Deeper Commentary
Song of Solomon 6:1
Daughters of Jerusalem
Where has your beloved gone, you fairest among women? Where has your
beloved turned, that we may seek him with you?-
This is bitter sarcasm. They ask her where Solomon has “turned aside”
so that they can come and seek him with her, using a word elsewhere
associated with ‘turning aside’ in apostasy to other gods. They
sarcastically quote Solomon’s terms of endearment back to her.
Beloved
Song of Solomon 6:2 My beloved has gone down to his garden, to the beds of
spices, to feed in the gardens, and to gather lilies-
In Song 4:16; 5:1 she has invited Solomon to enter her closed garden
and he does so. The reference is to them sleeping together, and the
language of beds, feeding and lilies has elsewhere been used in the song
for sexual activity. She is therefore telling the daughters of Jerusalem
that she has slept with Solomon, and therefore he is hers exclusively
(:3). For all her self confidence and forwardness, she is betrayed as a
laughable fool to believe this. In Song 7:6,8, Solomon likewise openly
talks about their sexual encounters; their relationship is now no longer
secret.
Song of Solomon 6:3 I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine. He browses
among the lilies-
Being in the lilies has been language elsewhere used in the Song for
sex. I noted on :2 that she is retorting to the daughters of Jerusalem
that because she has slept with Solomon, therefore he is uniquely hers and
this, she thinks is her final answer to her competitors. But of course her
argument holds no water. She appears foolish and naive, for all her sexual
manipulation of Solomon.
Lover
Song of Solomon 6:4 You are beautiful, my love, as Tirzah, lovely as
Jerusalem, awesome as an army with banners-
This may continue the dream she has been having beginning in Song
5:2. Or it may be that now Solomon appears on the scene and comforts her
with expressions of his unique love for her, to calm her after her
nightmare. Tirzah was obviously an established city at the time, and was
later briefly the capital of the ten tribe kingdom. But it was destroyed
at the time of the exile, and this would be evidence that the song indeed
dates from Solomon's time, and the Song is not the fantasy of some post
exilic writer as the critics lamely claim; see on Song 7:4. Jerusalem was
the "perfection of beauty" (Ps. 48:3; 50:2), and yet through this allusion
Solomon is showing that unlike for David, Zion was not his chiefest joy,
but this Gentile girl was.
Song of Solomon 6:5 Turn away your eyes from me, for they have overcome me. Your hair
is like a flock of goats, that lie along the side of Gilead-
Solomon is defying his own wisdom in Prov. 6:25: "Don’t lust after
her beauty in your heart, neither let her captivate you with her eyelids". The blindness of Solomon is driven home time and again. He
warned the typical young man about being captivated by the eyelids
of the Gentile woman (Prov. 6:25); yet it was the eyes of Miss Egypt that he openly admitted stole his heart (Song 4:9; 6:5). We
note his total inability to be self critical and have a sense of
temptation and the possibility of personal failure. This seems to go with
the territory of assuming that mere possession of Divine truth somehow
justifies us of itself.
Song of Solomon 6:6 Your teeth are like a flock of ewes, which have come
up from the washing; of which each one has twins; none is bereaved among
them-
Without dental science, missing teeth would have been common in those
days, even in youth. But she apparently had none missing. Here and in Song
4:3 "your mouth is lovely" suggests they had already been involved in deep
kissing.
Song of Solomon 6:7 Your temples are like a piece of a pomegranate behind
your veil-
Solomon has seen behind her veil, the symbol of her virginity, for he
has entered her closed garden by sleeping with her (Song 4:16; 5:1). But
he likes to still perceive her as a virgin. They both create images of
each other which are simply not true to reality, and fall in love with
those images rather than reality. Although I am no fan of the allegorical
interpretation of the Song, it could be argued that this looks ahead to
Christ's imputation of righteousness to His bride.
Song of Solomon 6:8 There are sixty queens, eighty concubines, and virgins
without number-
Solomon boasts that he has many Jewish queens and concubines, but
there is only one woman, the Egyptian, that he truly loves (:8,9); he even
calls her his “sister”, associating himself thereby with Egypt. See on
:13. This is his answer to her nightmare which began in Song 5:2, about
the daughters of Jerusalem. Perhaps at that time he had 60 queens and 80
concubines, a number which would later rise to 700 wives and 300
concubines (1 Kings 11:3).
Song of Solomon 6:9 My dove, my perfect one, is unique-
Solomon seeks to persuade the girl that really she is his special
love, better than all his women of :8. We marvel at her naivety in
believing him.
She is her mother’s only daughter. She is the favourite one of her
who bore her. The daughters saw her, and called her blessed; the queens
and the concubines, and they praised her-
This is simply not the case, obviously. She has just had a nightmare
about the daughters of Jerusalem mocking her. And she is aware of
Solomon's existing harem (:8). And he tries to persuade her that actually
his queens, concubines and the daughters of Jerusalem think she is in fact
wonderful. They clearly do not, and she is presented as hopelessly foolish
in believing Solomon, who likewise presents himself as no more than a
sweet talking womanizer.
The allusion is to "the daughters will call me happy / blessed" (Gen. 30:13); Solomon has a vision of this Egyptian girl as becoming as one of the founding mothers of Israel. But her heart is far from it. He speaks as if she is in fact already this. He is in love with an image and projection upon her which is simply unrealistic and untrue.
Song of Solomon 6:10 Who is she who looks forth as the morning, beautiful as the moon,
clear as the sun, and awesome as an army with banners?-
The reference is to the morning star. This apparently is common
Egyptian love poem language. Solomon was clearly very influenced by Egypt
from a young age, and likes to try to talk to the girl as it were in her
own terms. He presents her as the brightest of all the stars, and more
awesome than an entire army. The idea is that although he admits he does
have a harem (:8), he seeks to persuade her that she is the brightest of
all the stars, she is the son and moon, and greater than an army with
banners. The significance of "banners" is that she had rejoiced that his
banner over her was love (Song 2:4). He is saying that his banner over her
was far greater than that over a whole army of women. And she appears, for
the time being, to believe his story. Which may well have been a standard
story trotted out to all his many women.
Song of Solomon 6:11 I went down into the nut tree grove, to see the green
plants of the valley, to see whether the vine budded, and the pomegranates
were in flower-
AV "I went down into the garden of nuts". Entrance to the locked
garden has been used by the couple to reference their lovemaking (Song
4:16; 5:1). He could be implying that he had slept with her in the hope
that she was "in flower" and would fall pregnant. He calculated that this
was going to comfort her more than anything at this time; he is trying to
show that he is very serious about their relationship. "Pomegranates" have
been used as erotic imagery in Song 1:6; 4:13. And she uses his reasoning
here to urge him to sleep with her in Song 7:12.
Song of Solomon 6:12 Without realizing it, my desire set me with my royal
people’s chariots-
The idea is that he assures her that the sexual encounter of :11 had
made him "beside himself" [NEV "Without realizing it"]. He felt he had
been as it were whisked away by the passion she stirred in him, "she put
me in the chariots of Ammi Nadib". Perhaps this was an Egyptian phrase. He
is by all means trying to persuade her that he found her sexually
superlative. We noted the confusion between the carriage / chariot and the
marriage bed of Solomon in Song 3:9.
Daughters of Jerusalem
Song of Solomon 6:13 Return, return, Shulammite! Return, return, that we
may gaze at you-
This would appear to be the sarcastic comment of the Israelite girls
after the Egyptian girl has run off away from them. They call her the
Shulammite, the Jerusalem girl, mockingly. For they all know she is a dark
skinned foreigner and not really a Shulammite. The girl is presented in
Song 5:7 as bedraggled, without her makeup and having been raped. Having
made her defence of herself to them, she runs off; and they sarcastically
invite her to return so they can look at her. This would assume that the
nightmare dream which began in Song 5:2 is here continuing.
Lover
Why do you desire to gaze at the Shulammite, as at the dance of Mahanaim?-
Perhaps the tension between the two groups- the Jerusalem women and the
Egyptian girl and her family (see on :8,9)- is behind the enigmatic
reference to “the company of two armies” or “the dance of the two camps”.
Solomon has to now carefully broker between his Egyptian woman and the
daughters of Jerusalem. He asks them rhetorically why they want to gaze at
her. The idea is of a girl dancing before two camps, one who support her
with encouragement, the other who detest her and shout insults. And
Solomon would be saying that he doesn't wish for this competitive
situation to arise. He may be implying to the daughters of Jerusalem that
they too need fear no competition, and so there need be no dance of
comparison. And yet Solomon confirms that indeed this Egyptian girl is a
Shulammite, a girl of Jerusalem, Yerushalem. She is one of the daughters
of Jerusalem, so he decides; and therefore there should be division
between her and the daughters of Jerusalem, as if they were in two camps.
Again we observe that Solomon projects an image onto her, as an Israelite
daughter of Zion... and believes it. Regardless of the reality.