Song of Solomon

The Shulammite voices longing for Solomon’s love, praising his fragrance and riches; court ladies affirm her beauty as she yearns to be drawn into the king’s chambers and rejoices in mutual affection amid vineyard and pasture imagery.

Springtime symbols (flowers, doves, fig trees) celebrate awakening love; the bride rests beneath her lover’s ‘banner of love,’ warns daughters of Jerusalem not to rouse love too soon, and likens her beloved to a gazelle leaping over mountains.

In a nocturnal dream the bride searches Jerusalem for her absent lover, finds him, and brings him to her mother’s house; the scene shifts to Solomon’s majestic wedding procession guarded by soldiers and fragrant with myrrh and incense.

The groom extols the bride’s beauty from head to neck to breasts, calling her a locked garden whose spices and fruits invite delight; she responds by welcoming him to enter and taste the garden’s choicest produce.

After a brief union the bride hesitates to open for her lover, he departs, and her search through the city leads to wounding by watchmen; she then vividly describes his unmatched attractiveness to the questioning daughters of Jerusalem.

Asked where her beloved has gone, the bride says he is in his garden; Solomon praises her unrivaled beauty (‘terrible as an army with banners’), and they delight in each other among flourishing orchards and the dance of Mahanaim.

The king poetically admires the bride from feet to crown, comparing her stature to a palm with clusters of fruit; she invites him to the countryside and vineyards to relish love’s new blossoms and offer him her choicest fruits.

The bride longs for open affection without shame, pledges enduring love as strong as death and unquenchable by floods, discusses protecting a younger sister’s purity, and, owning her vineyard, calls for her beloved to hurry like a gazelle.