40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Song of Solomon 1:1-4 (Episode 431)

Episode Date: September 3, 2024

Chad and Daniel spend some time introducing the Song of Solomon and how it has been interpreted before jumping into the opening verses. Have a listen. Show Notes: Support 1517 Podcast Network 1517 Po...dcasts 1517 on Youtube 1517 Podcast Network on Apple Podcasts 1517 Academy - Free Theological Education What's New from 1517: ·      Junk Drawer Jesus by Matt Poppvits The Inklings: Apostles and Apologists of the Imagination with Sam Schuldheisz Hitchhiking with Prophets: A Ride Through the Salvation Story of the Old Testament by Chad Bird 30 Minutes in the NT on Youtube Remembering Rod Rosenbladt Encouragement for Motherhood Edited by Katie Koplin More from the hosts: Daniel Emery Price Chad Bird

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 Podcast Network podcast. You can go to 1517.org slash podcast and check out all the other podcasts that are living over there. And while you're over there, make sure you check out everything else that 1517 is doing. All the academies, all the videos, all the other podcasts, the events, a lot of stuff going on over there. Check it all out. While you're over there also, if you want to support this show and just the work of 1517 in general, you can, of course, do that by hitting the donate link up in that upper right-hand corner.
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Starting point is 00:01:15 Chad, we are starting a new book today, a book unlike any other book. I mean, there's only one book like this in the Bible, I can tell you that. And that is the Song of Songs, or Song of Solomon, as some like to call it. Yeah, in fact, the very reason we started this podcast 10 years ago was so that we could eventually get to this book. I mean, I don't want to let the cat out of the bag, but that is the truth. 10 years ago, you said, hey, I think we should really talk about the Song of Songs, but to get there, we have to cover Genesis all the way through Ecclesiastes.
Starting point is 00:01:50 so we've been all it's been a long preparation just for this so i grew up with a lot of bible reading plans and a lot of reading the bible through in a year and that kind of stuff and did that a lot and this was like the only book that like and like would make me uncomfortable like as like a 11 year old you know like you're like you're reading you know judges and there's like all kinds of stuff that makes me uncomfortable now because like you're like oh it's so violent and bloody and horrific and that didn't really bother me then you're just like oh well you know people getting killed yeah whenever it came time to read this though you'd be like am i supposed to read this should i be reading this this adult literature yeah yeah so uh i have to uh you know
Starting point is 00:02:34 respond with a quote from rabbi akiva and i don't care which commentary you open i guarantee you they will have this quote, near the beginning. It's usually under the category of its place in the canon. So here's the famous quote from Rabbi Akiva, and this was in the context of the canonicity of the Song of Songs. He says, the whole world is not worth the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel. All the writings are holy, and the Song of Songs is the holy of holies oh wow so yeah so i mean that's a pretty big he liked it from this uh from this first century late first century uh a.d rabbi he's one of the he's one of the he's one of the few guys when you ask him what his favorite book of the bible is he's like song of songs
Starting point is 00:03:26 like obviously songs yeah you know what what is pretty amazing to me is that not only him but man you you look at uh especially well early christianity for sure but when you get into the medieval period and you start looking at the literature that's produced on the song of songs it is phenomenal i mean phenomenal in the sense of just the extent of the literature a bunch but there's some psychological stuff going on here but a bunch of monks uh you know sitting around meditating upon the they really like this book uh on the song of songs and So, I mean, you take Bernard of Clairvaux, for instance, who was to some extent influential on Martin Luther. And what was that number?
Starting point is 00:04:13 I just saw it the other day. He preached like 85 sermons, not on the Song of Songs, on the first two chapters of the Song of Songs. So, yeah, I remember probably two or three or four years ago, I was reading some of his sermons on this. And the opening line, let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth. I don't know. He's got, I forget the number, five or six sermons on that alone. Yeah, what was going on was, I mean, this was, as we'll talk about in a minute, I want to talk about how you interpret the book.
Starting point is 00:04:47 This was treated for centuries mainly as an allegory, an allegory of the individual soul with Christ or with Christ in the church. and so when you uh when you allegorize something you get hyper creative yeah on the way that you know you're going to interpret these things oh and well what so you know what do what do the two breasts represent on uh on the lover on on solomon's lover well that's got to be one is the old testament one is a new testament you know and from these we draw the spiritual nourishment of the word you know so i mean that's one example um of how where you end up when you allegorize thing and i and i think that was one of the ways one of the reasons because of its you know it's
Starting point is 00:05:38 it's sensual nature of course it's romantic genre but also the the hyper allegorizing that took place this was like a huge open door that people could walk through to exercise their creativity coming up with you know it one of the problems when you allegorize is there's very few like parameters right yeah so you know i say oh well the two fawns which are her two breasts represent the old the new testament and and you come along maybe and say well no i really think it's a law in the gospel and somebody else comes along and says actually i think it's paul's epistles and the four gospels you know so it just it's wide open as to what people want to want to say about these things so yeah it ended up being a huge hugely popular book for uh for for several
Starting point is 00:06:31 centuries but there is a keep elected to there is part of it too you know like as a especially if you think about um you know this being translated if you were to go to like to the the king james version of this right uh and you would read it and then you were to go read some like shakespeare and you you i mean it's not hard to to see the uh that it it sounds similar right like i mean this these sound like things that come out of the mouths of uh of like shakespearean figures or whatever especially if you're reading it in like the king's english or whatever and uh it so there is definitely like you could and obviously it far predates that stuff and so that you can uh you can sort of see that influence there because it is the thing in the bible that
Starting point is 00:07:22 sounds like that yeah yeah that uh that kind of antiquated poetry with these highly metaphorical figures most of which are i mean there's some that you know if we read it in some sort of modern romance poetry we wouldn't blink you know sometimes uh like there's a line somewhere in here about you know someone getting caught in the uh the the uh the trestles of her hair you know something like that i don't think that would strike us as too strange but you know if i compare her nose to a tower or her teeth to sheep then of course that's going to be really weird to us but a lot of this yeah it does have this very kind of shakespearean feel and uh because i mean it's it's it's kind of kind of strange to us uh but hopefully by the time we work our way through
Starting point is 00:08:12 some of the details it won't seem quite quite as strange uh you know there so i i've been reading several commentaries getting ready for the start of this and uh it's amazing to me that yeah people take this so many different directions yeah it's almost like you know you put song of songs beside revelation and there's so many different takes on revelation uh almost of course the uh you know the definitive one is the 30 minutes in the new testament one oh yeah so if you want to know like the definitive revelation take uh you can go look that up yeah i mean that goes without saying yeah yeah i said it anyway so you've got uh i mean i so i broke these down into i think three or four different categories uh you got i've already mentioned one the allegorical
Starting point is 00:09:04 you know where you're it's kind of like if you so if you're not familiar with allegory just think of Animal Farm, or if you're more familiar with Pilgrim's Progress, you know, both of those allegories, they're, they're saying one thing, but what they're really teaching you is something else. So one thing stands for something else. So I'm talking about A, but what I really mean is B, and I'm talking about the Animal Farm, but I'm actually talking about, you know, the Russian Revolution or communism, or I'm talking about Christian's progress through this world, but I'm actually talking about the journey of the of every christian so there's that approach and it's it i mean you'll still see you'll still see that today but it was very popular among a lot of the church
Starting point is 00:09:50 fathers and uh on up into the time of the reformation but there are also some people today who uh you find isolated cases throughout church history like theodore mop swetsia he he held this too that it's just it's a it's a love song and nothing more than a love song some people today able to say, well, there's nothing religious about this. They'll argue that God's name is never mentioned, even though most people would argue that it is. I think that's chapter 8, verse 6. But even so, one mention of the Lord's name in the whole book. So this is nothing more than just religious poetry. Well, yeah, my problem with that is that, number one, it's in the canon itself, which immediately adds context to it. And Solomon's mentioned here, of course, who's
Starting point is 00:10:41 deeply rooted in the canonical story. And you've got plenty of other examples in the Old Testament where the marriage of a man and a wife, particularly a man and wife, like the prophet Hosea and Gomer, or even psalms like Psalm 45, which is a love song, really a wedding song about the king and his marriage to a foreign princess. But you got plenty of other examples in the Bible where marriage or the love between a man and a woman is iconic of the marriage between the Lord and Israel or between Christ and the church. So I don't,
Starting point is 00:11:19 I don't think really that the treating it just as a religious or as a, as a love song, a non-religious love song works. So this is, I don't know, this is my take on it. This is the way I approach, approach the song of songs.
Starting point is 00:11:32 I see it as, you could call it, number one, analogical. So an analogy where you have these two lovers, Solomon and the Shulamite. And by analogy, the love that they share is also the love shared by Yahweh in Israel, Christ in his church. and alongside that is uh kind of a typological approach where you see what's happening here as a type or foreshadowing of the love between christ and and his church and for me that seems to be seems to be the best approach because number one it takes seriously the fact that this is a love song and so it's not an allegory it is a love song there's plenty of metaphors and symbols and all that kind of stuff in it that you would expect of hebrew poetry but it's not just a love
Starting point is 00:12:21 song, because it's in the canon, and because of that, it's connected to all the other parts of the salvation stories. So it's pointing by analogy or by typology to the relationship between Christ and His bride, the Church. So anyway, that's the way that I approach it, and it seems to fit best with, I think, our overall approach, if we read it that way. i've i've kind of uh approached that this is a let's see don't turn this off the second i say this uh listen to the the end of what i say okay so the initial thing i'm going to say first is going to sound like oh don't say that when i read the song of solomon i read it uh as a little bit of a fantasy and and what i mean by that is that it's not because it's not just like solomon writing
Starting point is 00:13:16 a love song to a person there's like a dialogue that's happening in this right like this is a it'd be one thing if it was just like this is how i feel about this woman like okay sure that makes that makes sense yeah you're really man you're you really got it bad for this this woman and you're really gonna let the world know exactly how you feel about her and so easy enough uh but this is actually you have like all you have different players within this this um this song right so you have her words and his words and some other people's words you know like what other people are saying and so and by and by fantasy i don't mean that in like this sort of like crude way what i mean is that like uh as like an ideal right and so if you think about who solomon is
Starting point is 00:14:04 and i by the way feel free to like completely obliterate what i'm saying here uh you think who Solomon is, he's a guy who's famous for one thing most of all, which is, this guy's got, like, how many wives does he end up with? 700 wives, 300 concubines. Yeah, he's got like a thousand women.
Starting point is 00:14:24 Yeah, he's got a thousand women, let's put it that way. Yeah, and it seems as though, I mean, we just got done with Ecclesiastes, this does not seem to have really helped him at all. This does not seem to have, like, filled the void. He has not, like, extracted uh all the necessary meaning for life from this endeavor like far from it like this is
Starting point is 00:14:44 not as this has not happened but that doesn't mean like that solomon's not like a lover i would actually say like it's the opposite of that sometimes you get this idea of solomon that he's just like a lust-filled maniac which maybe i mean he's a man and a sinner so sure but it's also could be that he's also like maybe this like hopeless romantic that is like looking for like this real thing right and so in this you have i feel like this this song and yet this like story of like of what it would look like if you add like the real thing like if you like this is what uh this is what you really need like that's what i mean by a fantasy it's the this is the ideal and of course that i think this does then apply to christ and his church and like only god could
Starting point is 00:15:33 love a bride this way. And so, yeah, I don't know, that's been helpful to me, to think of it sort of that way, where you're almost like, man, if love could be all that it was supposed to be, like it would sound like this, like
Starting point is 00:15:51 this is what she would say, and these are the sorts of things that he would say, and these are the sorts of things that other people witnessing it would say, and then you can say, but this is sort of you do have this in Christ and his church, even though Solomon obviously couldn't find this
Starting point is 00:16:08 with any one of the thousand. This is what it would be like if I ever found the thing. The ideal woman, yeah. Yeah, I think that argument holds water. The other, I don't even, this is not contradictory to what you said, I think another way of taking this would be to, that he's speaking about at least a woman
Starting point is 00:16:31 that he's found who is as close to ideal yeah as he can imagine uh and there so there's some who argue that this is uh this kind of sounds funny because people will talk about the the young luther and the old luther we've read we've read the old solomon yeah so this is like the young solomon he's just become king and uh he's just fallen head over heels with this uh this gal who's only named in one place in chapter 6 verse 13 as the it's not even her name just where she's from the shulamite so the shulamite is this this lover and she is just yeah he's stricken i mean his head over heels in love with her and so some people take you got old solomon ecclesiastes young solomon song of songs and i don't know i it kind of fits for me that this sounds like
Starting point is 00:17:23 a guy who's not quite as old and jaded as Ecclesiastes is. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, imagine—you can imagine this easily. So both these things can be true at once. This is probably not a recounting of the conversations he's having with her and what other people are saying. But if you—so if you meet somebody, if you meet the Shulamite,
Starting point is 00:17:48 and man she's something and uh you you go and and you're having a wonderful time with her and then you go back and you put pen to paper you might project a little bit uh about like what you think this could be right you're like i mean this feels like this yeah this is it yeah that's what i'm talking about is like where you're like man oh man and whether it's an actual person that you're putting this on or or an idea of a person or whatever it is but you're saying you're you're feeling it man and like and i think that the truth though of the whole thing is that actually chad you and i are both married uh i love my wife she's great you love your wife she's great better than either of us deserve for sure but you know like i mean this doesn't like describe
Starting point is 00:18:31 our conversations uh like you know it doesn't sound like our this doesn't sound like our pillow talk no and just and just like you know your affections aren't this i don't know yeah like it's just it's just not like that but uh there's a pure it's weird because like yeah it is kind of like sensual and stuff but there's also like sort of a a naivety and like a innocence to it where you're like which you only get like obviously with like a like a pure love between like christ and his and his bride yeah yeah and i think that that actually fits with another point i wanted to make about this that I can't remember where I saw this quote, but somebody said the Song of Songs is basically an extensive commentary on that closing verse of Genesis 2 where the man and his wife were
Starting point is 00:19:22 both naked and were not ashamed. I mean, there's a very Edenic quality to this. I mean, both in the sense of kind of an idealistic state of love between a man and a woman, but also, I mean, this thing is full of all kinds of sensual imagery both you know all the senses are hit here taste and sight and smell and feeling i mean everything is there so it does have kind of this paradise quality to it which would again fit with kind of the theme of innocence and yeah yeah and the the youthfulness of love and you know unpolluted by all the stuff that happens well he's excited about things that in our world yeah well man dude he like he's excited about things that you just don't get excited about and you're as you're older like there's there's there's things that he says
Starting point is 00:20:16 here that you're that it doesn't you're like what like what are you like 15 like like what like what is going on here like it's like you uh you know your hand accidentally brushed up against someone else's hand and then you read way too much into it you know you're like what's happening here man yeah and i mean him and her this is reciprocal that's one of the uh that is one of the things that you'll that was surprising to me actually is that i'll forget the stats but one one scholar uh quoted somebody saying basically that of the speeches of the woman they comprise like 53 or 54 percent of the book and the speech and then you have the chorus this other group daughters of jerusalem or whatever you want to call them uh but the the the man solomon speaking here is just
Starting point is 00:21:05 like 30 something so that's that is one of the uniquenesses of the book is she's speaking these words to him and he's speaking these words back to her and occasionally you'll have this group this chorus as we're singing along but it's dominated by her voice which is it's pretty remarkable that if you and i do believe solomon wrote this book i mean that's highly disputed by in the scholarship but uh i i take it as it as it stands i mean solomon is makes sense to me that would be the author of something like this well well also dude you might i mean if you're if you're idealizing something in your head too and you're like oh man i just met whether you just met somebody or whatever um yeah part of this is like how would you want to be loved i mean it's like
Starting point is 00:21:47 this is uh this is of course like she's gonna do a lot of talking you're like these are the words that i know i i'm gonna tell you how i feel about it oh but i would like this surely sure like if i could have anything it would be for you to feel this way about me yes yeah yeah so i mean it's um it's it's gonna be a i think it's gonna be interesting book it's a it's a little bit difficult to find uh where the sections begin and end and how to how to structure because it's not like some people compare it to a play and i i understand that uh because it does kind of feel like you got you got the male actor you got the female actor you kind of got this like a um almost like a greek chorus over here singing sometimes you got that going on but you know a play has like
Starting point is 00:22:34 it's laid out got this act then following into this act and that that act and that that's pretty difficult for me to to discern i mean there are some that break it down that way the the typical jewish reading of this is that this is sort of a uh a historical allegory depicting the various stages of israel's history and that's one of the reasons they for instance they so this is part song of songs is part of uh what i call the the megaloth uh which this means five scrolls and there are certain certain biblical books scrolls that are read at the annual festivals and so song of songs is always read at Passover because it's interpreted to mean that this is what happened when Israel was in captivity and then they were brought out and they had the whole exodus and so
Starting point is 00:23:27 on and so forth. So that's one of the reasons that it's read at that time is because this is part of the Jewish understanding of the song. But it doesn't really have, in my opinion, that well laid out structure you kind of go from scene to scene and some of them are about anticipation some of them are about being together and some of them are about a temporary separation than a reunion and some of them are about a longer separation so it seems to me that it's just kind of a constellation of the various experiences that that these two lovers have as they're either together or anticipating being together or apart for a time and the way it works is she speaks and he speaks and sometimes other people speak so you got several different actors but mainly the man
Starting point is 00:24:18 the woman and then this we these daughters of jerusalem who occasionally will step in and have their their little say yeah and that makes sense i mean they i think i think like christ and the church as his bride, like, helps this a lot. For the Jewish understanding of it, when you're like, this is about, you know, God and Israel, you're like, well, Christ and his
Starting point is 00:24:44 bride, like, helps this feel like a little more direct, because you do have a man and, like, his bride, the people of God, the church. But, you know, even God, when he speaks to Israel, as we've gone over many
Starting point is 00:25:00 times, when they are straying away from him, he does speak about them like a wife, in the sense that he calls them, like, adulterers. It's always in a negative sense, like they're a bad wife, you know, like they're whores and adulterers. But there is still that sort of language. It's not as, like, direct, there's Christ and his bride, the Church. And so, on one hand, I think that that sort of Jewish interpretation is right, as far I was like, yeah, sure, could this apply in a way to God and His people at all times and places? Sure.
Starting point is 00:25:36 But man, having the person of Christ and His bride, the Church, come along really makes this a lot easier, I think. Yeah, yeah. I mean, oh, yeah, you kind of read the Song of Songs with one eye cast to Ephesians 5, right? where you have this beautiful description of what christ has done for his church and even you know verses like uh second corinthians 11 where paul says he says i betrothed you to one husband to present you as a pure virgin to christ so he sees his role as an apostle of kind of a i don't know a matchmaker i suppose like he's betrothal agent he's bringing together this pure virgin pure virgin of the church to christ he's going to betroth those together so yeah i mean certainly the old testament but more explicitly in the new testament you have this image of the
Starting point is 00:26:34 bride of christ the corporate body of believers as being his his beloved yeah when he's cleansed and made his own and this just happens to be the the old testament very expansive sensual description of this love, which is pretty remarkable. I mean, I don't know how many people preach like this when they're talking about the love of Christ for His bride. Yeah. It might make the congregation a little bit uncomfortable, understandably so. But, you know, this is, again, this is the ideal love. So if you were to take a man and a woman, put them together without any issues
Starting point is 00:27:17 any problems just two people madly passionately in love with each other both giving and receiving then this is what this would sound like at least this is what would sound like in the style
Starting point is 00:27:34 of Hebrew poetry should we get into a verse? we should get into a verse it's been 29 minutes About a 30-minute introduction to this, but hopefully that was helpful as we start our way through this. So I should note that depending on the Bible that you're using, sometimes these will be, you'll have like designations in here. Like I'm looking at the ESV, which not only will give a title for this section, which they say, The Bride Confesses Her Love. but throughout this it'll say it'll have a she and then it'll say others and then she and then he
Starting point is 00:28:13 so go back and forth and if your bible has those keep in mind that's not part of the original right you won't find these kind of designations in the hebrew although i will point out that some of the earliest greek manuscripts we have of the old testament like codex sinaiticus already then in the early centuries of the church they were designating the speakers like in the margin so this goes way back this is just a it's supposed to be helpful for uh for people to understand who's speaking because if you're reading in english you can't always tell hebrew has a way like a lot of languages have a way like they have gender with nouns so masculine nouns feminine nouns and you can tell when you're reading in the original if it's a man speaking
Starting point is 00:28:58 or if it's a woman speaking or if it's if it's a group speaking you can't always tell that in translation so that's one of the reasons that in many bibles today they'll actually have the sections labeled she he or or they so let's let's see let's see what she uh what she says you start out here with uh the heading of the entire thing it's called uh the song of songs which is solomons in hebrew that's uh the song of songs is shir hasherim and this is the uh the hebrew superlative so that's the we would say the best of songs but just like you know the holy of holies is the most holy place or the king of kings is the greatest king so the shir hasherim the song of songs is the finest or the best of the songs which is solomons and of course this
Starting point is 00:29:55 is where we get the title also, The Song of Solomon. So after the title, here's what she says. 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 so i mean where there's no like lead into this she she jumps she jumps right in uh and this is probably probably best uh rendered something like uh let him smother me with kisses let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth and why we do this doesn't work so well in our culture because when you think about a kiss of course we always think about a kiss where one person's mouth is touching another person's mouth
Starting point is 00:30:52 but we do have evidence in the uh in the ancient near east that sometimes there were nose kisses which are you know still happen in some cultures today so she's saying i don't want i don't want like a peck on the cheek or i don't want a nose kiss i want the real thing i want your lips on my lips and not just once but i want you to as it were smother me with kisses so let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth. And then she transitions from that to say that his love is better than wine. Now, depending on the translations you're looking at, many of them will just say love. This is actually, this is a plural, dodeem. Doed is the singular, dodeem is the plural here. And a pretty strong case can be made from the other occurrences of the plural
Starting point is 00:31:45 of this word throughout the rest of the Old Testament, that it's not just love, but it's love-making that's being talked about here. So sometimes you'll read it translated as caresses, but I would translate it love-making. Your love-making is better than wine. In other words, you know, wine's good, tastes good, it's intoxicating if you have plenty of it. Well, More intoxicating, better than that, is the relationship that we have together, the lovemaking that we are enjoying. So it doesn't take long. You're all the way in with a song of songs. Yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 00:32:25 And not only that, but you smell good, too. Yeah, definitely smell good. Because your anointing oils are fragrant. all right and and i like this this is uh yeah you are jumping right in but you are like intoxicated is like the right word that this person this is somebody who is like love drunk right like this person is uh is fully intoxicated with this other person to the point where you're like i love the way you smell i like the way your name sounds like i mean i just i i just say your name over and over again, and I just love it. In fact, I think everybody loves it, because you
Starting point is 00:33:05 have this, therefore virgins love you, this kind of thing. Who couldn't love you? I mean, look at you. I mean, smell you. Say your name. Everything about you is incredible. Of course everyone loves you. Yeah, she's speaking to Solomon. The Church is talking to Christ. And what you'll notice as when she speaks she's hitting all the senses you know i love your taste i love your smell i love the way you feel i love the way you sound all of this and that when the guy speaks almost without exception he just talks about how she looks yeah in that i mean solomon you know master of wisdom also understood kind of the two ways that the two sexes operate to mean guys tend to be all about the eyes right yeah uh so when he talks he talks over and over about oh you're
Starting point is 00:34:03 really beautiful and he'll describe her beauty in any number of ways but she hits all the senses he's mainly focused upon sight and you're right i mean she she smells he smells good to her uh his name is like oil poured out uh and then she said when she says virgins love you she's basically saying, man, there is not a woman in sight of meritable age who is not attracted to you, obviously. Who
Starting point is 00:34:32 wouldn't love you? And then I'm going to straight up run into your bedroom, as also was suggested. Precisely, that's what's happened. It's a perfect follow-up actually, when she says, virgins love you. So she's saying, I'm going to get you away from all
Starting point is 00:34:48 of those. So, verse 4, draw me after you. In fact, yeah let's let's run run not to just get away from everybody but she says the king has brought me into his into his chambers that may not there's a plural in hebrew uh can can mean a variety of things but uh given the context and given what she's saying then probably would translate it just as bedroom here that's where she wants him to take her and notice the two there i mean you switch back and forth so between like how she addresses him so she starts out in third person let him kiss me let him smother me with kisses but then she switches to to speak of him directly
Starting point is 00:35:31 you know your anointing oils are are fragrant but then in verse four she switches again to third person and she refers to him as a king so the king has brought me into into his chambers now that seems kind of jarring to you well that's just that's just the way the hebrew poetry works it's I'll be jumping back and forth between direct address and third-person address. That's not unusual for this kind of poetry. That's just the way it works. The thing that's maybe the most uncomfortable is that, you know, as two guys sitting here breaking this down,
Starting point is 00:36:05 is that obviously we are supposed to play the role of the she here, because obviously we're part of the Bride of Christ, so this is how we would speak of Christ. and then it gets even weirder when this is how Christ speaks of us. But, you know, if you're able to get out, like, let that be, this is like, you do see someone who is completely enraptured with this other person, and of course this is the way that the Church at least ought to be with Christ, right?
Starting point is 00:36:41 Where it's like, yeah, he's the best. I mean, everything about Him is everything I need. Not desiring Him is insanity to you. Yeah, and I think that can be extremely helpful to remind us—let me put it this way. There is a tendency to speak more abstractly about, you know, doctrine or creeds or teachings or whatever it is, and to lose the focus upon the person of Jesus. Yeah. It's very easy to talk about the things that Jesus gives to us,
Starting point is 00:37:16 the things that Jesus teaches us, and I'm not denigrating the importance of that. But as one hymn puts it, Jesus, Jesus, only Jesus, can my heartfelt longings still. So it's all about him. And this song has a way of reminding us of that, that Christianity is not about, it's not a philosophy, it's not just a body of doctrine,
Starting point is 00:37:40 And it's all about Christ and his love for us, his, as the Song of Songs will describe it, his passionate, sensual, all-in kind of love for us. And then the way that we respond to that also reciprocally, where he loves us and we love him. And basically you get to the point where you can't get enough of being in the other's presence. so that is one of the beauties and I think one of the strong messages of the Song of Songs that it's all about Christ it's all about our love for Him
Starting point is 00:38:16 and His love for us and so that's going to be a dominating feature of the Song of Songs I think we're we're done we didn't get very far today we got through four and a half verses but that's okay
Starting point is 00:38:30 we got a good lead in we can jump in I can tease you with this so you got the four verses we're going to hear from the others as the ESV but one of the things I do like and we'll get into this next week
Starting point is 00:38:43 is that if you think about this is a bride and she's letting you know how great the groom is and one thing that happens over and over again is man everybody agrees and that's sort of how it's supposed to be
Starting point is 00:39:03 if you think about How you would talk about Christ to other people, you would talk about Him in such a way that everyone else would also be like, well, yeah, that sounds like the best. Sounds like the best. Yeah, yeah. Great, great point. Yeah, and you're going to see that happen a lot, where everyone's like, we agree. In fact, we're like, no lies detected, right? So we'll get into some of that next episode. All right, Chad, I'll see you then. See you then.

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