Song of Solomon: The Bible's Love Poem, and The Love It Points To
Scripture's boldest celebration of covenant love — and a picture of something even greater. Song of Solomon is Scripture's only book devoted entirely to romantic love... a poem celebrating desire, longing, and covenant faithfulness between husband and wife, and ultimately pointing beyond itself to Christ's love for His church. Of all sixty-six books in the Bible, none has caused quite as much interpretive nervousness as Song of Solomon. It is eight chapters of unfiltered romantic poetry: a bride and groom praising each other's beauty, aching with longing, delighting in one another's presence without a single reference to God's name, without a moral lesson stated outright, without a narrative arc beyond two lovers finding, losing, and finding each other again. Early rabbis debated whether it belonged in the canon at all; Christian interpreters for centuries were so uncomfortable with its plain content that they read it almost exclusively as coded allegory, unwill...