📜 Table of Contents ›
Song of Solomon
📖 Song of Solomon
שִׁיר הַשִּׁירִים Shir ha-Shirim — 'The Song of Songs' — a Hebrew SUPERLATIVE, the same construction as 'holy of holies' or 'vanity of vanities': a noun governing its own plural means the supreme one of its kind. So the title is a claim about the poem — the best song there is. The English 'Song of Solomon' comes from the second half of verse 1, asher li-Shlomo, where one prefixed letter may mean by, for, about, belonging to, or in the manner of Solomon.
ᾎσμα ᾈσμάτων (Aisma Aismatôn) — The Septuagint keeps the Hebrew superlative exactly, and Latin followed with Canticum Canticorum — hence the older English title 'Canticles.' The Greek translation is unusually literal, following Hebrew word order even where it damages the Greek, which makes it a useful witness to the consonantal text.
Love poetry, unembarrassed and unexplained: two voices, mostly hers, a body described as a landscape, and not one mention of God, law, covenant or Israel in eight chapters — the book Rabbi Akiva called the holy of holies of the Scriptures.
Chapters
1 of 8 chapters translated · 12.5%
Gold chapters are published — click one to read it. The rest are still ahead.
Chapter by chapter
Song of Solomon 1The title is a Hebrew superlative — a noun governing its own plural, like ‘holy of holies’ — so it means THE BEST SONG THERE IS; and ‘which is Solomon’s’ is a single prefixed letter that can equally mean by him, for him, about him, or in his manner. Then, with no narrator and no introduction, a woman begins mid-desire: ‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.’ She will speak most of this book, open it and close it. She says she is black AND lovely — the Hebrew has the ordinary conjunction, and Jerome’s ‘but’ has shaped the verse ever since — and explains it herself: sunburn, from being made to keep her brothers’ vineyards. He calls her a mare among Pharaoh’s chariots, which is not about size: Egyptian chariots were drawn by stallions, and one mare pulls the formation apart. It ends with two lovers lying on grass under cedars, calling it their house.
About the book
Where it sits
One of the Five Megillot (Festival Scrolls) among the Writings, read at PASSOVER. ⚠ Its canonicity was debated in the same discussions as Ecclesiastes: the Mishnah (Yadayim 3:5) records the dispute over whether it 'defiles the hands,' and preserves RABBI AKIVA's decisive answer — 'all the Writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the HOLY OF HOLIES' — together with his warning against anyone who would 'trill' it at banquets as an ordinary song. Fragments were found at Qumran (4QCant-a, 4QCant-b, 6QCant), so it was being copied as scripture well before the rabbinic discussion.
Genre
LYRIC POETRY — a sequence of love poems, without narrative, narrator, or resolution. The voices are unlabelled (the speaker headings in modern Bibles are editorial; the manuscripts have none), and they are identified only by the gender of the Hebrew verbs and pronouns. Its closest relatives are not elsewhere in the Bible but in EGYPTIAN love poetry of the New Kingdom (c. 1300-1100 BC), which shares its vocabulary of 'brother' and 'sister' for lovers, its garden imagery, its lovesickness and its descriptions of the body part by part — the form Arabic poetics later calls a wasf. Whether the Song is one poem or an anthology of about thirty is disputed; the recurring refrains and consistent characters argue for design.
Author
Anonymous. The superscription's asher li-Shlomo is exactly as elastic as 'of David' over a psalm, and SOLOMON appears inside the book as a figure spoken about in the third person (3:7-11; 8:11-12) — twice, arguably, unfavourably: the man with a thousand wives is set against one woman who says 'my vineyard, my own, is before me.' ⚠ It is also worth saying that this is the one book of the Bible in which a WOMAN'S VOICE dominates: she speaks the majority of its lines, opens it and closes it, and is the only character who addresses the audience directly. Whether that reflects a woman's authorship is unknowable and has been seriously proposed.
Date written
Genuinely open, with evidence pulling both ways. Pulling LATE: a Persian loanword (pardes, 'park, orchard,' 4:13), possibly a Greek one (appiryon, 3:9), and features some read as late Hebrew. Pulling EARLY: close parallels with Egyptian love poetry of the 13th-12th centuries BC, and northern place-names (Tirzah, Lebanon, Amana, Senir, Hermon) that suit a pre-exilic setting. Proposals therefore run from the 10th century to the 3rd. The Qumran copies set the latest limit.
Place
Nowhere in particular and everywhere at once: Jerusalem and its 'daughters,' Kedar's tents, the vineyards of En-gedi, Lebanon and Hermon in the north, Sharon, Gilead, Tirzah, Damascus, Heshbon. The geography is real, wide, and used for its sound and associations rather than to place a plot.
Audience
Anyone. The Song makes no argument, teaches no doctrine, and asks nothing of the reader. ⚠ That is precisely what has made it the most interpreted book in the Bible: with no stated purpose, readers have supplied one — the synagogue reading it as Jehovah and Israel, the church as Christ and the congregation, mystics as the soul and God, and most modern scholarship as what it appears to be, human love spoken about without apology.
How it's laid out
1:1The title — 'the Song of Songs, which is Solomon's' — a superlative over an ambiguous preposition.
1:2-2:7First exchange: kisses, perfume, sunburnt skin and vineyards, a search for the shepherd at noon, the mare among Pharaoh's chariots, and a bed of grass under cedars. Ends with the first refrain: do not stir up love until it pleases.
2:8-3:5'The voice of my beloved — look, he comes leaping on the mountains.' Spring, the little foxes, and then a night search through the city for the one her soul loves.
3:6-5:1The royal procession from the wilderness, Solomon's palanquin — and then the first great wasf, the description of the woman head to foot, ending in a locked garden that opens: 'I have come into my garden, my sister, my bride.'
5:2-6:3THE NIGHT AT THE DOOR — he knocks, she hesitates, he is gone; she searches, the watchmen beat her, and she describes him to the daughters of Jerusalem head to foot. The Song's one moment of real loss.
6:4-8:4Reunion and further praise, the dance of the Shulammite, the mandrakes giving fragrance, and the refrain again.
8:5-14THE CLIMAX — 'set me as a seal upon your heart, for love is strong as death'; the vineyard Solomon leased out against 'my vineyard, my own, is before me'; and a last line that sends the beloved away over the mountains of spices.
What it's about
- LOVE, SPOKEN ABOUT PLAINLY — desire, longing, delay, absence and reunion, described with a physical directness found nowhere else in the Bible and offered without moral framing, warning or apology.
- MUTUALITY — 'my beloved is mine and I am his' (2:16), repeated and inverted. Both lovers praise, both seek, both are absent; there is no ownership and no hierarchy in the poem, which is one of the genuinely startling things about it.
- THE GARDEN — vineyard, orchard, spices, wells, locked garden: the woman is described as a landscape and the landscape as her, continuously, and the device is never once explained. Readers have long heard Eden behind it: a man and a woman, naked and unashamed, in a garden, with the curse of Genesis 3:16 answered by 'his desire is for me' (7:10).
- ABSENCE — twice she loses him and goes out at night to look. The Song is not a book of uninterrupted happiness; its most vivid writing is about the gap.
- 'LOVE IS STRONG AS DEATH' (8:6) — the book's one general statement, saved for the end, and the only line in it that sounds like the rest of the Bible: love as fierce as Sheol, its flames a flame of Yah — the single possible occurrence of the divine name in the entire book, and even that is disputed as an intensifier rather than a name.
- GOD IS NOT MENTIONED — the second book in a row on this site of which that is true. Whether the Song is therefore secular poetry preserved for its beauty, or an allegory whose subject is too obvious to name, is the argument that has produced almost all of its commentary.
Key words & people
Words this book turns on — each links to its dictionary entry:
People & places — each links to the encyclopedia:
The source text
Translated from the pointed Hebrew Masoretic Text (as printed by Mechon-Mamre). ⚠ The Song has an unusually high proportion of rare words — about fifty occur only here — and several of its plant, spice and architectural terms are simply uncertain, which is why the versions diverge so widely in its descriptive passages. Chapter 1 alone carries a ketiv/qere at verse 17 (rachitenu written, rahitenu read) and an ancient textual split at verse 7, where the Septuagint, Syriac and Vulgate read 'like one who wanders' against the Masoretic 'like one who veils herself.' This translation follows the Masoretic reading and records the alternative rather than choosing silently.
Looking forward
The Song contains no prophecy, names no messiah, and makes no theological claim; every Christian reading of it is a reading INTO it, and the church has done so almost without interruption since Origen, who wrote ten volumes on it. That tradition produced some of the best devotional writing in the language (Bernard of Clairvaux preached eighty-six sermons on chapter 1 alone), and it also produced centuries of embarrassment about the plain sense. The honest position is that the New Testament never quotes the Song, that the marriage imagery it is usually read through (Ephesians 5, Revelation 19) comes from the PROPHETS' covenant metaphor rather than from here, and that the book's own subject is a man and a woman. What it offers Christian reading is not a prediction but a vocabulary — that love is 'strong as death,' which is the only comparison in scripture that measures anything against death and does not lose.
Where the debates are
WHETHER TO READ IT ALLEGORICALLY — the oldest and largest question, and the one that decides everything else about the book. WHO WROTE IT and when, with the evidence pulling in both directions. WHETHER IT HAS A PLOT — a drama with two men (the 'shepherd hypothesis'), a wedding cycle, or an anthology of lyrics arranged by theme. WHETHER 'black AND lovely' or 'black BUT lovely' at 1:5, a single conjunction with a long reception history. WHETHER 8:6's shalhevetyah contains the DIVINE NAME or is simply a superlative ('a mighty flame'). And why a book with no God, no law and no Israel was kept at all — to which Akiva's answer, that it is the holy of holies, remains the most influential ever given.