Saturday
Saturday
The Song of Songs
My lover is mine and I am his.
Song of Songs 2:16
Many people have questioned the propriety of including the Song of Songs in the canon of the Old Testament. They find the intimate exchanges between the lover and his beloved embarrassing and inappropriate within the pages of Holy Scripture. Others can come to terms with the book only by allegorizing it as expressing the love between Yahweh and Israel or between Christ and his church. There has in fact been a long tradition—both Jewish and Christian—of this allegorical interpretation. The best-known is probably the Sermon on the Canticle of Canticles by Bernard of Clairvaux. During the last eighteen years of his life (1135–1153), Bernard preached eighty-six sermons on the Song of Songs, but he does seem to have gone over the top in his fanciful allegorizations.
The place to begin is surely to affirm without any sense of shame a literal interpretation of the Song of Songs. Anybody reading the Song of Songs for the first time would understand it to be an uninhibited love poem. Erotic it could be called in the sense of expressing sexual love, but pornographic it is definitely not. It is important to emphasize this difference.
Christians have a very negative or puritanical reputation in the area of sex. But the Song of Songs gives the lie to this; it is a beautiful celebration of conjugal love.
Is it legitimate, then, to use the Song of Songs also as an allegory between Christ and his people? My answer is that it is legitimate to use allegory to illustrate, but not to substantiate, a truth. Thus Scripture teaches in many places that God and his people are committed to each other in a covenant of love. Therefore it is legitimate to use the Song of Songs, which expresses the love of bride and bridegroom for each other, in order to illustrate this truth.
For further reading: Ephesians 5:21–33