The Message of the Song of Songs: The Lyrics of Love (BST)
Overview
At first reading, the Song of Songs appears to be an unabashed celebration of the deeply rooted urges of physical attraction, mutual love, and sexual consummation between a man and a woman.
Tom Gledhill maintains that the Song of Songs is in fact just that—a literary, poetic exploration of human love that strongly affirms loyalty, beauty, and sexuality in all their variety. With tender metaphor and extravagant imagery, the Song of Songs writer spins a tale of human love into the cadence of verse, innocent of our quest for historical persons behind the text.
But in God’s story, human beauty, intimacy, and sexuality are not ends in themselves. They are transencedental longings, whispers of immortality. Like all of creation, they point beyond themselves to their divine Author, who in this Song of Songs is nowhere mentioned but everywhere assumed. This book is a refreshing reminder of the Song of Song’s ancient and vibrant affirmation of human sexuality that forms an interlude in the Old Testament story and echoes between the lines of Christian revelation.
Get the complete Bible Speaks Today Old Testament Commentary Series (33 vols.).
Key Features
- Applies the truth of Scripture to everyday life in the contemporary world
- Engages a variety of readers with accessible, nontechnical language
- Analyzes the flow of thought in passage-by-passage exposition of Old Testament books
- Provides insightful treatment of key themes
Top Highlights
“Firstly, we must realize that the two lovers are creations of a literary imagination, in the sense that the lovers are not modelled on real people.” (Page 21)
“The main themes of the Song are romantic love, courtship, beauty, passion and mutual commitment.” (Page 26)
“There are no examples elsewhere in the literature of the Ancient Near-East of any kind of love triangles” (Page 26)
“The very untidy structure of the Song allows the lovers to come on the scene in the full flood of passionate longing. This makes it difficult for the expositor to chart the natural progress of a growing relationship in a linear way, for the sequence of the text does not allow us to do that. If we are to regard the Song as a manual for courtship leading to marriage then we would effectively have to reorder the text to produce a more natural sequence. But in the Song, all the complex emotions of courtship are jumbled up together in a somewhat bewildering cycle of movements, and we have to untangle the various strands as we progress through the Song.” (Page 28)
“So the Song is a celebration of this aspect of creation. It is an invitation to contemplate our own humanity, to delight in its beauty, to sit light to its capriciousness, and to explore the possibilities involved in a relationship of love between a man and a woman. There is little moralizing in the Song (except perhaps for the idea that love cannot be bought). We have to look elsewhere in the broader biblical context for that. So if we ask the question, ‘Where is God in the Song?’, the answer is ‘Nowhere and everywhere.’ He is nowhere explicitly mentioned, everywhere assumed.” (Page 37)
- Title: The Message of the Song of Songs: The Lyrics of Love
- Author: Tom Gledhill
- Series: The Bible Speaks Today
- Publisher: Inter-Varsity
- Print Publication Date: 1994
- Logos Release Date: 2015
- Pages: 254
- Era: era:contemporary
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
- Subject: Bible. O.T. Song of Solomon › Commentaries
- ISBNs: 9780851109671, 0851109675
- Resource ID: LLS:BST22SO
- Resource Type: Bible Commentary
- Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-29T22:22:23Z