Commentary on the Song of Songs

Contents

Reading pages: 0.1 · 1.1 · 1.4–1.14 · 2.1–2.6 · 2.8 · 3.1–3.11 · 4.1–4.16 · 5.1–5.9 · 6.1–6.12 · 7.1–7.11 · 8.1–8.14

1. 0.1The Song of Songs is so called because, unlike victory songs that celebrate the freeing of captives, it celebrates the King's marriage to those he freed: the height of God's love for humankind.
2. 1.1The bride, the Church and the souls perfected in virtue, longs for the coming of the Word foretold by the prophets; his "ointment" is the Spirit's gifts poured out through his passion, and the maidens are souls not yet perfect who follow her.
3. 1.4The bride, the Church of the Gentiles, is black from her former idolatry but beautiful through faith; the apostles fought her passions; she asks to be kept from the heretics' flocks and is told to follow the saints and care for sinners too.
4. 1.8Pharaoh stands for the devil, drowned in baptism; the bride is likened to the "mare" of Christ's human nature, which she is conformed to.
5. 1.9The bride's cheeks and neck are her modest and faithful members; the angels and Scriptures adorn her until Christ rises; she calls him "kinsman" because he was born of her sister, Israel, and names him nard, myrrh and blossoming vine.
6. 1.14The bride's eyes are "doves" because they are spiritual, enlightened by the Spirit; the couch where bride and bridegroom rest together is the divine Scripture.
7. 2.1Christ is the lily of the valleys because he went down to the dead; the bride stands out among the heretical churches like a lily among thorns.
8. 2.3Christ is the apple tree whose fruit feeds the bride and delights every sense; his shade is the partial knowledge of this life, seen as in a mirror.
9. 2.4The house of wine is the churches, God's winepresses; the bride asks to be taught to love Christ above all, and is wounded by his love.
10. 2.6God's left hand (punishment) is above the bride and his right (blessing) embraces her; she charges the maidens to keep love for Christ always burning, a love that turns away from those who refuse him.
11. 2.8The bridegroom's voice, his leaping over the mountains of the idols, his care for the bride through the 'nets' of trials, the coming spring of his advent, the rock of faith, and the foxes that stand for heretics.
12. 3.1God sometimes delays answering the prayers of the pious for their good, as with David, Paul and Elijah; so the bride seeks the absent bridegroom at night and through the city.
13. 3.3The angels who keep watch over the soul cannot show her the bridegroom's essence; passing beyond all created things she holds him by faith and brings him into the mind, the house of divine wisdom.
14. 3.5The bride repeats her oath to the daughters of Jerusalem, already explained at Song 2:7, to kindle their love for the bridegroom.
15. 3.6The angels marvel at the bride rising from the desert of human nature like incense smoke; her myrrh and frankincense are faith in Christ's death and in his divinity, that is, the economy and theology.
16. 3.7Solomon, the man of peace, stands for Christ; his bed is the divine Scriptures, and the sixty mighty men are the saints made perfect under the law, armed with the word that refutes and the hidden, mystical word.
17. 3.9The litter is the apostles who carried Christ's name to the nations; made from Lebanon (the Jewish people), with pillars (Peter, James and John), a golden back (the gospel), and a floor of precious stones (the divine oracles).
18. 3.11The crown with which his mother crowned Solomon is the crown of thorns given by Judaea, which Christ received as the crown of love on the day of his passion, his wedding day, when he gave his body and blood.
19. 4.1The bridegroom praises the bride part by part (her spiritual eyes, timely silence, hair, teeth washed in baptism, lips marked with his blood like Rahab's thread, neck and breasts of teaching), goes willingly to the mountain of myrrh (his death), and calls her wholly beautiful; a new book of the commentary begins with a prayer.
20. 4.10The bridegroom calls the bride away from Lebanon (idolatry) and Sanir and Hermon (life under the law), as Psalm 45 bids her forget her father's house; she is his sister by shared nature, his bride by receiving his teaching, and his companion by clinging to him.
21. 4.11The lips of the church are her teachers, dripping the honey of the Scriptures' hidden meaning and the milk of simple teaching; she is a garden enclosed and a sealed fountain for the worthy, and her pomegranates, spices and well stand for love, the orders of the saved, pious writings, and the spiritual sense of the law.
22. 4.16The bride calls on the north and south winds to blow through her garden.
23. 5.1The bride bids the north wind (the hostile spirit) depart and the south wind (divine grace) blow; the bridegroom gathers the myrrh of her death with him in baptism and invites the perfect to a sober drunkenness.
24. 5.2The bride's heart stays awake for the bridegroom who knocks; her delay in opening teaches the harm of sloth, and the watchmen who wound her stand for the rulers and tyrants who persecuted the saints.
25. 5.8The bride asks the maidens to tell the bridegroom that she is wounded with love; they, still imperfect, do not know who he is.
26. 5.9The bride describes the bridegroom's marks: white as God and ruddy through his passion, his head the divinity, his eyes doves watching over baptism, his lips the divine words teaching self-denial, his hands his deeds, his belly the hidden mysteries, his appearance frankincense and cedar for his two natures; the maidens then ask where he has gone.
27. 6.1The one garden and the many gardens are the one church and the many local churches, all shepherded by Christ.
28. 6.2The bride belongs wholly to the bridegroom; he calls her "good pleasure" because he took pleasure in her, lovely as the heavenly Jerusalem and amazing in her good order.
29. 6.4The bridegroom tells the bride not to gaze beyond measure at him, who is incomprehensible even to angels, lest her sight be harmed.
30. 6.5The repeated praises remind the bride to keep her beauty; the queens, concubines and maidens are those who serve God for the kingdom, from fear of judgment, or carelessly, while the bride loves the bridegroom for his own sake; a new book of the commentary begins with a prayer.
31. 6.9The bride looks out like the dawn now and will shine like the moon and finally the sun at the Lord's day; she goes down to the garden of this passing life to care for the fruitful, and is astonished that those she sought to save, driven by the devil like chariots, attacked her.
32. 6.12The Shulammite is "she who is at peace"; the bridegroom's ministers urge the persecuted bride to return and keep preaching, as the Lord strengthened Paul in his weakness.
33. 7.1The Shulammite is both an army and a choir; her straight steps shod with the gospel, the "daughter of Nadab" who brings the new fire, and the bridegroom now praises her from her deeds upward to her contemplation, setting her navel and nose against those of unfaithful Judaea.
34. 7.6The bride's height is like the palm reaching to heaven, yet like the palm's hanging clusters her teaching bends down to the weak.
35. 7.8The bride presses on to climb the palm, which bears the vine's clusters of saving teaching; her speech is guarded by her teeth, and she shuns every alien communion while longing to share the bridegroom with others.
36. 7.11The bride asks the bridegroom to go with her to the field and villages, the lowly souls, to see who has begun to bear fruit; the mandrakes are souls asleep to sin, and the new and old fruits are the precepts of the two covenants she has kept.
37. 8.1Christ shared our nature and nursed at the same breasts, and was baptized not for his own need but to show the bride the gifts of baptism; she longs to bring him into her mother's house, the temple of the Spirit.
38. 8.3The bride is beyond the threat of punishment (the left hand) and receives the blessings of the right.
39. 8.4The bride's third oath urges the maidens to keep their love for the bridegroom always kindled.
40. 8.5The bride, once black, comes up made white by sharing the bridegroom's whiteness; he asks her to set him as a seal on heart and arm, contemplation and action, for love is stronger than death.
41. 8.7No flood can quench love for God: Abraham, Joseph, the three youths, Daniel and above all Paul show it, and those who lack love despise those who give everything for it.
42. 8.8The prophets, as matchmakers, prepare the still immature church for the king; she answers that she is a wall and a vineyard, the vineyard taken from Israel and given to a fruitful nation and entrusted to the priests as keepers.
43. 8.12The thousand pieces of silver are the bride's own salvation, which the bridegroom returns to her; the two hundred, a fifth, are the keepers' wage for guarding the five senses, for nothing goes unrewarded with God.
44. 8.13The bride, still bound to a body and fearing change, asks to hear Christ's final words of welcome to the blessed, which the angels, free of the body, already enjoy.
45. 8.14At the end Christ draws the righteous up to the heights of deifying grace and, like a deer that kills serpents, destroys the evil spirits; whoever is bitten should look to him who was lifted up.