Trigger warning: Might not be suitable for repressed, conservative Christians offended by truth and puns (#realBibletalk)
Songs of Solomon is not about Christ's love for the Church, but you can read it that way if you want:
- You can create spiritual culminations from the gentle caress of words; find ecstasy in the tangled tongues and lips, pressed together like the mountainous breasts deer play on in the text.
- You can regal your heart with how Jesus' banner covers you with words of love; how He fills your mouth, sates your appetite, with every good thing: apples and figs of Scripture, milk and honey of comfort, an embrace with hole filled hands under your head and in the small of your back.
- You can come to an understanding that God is intimately in love with you, wants a deep and penetrating relationship with all people; how God wants to shower us all with fragrance stronger than spices.
- You can revel in God describing the your whole castle of your body, head to toe, not skipping your most secret, damp corners.
But that is not how the writers wrote the text. They were not thinking about Jesus. And we have a hard time with the "they were writing about Him without knowing they were" argument. Do you really want to posit that God used this medium to communicate deep truths about relationship with the Divine because even God knows "sex sells"?
The debate about why/how the book even made it into the Bible has been hard fought. The traditions that there is a deeper allegorical or anagogical meaning that ties humanity to the Divine are just as old — as famously stated by R. Akiba: "for all the ages are not worth the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel; for all the Ketuvim are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies." Thus we theists posit that the text is about YHWH and Israel, Christ and the Church, the pious Jew and the Sabbath, the Logos and the soul, Tiferet and Shekhinah. And on and on, world without end.
But why can't these books be holy while still simply speaking of human love and romance? Is it because we've regulated sexuality to the basest, vilest, unspeakable regions of the theistic experience; sex has gotten so much bad press, that a book in the Bible cannot be only speaking about sensuality? As if sexuality wasn't also created by God.
Perhaps we can regain an understanding of these holy words as love poems taken from wedding rituals, folk traditions, an amorously appropriate poet, or maybe even King Solomon himself, not sexed up theological musing about Jesus' love for you.
However, if you need that sort of intimacy with your deity, by all means, have at it. At least God will call you in the morning.
But what do we know: we made this game, and you probably think we're going to Hell. A sexy, sexy Hell.
"Perhaps Ludacris read this passage before composing the chorus to "What's Your Fantasy," biblical scholar that he is. Perhaps he got closer to the truth of this text than Matthew Henry. . ."