriage and therefore about chastity, from beginning to end. We will encounter bridal imagery and marital vocabulary frequently in this book, especially in chapters 4 and 5. We will also hear people recite wedding vows (e.g., Song 2:16; 8:6). Understand, too, that marriage is the only context in which God-fearing people would have celebrated sex in ancient Israel. They understood — as not everyone in our culture does — that only covenant matrimony provides enough relational safety for our sexuality to be released in all its soul-bonding power. All of this leads Doug O'Donnell to conclude that the Song of Songs is "erotic poetry set within the ethical limits of the marriage bed."

The word poetry is also important for knowing how to approach this book. A love song is simply a love poem set to music. So we need to read the Song of Songs poetically. This may seem intimidating to people who think they don't like poetry and say they have a hard time reading it. But in fact most people encounter love poems every day through listening to popular music. The love songs we listen to are really poems set to music. Like the Song of Songs, most of them have something to do with love, and sometimes sex. Their words have a way of getting inside us and connecting with our life experience, which explains why people often put song lyrics on their profile pages.

Thinking of the Song of Songs as a love song makes the book more accessible than we might at first think. Read this book the way you read the liner notes to an album of love songs. And listen to its message like you would listen to the playlist for the dance at a wedding reception. If we read the Song of Songs like a short story, we will be frustrated by its lack of clarity. But if we read this book the way it was meant to be read — as a loose collection of love songs from a steamy romance that became a happy marriage — we will enter into its joy.

The Woman's Desire

The song begins with a breathless desire: "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!" (Song 1:2). Did I mention yet that this is the hottest book in the Bible? The opening verse states the book's title. Then in the second verse we meet a woman who is smoldering. We don't know her name. We don't know the object of her desire. We don't know if her love is reciprocated or whether it will ever be consummated. Maybe the man she loves doesn't even know that she exists — it's just a crush from afar. But as far as she is concerned, this is love at first sight. Suddenly, the woman is in love.

Her impatience for passion is evident from the rapid progression in verses 2 to 4 from the third person ("Let him kiss me") to the second person ("Draw me after you") to the first-person plural ("Let us run"). She wants to be with the man she loves, so she is impatient for this relationship to move forward as fast as possible.

The woman's flaming passion is evident not only from the pronouns she uses but also from the nouns and verbs. Maybe it seems redundant for her to say that she wants the kisses "of his mouth." But in the ancient Near East, nose kisses were sometimes exchanged as a greeting of friendship. So this woman wants to be clear: she is looking for a lover, not just a friend. She finds her beloved's fragrance irresistible — as in one of those cologne commercials where the man walks by and the women swoon. And when she says that his "love is better than wine" (1:2), the word she uses for her intoxicating attraction is a word for lovemaking. Understand that this woman's goal is not to have a Bible study with the man she loves or simply to share an evening with him out on the town. It's "kisses" she wants — in the plural. Her vision for this relationship clearly ends with him carrying her across the threshold and into the bedroom — his royal chamber (1:4, 12). Needless to say, the woman is looking forward to their wedding night.

We are only a few verses into the Song of Songs and already we can understand why some rabbis warned the young men in their synagogues not to read this book until they turned thirty. This is a book "about desire from beginning to end — desire stirred, desire frustrated, desire satisfied, desire frustrated again — but above all, desire." One pastor I know likes to guide his parishioners by asking them probing questions about their desires: What do you want? How are you trying to get it? How is that working out for you? The Song of Songs asks us similarly probing questions about our sexual desire, which is one of God's good gifts, but like all good gifts it can be turned to sinful purposes. This makes the Song of Songs a perilous book for us to read. In bringing us close to ecstasy, it also draws us near to danger.

We should proceed with caution, therefore, and one of the best ways for us to be careful is to read the words of this book as closely as we can. At first, the woman's poetic language may seem over the top, but recognize that her affection is more than a shallow infatuation. In verse 3 she tells us that her lover's "name is oil poured out." Typically, when people fall in love, they love to hear the name of their beloved. The Ryken family has an old Scrabble set that my mother must have used right after she got engaged to my father, because her new name is written over and over again on the underside of the box top: Mary Alice Graham Ryken.

The woman in the Song of Songs is doing something even more significant. In biblical terms, a "name" is a reputation. So when she says that her lover's name is like sweet perfume and that all the maidens love him too, she is praising his character. She loves him for who he is, not just because he smells nice or because she imagines that he might be a good kisser. She loves everything about him.

Apparently, her friends agree. In verse 4 a choir of young virgins called "thedaughters of Jerusalem" — think of them as bridesmaids or debutantes — pronounce their benediction on the man of her dreams, and on her desire for the consummation of their marriage: "We will exult and rejoice in you; we will extol your love more than wine; rightly do they love you." Later these young women will assist the wedding preparations by making "ornaments of gold, studded with silver" (1:11). As single women, they too have a vital interest in the success of their friend's marriage.

None of this quite fits our conventional categories for romance. Is thewould-be bride a feminist or a traditionalist? It is hard to say. She boldly declares her affection for someone she loves and openly communicates her desires, including sexual desires. Yet at the same time she expects and longs for the man to provide leadership in their relationship. Notice that she wants him to kiss her (1:2), and also that she calls him her "king" (1:4, 12). In presenting this portrait of love and desire, the Bible is not bound by cultural constructs for gender but is helping us understand God's design for human relationships. Taking all of this into account, here is how Iain Duguid describes the dynamic partnership that we read about in this book: "In the Song, the woman is not a land to be conquered by the man or a field to be planted with his seed; she is a vineyard to be cultivated by him so that together they can enjoy the sweet wine of their relationship."

Consider another paradox. The woman is independent enough to have desires of her own and then pursue them. She knows what she wants in a man. She also happens to know which man she wants. But she will only pursue this relationship with the support of her faith community. She wants the people around her — especially godly women — to bless and celebrate this relationship, which is not exclusively private but inclusively public.

Already we see signs of a healthy relationship: the woman will enter this partnership with equal passion, hoping and expecting to find a man who is strong enough to lead. And as their relationship develops, they will not cut themselves off from others; they will find strength in the counsel of their community.

The Woman's Hesitation

There is a problem, however, as there always seems to be when it comes to love and romance. The problem in this case is as old as sin and as current as today's fashion magazines. The woman is self-conscious about her physical appearance. "I am very dark, but lovely," she tells her friends. By way of comparison, she says that her skin is dark and coarse "like the tents of Kedar" (1:5). Then she explains why. It is because she has been working outdoors:

Do not gaze at me because I am dark, because the sun has looked upon me, My mother's sons were angry with me; they made me keeper of the vineyards, but my own vineyard I have not kept! (1:6)

To be clear, these verses are not about ethnicity. The Song of Songs does not put a biblical value judgment on a particular skin tone. It simply reflects the beauty standards of a culture in which wealthy people typically stayed indoors and poor people were darkened by the sun. The issue is social, not racial. In effect, the Song of Songs tells a Cinderella story. The heroine's brothers (or perhaps step-brothers, since she calls them "the sons of my mother") have forced her to work out in the fields, under the blazing sun. As a result, she has been too busy taking care of her family's vineyard to tend to her own complexion. So rather than thanking God that she's a country girl, she laments her rustic upbringing. Although she believed that she was attractive, she also worried about measuring up to her culture's standards for feminine beauty.

The Bible is realistic about the struggle we have with our embodiment. The burdens that many women carry because of body image are immense. Although standards may vary from culture to culture, there always seems to be something for a woman to try to improve: get a tan or else use skin cream to make your skin lighter; make your hair straight or else curl it; get your body flatter or make it curvier — there is always some feature that ought to be bigger, or smaller, or downright more beautiful than it is. Many men face similar struggles with their physiques, of course.

The anxiety and anguish of these cultural pressures came home to me one day when I was listening to the radio and heard an actress say that she was afraid to go out in public because she knew that she would never look as good as she looked in the movies, where every flaw was concealed. She hated to leave her house and go places where people would take her picture and perhaps make unflattering comments about her. At the time, she would have been on everyone's short list of the world's most beautiful people. But apparently she wasn't beautiful enough to look like herself! I was brokenhearted when I heard this, because I understood that our culture was holding the women I love — my wife and sisters, daughters and nieces — to a standard that no woman could ever meet, not even the most beautiful women in the world.

In her inner turmoil about her physical appearance, the woman in the Song of Songs reached out to the man she loved — the man she hoped would also love her:

Tell me, you whom my soul loves,
where you pasture your flock,
where you make it lie down at noon;
for why should I be like one who veils herself beside the flocks of your companions? (1:7)

Here the woman reveals a desire much deeper than kisses and cologne — a passion more intense than wanting to be carried across the threshold and into the king's bedchamber. She wants to know where she can go and be with the man she loves, not only at night but also during the daytime. In spite of her fears, she wants to see him face-to-face. In a word, she wants intimacy. Furthermore, she expresses this explicitly as something she wants with her soul, not just her body. Don't miss the deepest longing of the Song of Songs: not a sexual partner, but a soulmate.

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "The Love of Loves in the Song of Songs"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Philip G. Ryken.
Excerpted by permission of Good News Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Prologue: I Love You Always, Forever 11

1 You're the One That I Want (Song 1:1-14) 27

2 Underneath the Apple Tree (Song 1:15-2:7) 43

3 I'm for You, and You're for Me (Song 2:8-3:5) 61

4 Royal Wedding (Song 3:6-5:1) 79

5 Lovers' Quarrel (Song 5:2-6:3) 99

6 The Duet after the Fight (Song 6:4-8:4) 115

7 Forever Yours (Song 8:5-14) 133

Epilogue: Happily Ever After 149

Acknowledgments 161

Discussion Guide 163

Notes 185

General Index 191

Scripture Index 197

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Phil Ryken is a master expositor of the Scripture, and he uses all his ability to beautifully unpack one of the most intriguing and difficult books of the Bible to understand—the Song of Songs. Historically, interpreters have read the book as either/or. It is either about human romance or about our relationship with Jesus. Ryken reads the book as both/and—both in its immediate historical context (about romance) and its whole canonical context (about the spousal love of Jesus Christ.) And of course, biblical wisdom about love and sexuality has perhaps never been as crucial and needed by the church as it is today. An important book for us all!”
Timothy Keller, Late Founding Pastor, Redeemer Presbyterian Church, New York City; Chairman and Cofounder, Redeemer City to City

The Love of Loves in the Song of Songs is a book that every serious Bible student will want. A thoroughly researched, insightful, and challenging treatment of one of Scripture’s most engaging and relevant books, written by one of our generation’s finest pastoral theologians!”
J. D. Greear, Pastor, The Summit Church, Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina

“Our culture is deeply confused about sexuality and marriage. Not coincidentally, it is equally confused about the God who created humanity for a committed, exclusive, loving relationship with himself. This book shows us the remedy in the Song of Songs, the divine love song that shows us how our human marriages ought to work and how they ought to mirror Christ’s passionate love for his bride. Ryken shows us how the song speaks to everyday relationships and, in doing so, how it points us to the One who made us for himself.”
Iain M. Duguid, Professor of Old Testament, Westminster Theological Seminary

“Phil Ryken looks at this neglected book of the Bible, Song of Songs, on its own terms and with wonderful gospel awareness. He presents a truly thrilling vision of human sexuality along with the lover’s heart of God himself. It has had a deep impact on me already and I’d love for you to benefit from it too.”
Sam Allberry, Associate Pastor, Immanuel Nashville; author; speaker

“After reading The Love of Loves in the Song of Songs, I will never read this biblical book in the same way again. Ryken skillfully weaves into each passage God’s wisdom about both the magnificence of human marriage and the romance of our redemption. I can’t think of any Christian—single or married—who wouldn’t benefit from this book.”
Jani Ortlund, Executive Vice President, Renewal Ministries

“Here is a book of costly value for both single and married people! I have been blessed to read this, and through Ryken’s exposition I see how the Word made flesh in the Song of Songs is brighter and more wonderful than I imagined. Ryken’s call for obedience to Scripture’s authority is convicting, but we are given hope and help as we read. He says that this Song ‘operates simultaneously on at least two different levels,’ teaching us about Christ with his bride, which speaks to what a truly godly marriage can be, and how all of us in the body, single or married, are his true bride.”
Valerie Elliot Shepard, author, Pilipinto’s Happiness and Devotedly: The Personal Letters and Love Story of Jim and Elisabeth Elliot

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