JY: Welcome to GearTalk, a podcast on Biblical Theology. We’ve been focusing on books connected to Solomon. Today we’re in our second week in the Song of Songs. Jason and Tom are in San Diego and happen to run into Miles Van Pelt, a scholar just completing work on Song of Songs. What a gift. Miles walks us through the book. We recorded this podcast outside, so be prepared for a little background noise. It’s worth it. When you’re done listening, be sure to take a look at the resources connected to Song of Songs highlighted in our show notes.

TK: Welcome to GearTalk, I’m Tom. I’m sitting across a table with—actually there’s a fire going in it—and Jason DeRouchie, and we got more people here, Jason. So introduce the people. And I feel like today is a little funny because you were in the batter circle taking your warm up swings to lead us through Song of Solomon, and you’ve been benched. I have been benched. I’ve gotten trumped by my dear brother, Miles Van Pelt, who is—well, I’ll let him introduce himself, but we have a super long history going back to graduate school 25 years ago, at least. We were at Gordon-Conwell together, our families were tight there, and then we both did our PhDs together at Southern Seminary. He’s right at the final stages of a major commentary on Song of Songs, arguing for the three-character approach, and he’s been gracious to meet with us today. So he’s on my left, you’re right, Tom. Then on the other side of the table is Lance Kramer, who is hanging out with Tom and me this week, and who himself has contributed to GearTalk in various ways in the past, and you’re going to hear from him again in the future.

TK: Yep.

JD: And so we’re all here in San Diego, California. It’s beautiful out. It’s kind of like the Garden of Eden around us, and you’ve got waterfalls behind us, so you may hear some distraction. We may even see friends and greet them. But we are here now for the next minutes to focus on Song of Songs. And for all of you who are listening, we are just in the process of working through books that Solomon wrote. And we’ve covered Ecclesiastes, and now we’re in this book of Song of Songs, a book that very few boldly go into. And yet we’re going to jump right in. And we’ve got a brother who is nurturing love with his wife of how many years?

MVP: Thirty-three years.

JD: Thirty-three years. And delighted to celebrate that love and encourage others to do the same with their own spouses, all underneath the Lordship of Christ. And so we get to celebrate some beautiful Bible today. In Miles’s words, even as we’re gathered around this fire, it’s going to be white hot. So hold on, ladies and gentlemen. Miles, why don’t you give us a little update on who you are, and feel free to give any further background what you do right now. You’ve been a church planter, and you also have a very long-held post at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson. So give us a taste of Miles Van Pelt.

MVP: Yeah, I’m Miles Van Pelt, and I’m the Professor of Old Testament and Biblical Languages at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi. I also direct the Summer Institute for Biblical Languages that we host there each year with Hebrew and Greek intensives. This is my 22nd year at RTS. For 15 of those years, I served as the Academic Dean, but I’m no longer doing that. For five of those years, I helped shepherd a church plant, but I’m no longer doing that. And so at this stage of my life—kind of a 2.0—I am free to be a professor and engaging in more writing and speaking and things like this. And so I’m happy to be a part of this and thankful for it.

JD: But you’ve got a churchman, you’ve got a girl who is faithful and such a sweet partner, and you’ve got four kids and two grandkids.

MVP: Yeah, we do. In fact, yesterday on the way up here, Lori and I—she’s my wife—we drove by our high school together.

TK: You went to the same high school?

MVP: And we started dating when we were 15, and it was 40 years ago this fall that I sat behind her in chapel, and the girl next to me said, that girl likes you. And that’s the beginning of our story 40 years ago.

JD: I love it.

TK: Was it true? Did she actually like you?

MVP: She did. Yeah. So she liked me a little bit my freshman year, but I parted my hair down the middle, and her friend said that’s a no-go. And thankfully, the next year I came back, my hair was parted on the side, and so it was A-OK. And so that began the whole scene.

TK: Love it.

JD: White-hot, baby.

MVP: I’m thankful. I don’t know what the Lord did to make me want to change my hairstyle, but I’m thankful what happened. So yeah, she’s my best friend, and she’s been the delight of my life for the last 40 years.

JD: Well, it’s been a joy to even get to see her here at this conference with you. And I’m delighted we get to talk about this book that very few Christians even know how to touch. And Tom and I, on our last podcast, helped introduce this book. And as he said, I am gladly benched in order to let you step up to the plate for us. We would just love for you—how long have you been working in this book? Why did you decide, “I’m going to write a commentary on Song of Songs?” And just give us a sense for how you have—like, you teach this, right, at the school? And students come to your classroom, and they don’t know what they’re going to get.

TK: Maybe add one more element to it. Like, in a church setting, how you see it fitting into a pastor’s preaching, that sort of thing.

MVP: Sure, I’ve taught this course at RTS for well over 15 years. I teach two kind of specialized exegesis courses, one in narrative and one in poetry. And I’ve normally focused for poetry on Song of Songs, and normally on narrative for the Book of Judges. And I like the books that no one else wants to touch, you know?

JD: And you’ve written a commentary on the Book of Judges, the ESV Expository Commentary Series, and we encourage people to go there. Miles is a Jesus-cherishing, intentionally exalting Old Testament professor, and there’s not a lot of us out there. There’s more growing, praise the Lord. And so in both Judges and in Song of Songs, you’re going to see Jesus elevated if you’re on the receiving side of Miles’s teaching.

MVP: I sure hope so. That’s the goal. That’s the goal. And my interest in Judges and Song of Songs both sparked in seminary. Gordon Hugenberger sparked my interest in Judges. I had a friend who took his course, and I listened to a cassette tape—that tells you how old it is—a cassette tape on an introductory lecture like Judges 1 and 2. And he talked about the Judges are types of Moses. And I was immediately captivated by that. And then I wanted to take that and say, if they’re types of Moses, they’re types of Christ. And ran with that. I’ve been running for that for the last 20 years, and have loved every minute of it. The same is true of Song of Songs. I remember one day I was in Walt Kaiser’s office, and he asked me what I thought about the interpretation of that book. And I said, “Honestly, Dr. Kaiser, I have no idea.” And he said, “I think there are two men in the book.” And a little bit startled me at first thinking like, “Well, that’s certainly not allowed.” But he meant like two alternative men, like two different choices, like there’s not just Solomon, but there’s another man. And he was writing an article on that.

TK: And was he the first one that you know of that was kind of saying this?

MVP: He was the first one I heard it from. And again, one scholar calls the Song of Songs “functionally decanonized.” That is, even though it’s in the Bible, we kind of ignore it. And I thought like, “Well, shoot, I want to know how we can all scriptures God breathed and profitable.” And I wanted to know, how does that book teach me to live wisely in this world? And how does it point me to Christ? And so I like books like that. The next book I want to tackle is Lamentations after this one. And so I just want those books that no one’s talking about anymore.

JD: Love it.

MVP: And want to make them known and accessible. And in terms of the context of the church, I can tell you this. I preached through the whole book from start to finish in the context of a local church in front of my wife, all four of my children and my in-laws, and made it out alive. And so …

JD: How many sermons?

MVP: Maybe 12.

JD: Wow, okay.

MVP: Maybe eight. Some of them would be introductory, like what is marriage and how does that work in Genesis 2, and the context of 1 Kings 11 and who Solomon is and stuff like that. So it took some background work. But the church allowed me the opportunity to do that. And I would start every sermon this way that the Song of Songs teaches that the covenant of marriage designed by God in Genesis 2 was always intended to be rock solid in terms of commitment and white hot in terms of intimacy.

JD: Rock solid in terms of commitment, white hot in terms of intimacy, and Song of Songs points in that direction.

MVP: That’s exactly what it teaches according to chapter 8. And that when we uphold and cherish both rock solid and white hot, marriages in a post-Genesis 3 world can better—but not perfectly because of sin—endure hardship, resist temptation, and promote wholeness or shalom, which is the word in Song of Songs.

JD: And within the context of the Old Testament—and even in the context of the Former Writings—in that context of post-fall, it’s also pre-Christ. And how can the remnant faithfully pursue God in the hope of the Messiah, in a marriage context? And Song of Songs, is laying it out.

MVP: Yeah, it tells you exactly what it should be. Because if you think about it, the marriage covenant has been corrupted by sin, right? And we see it with Lamech’s polygamy early on in Genesis. And we see that, for example, the first two great judgment events in Genesis—the flood and Sodom and Gomorrah, the judgment by water and judgment by fire—are flanked by the corruption of the marriage covenant. So, with the flood, for example, it begins with the sons of God marrying the daughters of man—whatever you want to think of that, perhaps the mixing of the human and the divine—but at the very end, Ham uncovers the nakedness of his mother—or his father, which according to Leviticus 18, is maternal incest, all right? Then you’ve got the Sodom and Gomorrah judgment event by fire in Genesis 19, which is precipitated by the men of the city coming to sleep, whether to violate the angels, right? At the end, you’ve got a maternal incest with lots of daughters. So same kind of events, flanking these big judgment events. So we can see that the Lord loves the marriage covenant, and profane it precipitates incredible judgment. Because the marriage covenant of Genesis 2, right, is a picture of the marriage covenant of Revelation 21 and 22. And so when we kind of profane what God has created in the marriage covenant, we profane in some sense or spoil what he desires for us as his bride. And so the world can no longer see what he wants with us. And so it’s a beautiful picture of what Christ desires to have with us from Genesis 2, right? I always tell my students Genesis 2 begins with Sabbath rest and ends with the creation of the woman in the marriage covenant. And we as His people were created to enter into his rest as his bride. And so the whole history of the Bible after that is getting us into that spot. And our sin corrupts both God’s rest and his bride. So those pictures are helpful for me.

JD: That’s so good. That’s so good. I want you to take us into the book. There’s different characters. What characters do you see? What are the titles or names that you, as you teach through this book, what you give them? And how would you walk us through to these three major movements, as you’ve described them, each one ending with a refrain? I guess four movements, right?

MVP: Four sections. Yeah.

JD: Four sections.

MVP: Four sections.

JD: Three different uses of the refrain. Just walk us through how you’re seeing this book hold together, climaxing in this declaration of the fire of Yah. The fire of the Lord. That is love.

TK: And maybe, maybe Miles, also let us know what you personally do with—we touched on it last week when we talked about it—but what you do with the headings that may be different Bible translations put in, how you find those useful or not so useful for you.

MVP: Okay. Let me begin this way, just generically. Every translation of the Bible is an interpretation, right? We all know that. And the more poetic a book is, the more interpretation it requires in its translation, because figures and symbols and metaphors require a greater amount of translation and interpretation. And so books like the Song of Songs, or Lamentations, or Ecclesiastes, or even some of the Psalms, require an incredible amount of not just translation, but interpretation to make sense of it. I would give all of my Hebrew skills just to be able to translate Song of Songs from the original, because it’s peeling back all of the layers that get in our way in the context of the church. Because some people are embarrassed by the book, some people are ashamed by its content, some people don’t want to talk about sex and sexuality in the context of the church—which is really too bad, because the world is talking about it, and I want my kids to hear about it in the church, not from the world, and my grandkids now. So another layer of interpretation are the headings that all the different translations try to put in there—the ESV, the NIV, the King James—they all have them. Really, they are trying in earnest to help people make sense of what’s going on in the Song, but very few of them I have found to be entirely accurate. A lot of them just continue to set forth older principles or patterns that we haven’t really gone back and checked the sources of. The first thing I do with my students is to tell them to get an electronic copy, and cut and paste, and then delete all of the headings, and just read from scratch and take notes. If you can do that, if you can find a Bible without headings, or if you can find an electronic source that will remove the headings, do that. I think, because those are levels of interpretation, they can often be unhelpful. Because once you pick an interpretation, you have to follow through the whole way. And if you’re wrong at any spot, you’re wrong the rest of the way. And so it can be—it can be hard. And people—the poetry of the Song of Songs is challenging. The words are challenging. The vocabulary is perhaps the most challenging in terms of all of the different and rare words that appear there—all the strange words. And so it could be challenging. And so we have to—it takes a lot of work. It took a lot of work for me, looking at Egyptian and Babylonian, Sumerian love literature that’s common throughout the world. I mean, if you read the Egyptian love literature that predates Solomon, you know exactly where he got this material and this genre, right? His first wife was Pharaoh’s daughter, right? And he was a trader in wisdom literature, and chariots, and horses, and all that with Egypt. So all of this stuff was available to him. And so once you amass all of that information, you realize that Solomon is working with a particular genre and has a particular point to make. And so it really helps contextually to paint the background. Rarely do we find people engaging with Egyptian or Babylonian, Sumerian love literature of the exact same type as the Song of Songs. So it’s helpful to know what’s going on. And so the Song of Songs is the best song ever, right? That’s what that title means. We know that Solomon wrote 1,005 songs from 1 Kings 4—or 1 Kings, I forget which 1 Kings, I think it’s 1 Kings 4—and that this is the best one of them, I guess. The best song ever out of 1,005. That’s saying something, right? And the way this song is structured is by the adjuration that you see appearing three times throughout the Song. So it says, “I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles or the does of the field, do not arouse or awaken love before it’s ready.” Which is actually an oath curse, which is stronger in Hebrew than in English, all right? After each of those adjurations, someone comes.

JD: Meaning, if you arouse or awaken love before it’s ready, may you be cursed.

MVP: Right.

JD: That would be the pattern that—that’s what the reader, the listener, would have heard.

MVP: Yes. But because Hebrew had something called language taboo, you never pronounced the curse because in so doing, you could make it happen, you leave it out. “So if you arouse or awaken love, dot, dot, dot, you know what I mean.” So they just translated—so don’t arouse or awaken love, obviously.

JD: Right.

TK: The consequences will be devastating if you do.

MVP: Yeah. And that’s a well-known Hebrew oath way of doing things, and books are published on it.

JD: And it’s a well-known reality that immoral sex destroys.

MVP: Oh, sure. Yeah, that’s exactly right. Yeah. So after each adjuration, there’s three of them …

TK: What would be, Miles, what would be another word, “adjuration?” What would be another word you’d pick?

MVP: Oath curse.

TK: Oath curse.

MVP: Yeah. After each—so the woman is putting the daughters of Jerusalem under oath with a curse.

JD: And are these daughters of Jerusalem other women in a harem? Like Solomon’s harem?

MVP: They are the virgins in training. So later in chapter 6, we’re going to talk about there are kings and concubines and virgins without number, queens and concubines and virgins without number. And then they call them the queens, the concubines and the daughters.

JD: Okay.

MVP: And so there’s the one verbal link in there that the concubines without numbers are the daughters. Who are the daughters? The daughters of Jerusalem. In a harem complex, there are two houses, the house of the virgins and the house of the wives and the concubines. The house of the virgins are where you train. Remember, Esther chapter 2, she trained for a year. Six months with aloes and lotions and six months with spices and stuff like that. You were trained how to please the king. You were trained, you were given a good diet, fancy perfume, jewelry, and training in how to please the king. So however that might correspond to Solomon’s harem, we don’t know, but we can only imagine Solomon’s harem completely outstripped Xerxes, right? He was the wealthiest, the most fantastical, smartest, greatest.

JD: Fantastical, I like that.

MVP: It suits him, fabulous king of the day. And it says in the book that not only are queens and concubines, but virgins without number are innumerable. And those are the daughters of Jerusalem who are being addressed in the book. And those are the ones luring into the temptation. The woman is asked to make a choice between Genesis 2 marriage and 1 Kings 11 marriage.

JD: And remind us, 1 Kings 11 marriage.

MVP: 1 Kings 11 is the account of Solomon’s wives. He had 700 royal wives and 300 concubines. And those wives and concubines led his heart astray to worship all of the gods of the nations, which then results in this. And Solomon did that which was evil in the eyes of the Lord, the refrain of the Book of Judges. And so the Lord tore the kingdom from him because of that.

JD: So Solomon is the author of this book, and yet you’re going to argue that he’s not the main male character in the book.

MVP: He is a main male character. I mean, he’s the only one mentioned by name seven times. There are word plays on his name, and all the accoutrements of his kingdom are there. His crown, his royal bed.

JD: He’s more the antagonist, though, rather than the hero. He’s not the hero.

MVP: If I had to put it in the terms of the book of Proverbs, there’s Lady Wisdom and Lady Folly. In the Song of Songs, there’s Mr. Wisdom and Mr. Folly, and Solomon is Mr. Folly, and the beloved shepherd is Mr. Wisdom, who comes in the first part of the book. So that’s the whole thing about the coming. In 2:6, we see the first adoration. And then in 2:7, it says, “The voice of my beloved, behold, he comes leaping over the mountains, bounding over the hills.” This guy who’s leaping over the mountains and bounding over the hills can’t get over the harem wall. He can only peer through the lattice and look through the windows, because any male who went into the harem would be immediately killed, right? You could not enter. And so he calls to her.

JD: So she’s one of the virgins.

MVP: Yep. She’s been taken to the harem.

JD: And her—but she already has this preceding relationship.

MVP: Yep.

JD: Are we to see them married?

MVP: Nope. Not married yet.

JD: Okay.

MVP: Because once you’re—if you’re not a virgin, you’re not in the harem training. The king would only sleep with virgins. And then they’d be his concubines for life.

TK: Miles, can you—the very first verses of the whole book kind of can feel a little confusing. Like, wait, who’s talking to who, and how does that—can you kind of get us pointed in the right direction?

MVP: In 1:1–2:5, the first part of the book, the woman is taken into the harem, and the harem is enticing her to participate in harem life. That’s what’s going on there. There’s no Solomon yet, there’s no boyfriend yet or beloved yet—shepherd—she’s there by herself. And the harem begins this way: “Would that he kiss me with some of the kisses of his mouth! For your lovemaking would be more intoxicating than wine.” And so they invite her into harem life that way. Right. And then she says, “I’m not qualified. I’ve been tanned by the sun, manual labor, may have calluses,” that kind of thing. And they say, “Don’t worry. Remember, this is a year-long training program.” Lotions and aloes and spices, jewelry will make you suited for the king. And she says, “Nope, I belong to my beloved and my beloved belongs to me. I’m holding out for him.” That’s the message of the first section. Then, the beloved comes in 2:7 and calls to her, but she says, “You have to go and wait until I can get out, until the storm passes and the shadows flee,” which is the description of her time there.

JD: For her, it’s a dark place.

MVP: Yeah, the storm—yeah. It says in some translations, “Until the day passes and the shadows flee.” But it’s actually—the word there is yom too, the storm. Yeah. “Until the storm passes and the shadows flee.” And so, the beloved goes and waits until he comes back with her at the end in 8:5, right? And so, the second adjuration occurs in 3:5. And then in 3:6, that’s when Solomon appears, where he says, “Who is this coming up from the wilderness like columns of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, with all the fragrant powders of a merchant? Behold, it is the bed of Solomon!” So, you know exactly what’s going on there. He’s coming into what I call his portable love shack, all perfumed in its fantasticalness, right? And the women are called out to view Solomon and his crown, with which his mother crowned him on the day of his dedication. This is not his crown on his head—the crown on the other head. And they’re invited to come out and participate in this life.

JD: So, who is making the call, “Go out, O daughters of Zion, and look upon King Solomon?”

MVP: It’s the harem as a whole, or some kind of harem attendant, that kind of thing. We know that the women were given over to eunuchs, who would protect the harem, and then attendants who would shepherd them through the process, like Esther, for example. And even Esther was given a special attendant, special food, and stuff like that. So, we don’t know the specific—one commentator, Stu Van Perden, argues that there’s this harem attendant in there. But we never really know specifically if that’s true. It’s a nice thought, but it’s the harem as a whole, just like the culture as a whole, is inviting this woman into this particular lifestyle. Because think about it: in the ancient world, married life was hard and dirty and death-ridden, right? It was the Ancient Near East. Think about today’s world out there. Life there is hard and dirty and death-ridden. If there’s scarcity of food, death in childbearing, hard manual labor life—which is what she was given to—think about then life in Solomon’s harem. He was the richest, smartest, most incredible man of his time. It would have been complete care and opulence, worry-free life, as long as you are willing to give into the marriage system of 1 Kings 11 as opposed to Genesis 2. In this story, in this narrative account, the woman chooses Genesis 2 over 1 Kings 11.

TK: Can we just—I think this will help people—we read about David and Solomon and things like that, and the narrator doesn’t always—he does it in 1 Kings—but make a comment explicitly about, “David,” for instance, “did wrong in this.” Can you make a comment about what we do as maybe reading our Bibles, preaching, teaching, about when the narrator doesn’t tell us, but including that information—is it wrong for the king to do this? Or are they saying, “No, that’s part of—every king does this. It’s okay for the Israelite kings to go down that road”?

MVP: I don’t—so, narrative theology doesn’t always say what you want to know, but it shows you, right? We can see from David’s life and his children, and what happened, that it was a complete train wreck. Does that make sense? I think about David’s life and what happened to his children over the course of his life. I wouldn’t wish that on any person.

TK: And you would say then the narrator is showing you the fruit of this.

MVP: He’s telling you by showing you. Yeah. He’s telling you by showing you.

JD: We read the history of the covenant in light of the covenant. And he’s, the narrator is expecting us to know what baseline proper conduct in God’s covenant is.

MVP: Right. I mean, if you think about the law of the king, the Book of Deuteronomy says, right, you know, “Don’t have a lot of horses, don’t have a lot of money, and don’t have a lot of wives.” And when Solomon is analyzed in 1 Kings 10 and 11, he has a lot of horses, and he got them right from where God said not to—Egypt. He had a lot of money, so much so that silver was like nothing. And he had more wives than anyone else. And his kingdom fell apart. And so you put those things together in the narrative theology, and you read what’s going on, right? You can make the good and necessary consequence there. Yeah, that’s what’s going on.

JD: So Solomon enters in, and the daughters are called upon: “Go to his movable bed. You know, he’s made it available. He’ll accept you in.” And where does the book go then?

MVP: So from basically 3:6 all the way to 8:3—that’s what I call the temptation narrative—she is in the wilderness until she comes out. And there are—that section is basically divided in half by a second adoration that says …

JD: A partial adjuration.

MVP: A partial adjuration, yeah. And they say, “If we find him, what should we tell him?” That kind of thing. And why would you—they say this, “Why would you do this kind of thing?” And they say, “Where do we find your beloved? How is he better than any other beloved?” And she explains and stuff like that. So there’s this partial adjuration in the middle. So there’s basically the first part, which represents the temptation of Solomon, and the second part, which represents again the temptation of the harem. So that’s the lengthy section. The biggest section in the book is the temptation narrative.

JD: So in the midst of that temptation narrative, there’s some extended discussions of “the beloved,” and some extended discussions of “my love,” and the language of the vineyard. So could you clarify how that’s working within the temptation section?

MVP: There are at least three vineyards in the book. There’s the vineyard of chapter 1, which is the one that she went to work in, an actual vineyard. And then she uses that to say, “But my own vineyard, which is before me, I have not cared for.” She’s talking about her body. That’s the second vineyard. So she’s using that. Then, at the very end, there’s Solomon’s vineyard at Baal Hamon, which is in a place, but it’s a designation, Baal Hamon, meaning the husband of a multitude. Solomon’s vineyard is his harem, but then she says, “But my own vineyard is still before me.” That is, she hasn’t surrendered it to Solomon, and therefore, she rejects Solomon at that point. So there’s the actual vineyard that she worked in, there’s the vineyard of her own body, and there’s the vineyard of Solomon’s harem. And so her vineyard, the woman’s vineyard—which uses the exact same language for it—appears in chapter 1 and chapter 8. And then the family vineyard is in 1, and Solomon’s vineyard is in 8. Both places, she was sent to work, we could say, or to sell herself out.

JD: With the requests that go forward, “Open up to me your vineyard.” Who’s doing the talking? It seems, I think …

MVP: In which spot?

JD: I don’t have my normal Bible here, so it’s harder to find.

MVP: So there is the language, for example, in chapter 5, of the dream, which has the “Open to me.” But if you’re in the section of Solomon’s Vineyard, it’s illicit. Like when he says, “Let’s eat, drink, and be drunk with lovemaking.” That’s all in the plural. Those are illicit invitations. Does that make sense?

JD: Okay. So there, we’re not portraying the ideal.

MVP: Correct. Yeah, you’ve got to be careful where you are, if you’re in the temptation area. But the woman does describe her beloved. Right? And remember, he’s got, like—he’s described like the statue in the Book of Daniel. Gold and bronze and ivory. He’s described like a god. Right? And that’s what she conceives of her beloved as, as a god-like person. In some sense, she sees her beloved as his eschatological self, not his human self. Right? And that’s what draws her to him. She sees him in a way, in the way that the Lord ultimately created him, not in the way that he exists right now, which is a great way to think about your spouse.

JD: Wow.

MVP: As you’re eschatological—like, it’s great for me to think of my wife as her eschatological self that is fully perfect and wonderful and glorified, even though we still exist in these bodies—because that’s who God has ultimately made her to be.

JD: So she’s able to envision her man that way. When we read something like in chapter 6, where the man is talking to my love, “You are beautiful as Tirzah, my love, lovely as Jerusalem.” Is this the shepherd boy communicating of his girl?

MVP: No, he’s not—the shepherd boy is gone by the second adjuration.

JD: Okay.

MVP: Yeah. Remember, she tells her beloved to go away and to graze among the lilies until she can get out—until the storm passes and the day breaks. So everything after that is Solomon, the daughters of Jerusalem, and the woman.

TK: So just heavy, heavy temptation and resistance.

MVP: Yes. Yeah. So, “My beloved has gone down to his garden, to the bed of spices, to graze in the gardens, to gather lilies.” In 6:2, she says that’s where he is, and says in 6:3, “I belong to my beloved, my beloved is mine; he grazes among the lilies.” And then in 6:4, it says, “You are beautiful as Tirzah, my love, lovely as Jerusalem, awesome as an army with banners.” That’s the harem talking back to her, saying, “You’re frightening us.” That make sense? This says, “Turn away your eyes from me, for they overwhelm me—your hair is like a flock of goats.” They’re describing her beauty, right? And so some of this Solomon is describing, some of it the daughters of Jerusalem saying, “You’re an amazing woman, you’re ready to go.” Solomon is making advances, and she’s denying it all. When Solomon says right here in six, “Queens and concubines—they praised her,” right? I mean, in 690, this is a harem complex for sure, right? And this is not the kind of love that we’re invited to participate in in the Bible at all, right? This is the temptation of life. It’s a temptation that goes on around us—all around us—right now.

JD: So, we get to 8 through 8:3, and we have the final curse text in 8:4.

MVP: Yeah.

JD: And now we come to the conclusion of the book.

MVP: Yeah.

JD: After temptation, how does she—are we told how she gets out of the harem context?

MVP: We’re not—she just—well, we do know this: that if a woman—think about the virgins without number in the house of the virgins—not every virgin made it through. Does that make sense? And so some virgins would end up going home. But once you made it to the concubine house, that was your life sentence. You never left, right? And if you—for a marauding king, what do you come and do? Right, you sack the temple, you sack the palace, you spoil the harem. And that’s just what you do. And so that was a highly protected area. And so this was the king’s prized possessions—his women. That make sense? And so she, at the end, teaches what true love is like, when she says, “Place me like the seal on your heart, like the seal on your arm, for love is strong like death, it seals fierce like the grave.” That’s the rock solid, right? It’s irreversible. It’s ownership.

JD: It’s unrelenting. It’s steadfast.

MVP: Yeah. And then it says, “Its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of Yahweh,” right? The word there for “flashes of fire”—like lightning bolts in the Book of Psalms, right? Lightning burns at like 50,000 degrees, right? That’s like eight times hotter than the surface of the sun. So it’s talking about the hottest possible flashes of fire from the greatest source ever, right? The flame of Yah, I argue, is both the source of divine heat and the extent of that heat. And I like to describe it as a furnace and a flame—that the rock solid is the furnace, and the flame is the white hot that goes in the furnace. And we all know that fire can get hotter in a furnace, but once you take it out, it diminishes or goes out. And so you need the rock solid nature of the marriage covenant to protect and to promote the white hotness. It doesn’t have to be radical and crazy—it just needs to be protected and cherished. Does that make sense? And the world, man—the world loves the white hot, but they despise the rock solid. The church cherishes the rock solid, but they do very little to promote the white hot. And we’ve got to keep them both together in our marriages, right? To protect against hardship and temptation and to promote wholeness.

TK: Miles, would you say, as you’ve seen the book used or whatever, then the way you’re describing this—it’s not just for single people contemplating, “How am I going to live my life?” It’s for people who are already married.

MVP: It’s both. I mean, the book—you think about it this way, like Proverbs 1–9, especially Proverbs 7, Proverbs 5, 7, and 31—are written for young men who are not yet married to consider the type of person they should marry and how to be faithful in the midst of that marriage. The book of Song of Songs is the core to that. It’s written for young women when they’re thinking about married life and what is of value and what to pursue, and what does rock-solid or white-hot look like. Because we all know that this book was written because of Genesis 3. There is temptation, there is hardship, and there is brokenness. How do we, in the context of marriage, meet those trials? That’s what the book is trying to teach us—to value those things in order to endure the Genesis 3 life that we live in right now. Does that make sense?

LK: So, written for young women—I’m asking a question because I haven’t said anything up to this point and everybody needs to know that I am actually here.

MVP: We normally think like you can’t—like it used to be like the rabbis said, “Don’t read this book till you’re 30,” but then it’s too late, the ship is sailed, baby.

LK: So I had a young man in my Old Testament freshman class come up to me and say, “I don’t feel like I can read this book without sinning, without ideas coming to my head.” What would you say to that young man? I would say that the woman in the Song of Songs uses her desire for sexual intimacy to point her in the right direction. That is not bad—to have those desires. If it were, the human race would have gone extinct if we had eliminated the desire. Those desires are God-given, and we want to—with the Bible—focus them and point them in the right direction. Because the world is pointing them in every other direction. So the woman, like in her second dream account, is longing to be sexually united to her beloved in very intense and sexually explicit language that’s euphemistic—and so not gross or anything like that—and she’s using that as the means of resisting the temptation of Solomon. Which is a completely counter-cultural way to how we think about talking to people.

JD: She recognizes this is good desire for the right object at the right time.

MVP: Yep, exactly right. And so that’s why the adjuration, “Do not provoke this until it’s ready.”

JD: “Cursed are you, if you go too quickly.”

MVP: That’s exactly right.

JD: So we come to the very end of the book—just—she speaks of herself, she speaks of Solomon, and then she pretty much says, “If you girls want that, go for it. But I have something more pure, more lovely.” End the book for us, and then clarify how you would understand Solomon to have witnessed this, and how he got to the point of actually writing this book and saying, “This is the pattern, don’t follow me.”

MVP: Yeah. The book ends with this way: “My vineyard, my very own,” which is her body, “belongs to me; and you, Solomon, can keep your thousand that you paid for its keepers, and the two hundred for its fruit.” She rejects him, and then she invites us: “O you who dwell in the garden, with companions listening for your voice; let me hear it. Make haste, my beloved, and come away with me.” So she invites her beloved and the readers to reject the sinful life of the temptation that she’s been invited to participate in, and to come away and to cling fast to the Genesis 2 life of marriage, where the two become one flesh—an exclusive, permanent relationship until death do you part. The rock solid and white hot kind of thing. And that’s how the book ends in kind of this classic—you know, if you think about the climax of the Book of Proverbs: get a good wife, because the climax of creation is the creation of the woman in the marriage covenant. And so there is a reason that this is such an important focus in the wisdom literature, right? Proverbs 5, Proverbs 7, Proverbs 31, all the Song of Songs. Even the Book of Ruth can kind of function this way. She is the eshet hayil of Proverbs 31.

JD: And the wife of noble character.

MVP: Yeah, the wife of noble character, the wife of strength.

JD: Yeah.

MVP: And so all of this is playing into—the Creator of the universe created marriage. It’s a pre-fall institution. And he cherishes it because it’s a symbol of his relationship that he desires with us in the eschaton. And so, to the degree that he wants to present that to the world, he wants us to cherish this particular—and show it to the world. Like, a good marriage puts on display what Christ desires for each of us. It’s the way he desires us. It’s the way he longs to be with us. And so, that’s what this book encourages us to set forth. You know, I want my kids to know I love my wife. I want them to feel that I love her, that I cherish her, that I want her, that I long for her. And I want them to appreciate that. And I want the world to know the same thing. Even though my marriage is broken and has been wrecked and needs repentance and forgiveness all the time, in the midst of gospel grace, we move on. And that’s a beautiful picture of how Christ treats us in this world, laying down his own life. What does Paul say? “I desire to present you as a perfect or pure virgin in Christ,” and that’s what we’re going to become. It’s an amazing thought in the midst of all of our sins.

TK: So you shouldn’t have a thought reading this, “Well, I’ve already blown it.”

MVP: No.

TK: “Like I already destroyed my life and I’m with the harem.”

MVP: Yeah, this book is for everybody, because the hope of the single person is the hope of the married person, is the hope of the divorced person, is the hope of the widowed person—that the marriage of Genesis 2 is only a temporary shadow of the marriage of Revelation 21 and 22, when all things will be made new and every tear will be wiped away, right? It’s the same hope because—and marriage presents that, right? We all have longings, we all have desires, we all want to be known, we all want to be cherished and loved, right? That’s how God created us, and that’s what he’s destined us for. And marriage is a beautiful symbol of that for every person—for every person. Amen.

TK: Miles, what—kind of, as we wrap up here—I’m preaching this and I go down that road, but I’m making some connections to the gospel and Christ also. How have you found ways that have been helpful, and maybe not so helpful, when people talk about Christ and his church in this book?

MVP: Yeah, well, I think Paul—you know, in Ephesians 5, when he’s talking about marriage—he says, “This mystery is great,” he’s talking about Christ and the church. So you think Genesis 2 and Revelation 21 and 22 are connected at the Archimedean point of Ephesians 5, right? And so that’s my translation device. That gets me from my own marriage—or the marriage in general—to what I was created to be before the foundation of the world. And so that’s the helpful trajectory I take. You can overly interpret some of the sexual imagery or what’s going on in some of these songs. You know, just as the allegorical interpreters kind of overly interpret in one way, kind of what the so-called natural interpretation has been—by very popular preachers in the past—has been overly interpreted as calling for or demanding or requiring certain types of sexual relationships that are just not helpful. And so I don’t want to name names because it’s just not helpful, but a lot of people would perhaps be familiar with the very few sermon series that are out there and have done such. And so, like with anything—wisdom—you know, how do you live in God’s world according to God’s word, you know, in a world of common grace, but under the covenant of, you know, special grace? And that’s what wisdom literature helps us navigate. But the Creator of the universe has given us an operating manual, and I think he knows best how the world works. He made it. And so we are our own fools if we don’t take up his word and try to live by it. That’s why wisdom literature is so wonderful.

JD: I love this brother.

JD: Love this brother. Thank you so much for investing years of your life into this book so that we could better understand God’s word. You’ve served us well and we are grateful. May God nurture strong and white hot marriages for his glory that display the love of Christ to the Church to a world that so needs to see that true beautiful relationship.

MVP: And let me just say—and thank you for that so much—that I’m so thankful for the GearTalk podcast, just to let you know, in Biblical Theology, because I have so many students who benefit from it weekly and talk about it all the time. And I get so excited that you guys are having an influence on my students’ lives. I feel like we’re still connected in that way. And so I’m thankful for the ministry. And I just want you to keep doing it. Talk about the Bible. Love Jesus. Point to Christ. And I encourage others to follow in that trail.

JD: Amen.

TK: Amen. All right. This has been a joy. Thanks for doing it.

MVP: My pleasure.

JY: Thank you for joining us for GearTalk. For resources related to Biblical Theology, visit handstotheplow.org or jasonderouchie.com. Be sure to check out our show notes for links to resources on both sites related to Song of Songs.