«The Song of Songs» — Shir ha-Shirim, and the construction is a Hebrew superlative: a noun governing its own plural means the supreme one of its kind. It is the same grammar as holy of holies, king of kings, and — from the chapter this site published immediately before this one — hevel havalim, vapor of vapors. So the title is a claim: the best song there is. Every version keeps the Hebrew shape (KJV, ASV, NWT “The Song of Songs”), though NIV’s heading and the traditional English title “Song of Solomon” quietly answer a question the Hebrew leaves open.

⚠ «Which is Solomon’s» is one Hebrew letter, and it will not be pinned down. The phrase is asher li-Shlomo, and the prefixed lamed can mean by, for, about, belonging to, or in the style of. It is exactly the same construction as le-David over the Psalms, and it has exactly the same range. KJV and ASV render “which is Solomon’s”, keeping the ambiguity; NIV commits to authorship — “Solomon’s Song of Songs”; NWT also reads it as authorship. We keep the ambiguity, because the Hebrew does.

⚠ The very first voice in this book is a woman’s, and she is not answering anyone. Verse 2 begins mid-desire, with no narrator, no setting and no introduction — and the woman will speak more of this book than the man does, opening it and closing it. There is nothing else quite like that in the Hebrew Bible.

The strange pronoun shift in verse 2 is in the Hebrew and we keep it: “let him kiss me … for your loves are better than wine.” Third person to second in one breath — she thinks about him, then turns and speaks to him. Some translations smooth it (“let him … his love”), which loses the moment the daydream becomes an address.

«Your loves» is dodim (plural of dod), and it does not mean affection in the abstract: it is the word for lovemaking, caresses. The singular dod is what she calls him throughout — my beloved, twenty-six times in eight chapters. KJV and ASV say “thy love”, NIV “your love”, NWT “your expressions of affection”. The plural is stronger than any of those, and it is the reason this book has embarrassed commentators for two thousand years.

An untranslatable pun in verse 3. Shemen turaq shemekha — shemen is oil, shem is name, and the line says something like “oil poured out is your name.” The sound is the argument. No English can do both halves at once; we keep the image and note the pun.

⚠ «The young women» in verse 3 is alamot — the plural of almah, the single most argued-over noun in the Hebrew Bible, because Isaiah 7:14 says an almah shall conceive and the Greek Bible rendered it parthenos, ‘virgin,’ which is the reading Matthew 1:23 carries. Here it is used in the plural, without emphasis, of the young women of a court. That is worth seeing plainly: the word does its ordinary work here, and this verse is a data point in that debate rather than a decision about it. KJV “the virgins”, ASV “the virgins”, NIV and NWT “the young women” — the shelf itself shows the shift.

⚠ The Hebrew is shechorah ani ve-navah, and the middle word is the ordinary conjunction waw: AND. Hebrew waw can carry adversative force in the right context, so “but” is not impossible — but it is a choice, and it is the choice the whole Western tradition made. Jerome’s Vulgate has nigra sum sed formosa, “I am black but beautiful”; KJV follows with “I am black, but comely”, as do GNV and DRB. ASV keeps “but” too. The modern versions have moved: NIV “Dark am I, yet lovely” (still adversative), NWT “I am dark but lovely”. The plain reading — and the one that fits the two similes that follow, both of them admiring — is simply and. She is stating two facts about herself, not conceding one to claim the other. We print and, and we flag it, because this single conjunction has carried a great deal of freight in how this verse has been read.

What she is describing is sunburn from field labour, and she says so herself. Verse 6 explains it: her brothers were angry with her and made her keep the vineyards, and the sun looked on her. The contrast in view is between a woman who works outdoors and the sheltered “daughters of Jerusalem” — a distinction of class and labour. That is what the text argues; readers have often made it carry more.

The two similes are both compliments. The tents of Kedar are the black goat-hair tents of the northern Arabian nomads — Kedar is a son of Ishmael (Genesis 25:13) — and the curtains of Solomon are the hangings of a royal pavilion. Nomad tent-cloth and palace drapery: she compares herself to the finest fabric at both ends of the world she knows.

«My own vineyard I have not kept» is the book’s first double meaning, and everything afterward runs on it. Kerem, vineyard, is a literal plot of vines in the first half of the sentence and herself in the second. The Song will do this constantly — gardens, vineyards, orchards, spices, all of them at once landscape and body — and it never once explains the device.

«You whom my soul loves» — she-ahavah nafshi, a phrase she uses four times in the book and nobody else in the Bible uses at all. Nefesh is the whole living self, not a detachable soul; “whom I love with my life” is closer to the sense than anything English idiom offers.

⚠ «Like one veiled» is a genuine textual disagreement, and it is very old. The Masoretic Hebrew reads ke-otyah, like one who veils herself — which in Genesis 38:14 is what Tamar does when she sits by the road, so the line would be asking why she should be taken for a prostitute among his friends’ flocks. But the Septuagint, the Syriac and the Vulgate all read ke-to’iyah, like one who wanders — two letters transposed. KJV and ASV follow the Hebrew (“as one that is veiled”); NIV and NWT follow the ancient versions (“like a veiled woman” is NIV’s text but with the wandering reading in a footnote; DRB, from the Vulgate, has “lest I begin to wander”). We keep the Masoretic reading and record the other, which is what this translation does with every such split.

Verse 8 is the man’s first word in the book, and it is a tease: if you don’t know, follow the sheep tracks. He does not answer the question. He also gives her the title he will keep using — most beautiful of women.

The pastoral setting is doing real work. The man is a shepherd here and a king in verse 4 and verse 12, and the book never reconciles the two. That unresolved doubleness is one of the main reasons for the old “shepherd hypothesis” — that there are two rival men, a king and a shepherd — and one of the main reasons most modern readers take the Song as a collection of love lyrics rather than a drama with a plot.

⚠ This is not a compliment about being big. The Hebrew susati is feminine — my mare — and Egyptian chariots were drawn by stallions, harnessed in pairs. A mare loose among them does one thing: she pulls the entire formation apart. Ancient sources describe the tactic being used deliberately. So the line is closer to you are the beautiful disaster in the middle of a disciplined army than to anything about stature. KJV “I have compared thee … to a company of horses in Pharaoh’s chariots”, ASV the same, NIV “I liken you, my darling, to a mare among Pharaoh’s chariot horses” — NIV keeps the feminine, which is the whole point. NWT “To a mare among the chariots of Pharaoh I compare you”.

«My companion» is ra’yati, from re’a, friend, neighbour, companion — the same root as “love your neighbour as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18). He uses it nine times in this book and it appears nowhere else in the Bible in this form. The shelf reaches for endearments: KJV and ASV “my love”, NIV “my darling”, NWT “my companion” — NWT is the literal one, and it preserves something the others lose: the word he chooses for her is the word for a friend.

Verse 11 shifts to «we» — a plural voice offering to make her jewellery. Who is speaking is unclear: the daughters of Jerusalem, a chorus, or the man using a courtly plural. The Song moves between voices without ever labelling them, and the ancient manuscripts add no speaker headings; the ones in modern Bibles are editorial.

Nard (nerd) is an oil pressed from the root of a plant that grows in the Himalayas. It reached the Mediterranean by caravan and cost a labourer’s annual wage by the pound — which is what makes the alabaster jar of pure nard broken over Jesus’ feet in the Gospels the extravagance it is. Here it is simply what she is wearing.

Verse 13 is explicitly erotic and none of the versions flinch. A tseror ha-mor is a small cloth sachet of myrrh worn against the skin, and the verb yalin means to spend the night. KJV “he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts”, ASV the same, NIV “resting between my breasts”, NWT “he will spend the night between my breasts”. This verse is a fair test of what the book is: the allegorical readings have to work very hard here, and the plain reading does not have to work at all.

⚠ A homonym worth keeping distinct. The kopher of verse 14 is henna — the flowering shrub whose cream-coloured clusters are intensely fragrant and whose leaves dye skin orange-red. It is spelled exactly like the kopher that means ransom, the price paid to redeem a life (Exodus 21:30, and the root behind kippur). Same consonants, different words; this translation keeps them apart, and a reader meeting “camphire” in the KJV is meeting the plant.

En-gedi is a real place and the detail is exact: a freshwater spring in the cliffs above the Dead Sea, a sudden green oasis in the most barren landscape in Israel, warm enough to grow tropical crops. Ancient sources single it out for its palms and its balsam. Naming it is not decoration — it is the most improbable garden in the country.

These three verses are a duet, and the Hebrew makes it audible. He says hinnakh yafah — feminine “look at you, beautiful”; she answers hinnekha yafeh — the same words in the masculine. Only one letter changes. English cannot do that, so we keep the repeated frame (“look at you — beautiful”) and note that the reply is an exact echo, which is what the sound does.

«Your eyes are doves» — not like doves; the Hebrew has no comparison particle. What the image means is genuinely open: shape, colour, softness, the birds’ reputation for constancy, or the fluttering movement of the eyes themselves. The Song presents its metaphors without explaining any of them, which is a large part of why it survives translation better than most poetry.

«Our couch is green» — ra’ananah is the word used of a leafy, flourishing tree. The bed is grass. And then verse 17 completes the joke: the beams of “our houses” are cedars and the rafters cypresses — they are lying outdoors under trees and describing it as a palace. Cedar and cypress are the exact timbers 1 Kings lists for Solomon’s temple and palace; the forest is doing the work of a royal building programme.

⚠ Verse 17 carries a ketiv/qere — one of the Masoretes’ margin notes, and you can see it in the Hebrew column: the consonants as WRITTEN are rachitenu, and the tradition as READ is rahitenu, our rafters or panelling. The word is rare enough that its exact sense is uncertain either way. The scribes did not correct the column; they left both, which is the habit that makes the Hebrew text auditable.