Song of Solomon 5:11

The Text

She is standing in the street with her cloak gone and bruises rising on her arms, and the women around her ask, half taunting, what makes this man of hers worth all the fuss. So she answers them. She starts at the top, the way you would look up at someone you love who is taller than you: his head is like the purest gold, refined, weighty, unalloyed. And his hair, thick and dark, black as a raven, catching whatever light there is. Two images, that is all, and yet in them she has begun to build him out of words because he is not there to be pointed at.

The Core

Notice what she does with absence. She has searched, called, been struck by the watchmen, and found nothing; what she has left is speech. So she praises. The gold is not merely decorative: gold is what the temple was overlaid with, the metal that does not rust, tarnish or corrode, the substance of things that endure. She is saying he is incorruptible. The raven-black hair says the opposite thing in the same breath: not enduring but vital, young, alive, hair still dark and thick with the season of strength on him. Permanence and vigor together. This is what love does under the pressure of loss. It refuses to let go of the worth of the one it cannot hold, and it names that worth out loud, to strangers, in the street.

The Common Thread

Be careful here, because this song has been allegorized to death, and the woman in the street deserves better than to be turned into a code. But there is a genuine pattern, and it runs the other direction from the one we usually take. Israel's prophets kept reaching for marriage language to describe the covenant, not because romance is a handy illustration but because covenant really is that kind of bond: exclusive, embodied, wounded by betrayal, sustained by desire. So when this woman answers the mocking question with a catalogue of her absent beloved's beauty, she is doing something the church has always had to do. Christ is not visibly here. He is described, praised, insisted upon in words to people who ask what makes him better than any other. Faith has always been partly this: naming the worth of the one you cannot presently see.

The Mirror

There is a particular loneliness in loving someone the people around you do not rate. Your colleagues cannot see why you stay in the marriage. Your brother thinks your faith is a phase you should have outgrown by forty. Your friends look at the person you are caring for, the parent who no longer knows your name, and ask, gently, whether it is worth what it is costing you. The question in verse nine is not innocent, and neither are those. Notice that she does not defend herself. She does not explain her bruises or justify the search. She describes him, slowly, from the head down, and lets the description be the argument. That is a discipline worth learning, because we mostly answer such questions by getting defensive rather than by getting specific. Today, write down three concrete things about the one you love, God, your spouse, your struggling child, and make them particular, not general. Not "he is good," but the gold and the raven's hair.

Context

The scene sits in a walled city at night, in a world where a woman alone in the streets after dark was already suspect. The watchmen who should have protected her have beaten her and stripped her cloak; the city's guardians have become the danger. Around her stand the daughters of Jerusalem, a kind of chorus who have watched this whole affair with the interest neighbours always take in someone else's love life. Their question in verse nine carries a sting: what is so special about yours? Into that street, half-dressed and humiliated, she begins a wasf, the traditional Near Eastern love poem that praises the body part by part. Such poems were usually sung about the bride. Here it is the woman who sings, publicly, about a man, and that reversal is the point.

The Profile

An Israelite hearing this would know the vocabulary immediately. Gold overlaid the holy things; the cherubim, the lampstand, the walls of the sanctuary. To say a man's head is like the purest gold is to place him just short of blasphemy, in the register of things set apart. And they would hear the freedom of it. In a culture where a woman's desire was managed by fathers and brothers, where her body was described and appraised by others, this woman appraises. She looks. She names what she sees and finds it magnificent. The original hearers would have felt both the daring of that and its rightness, because the song has been insisting from the beginning that desire between two people who belong to each other is not a problem to be regulated but a good to be sung.

The Main Character

She is the central figure, not he. He is absent; she is entirely present, bruised, half-clothed, and still speaking. What her behaviour reveals is a kind of love that has survived contact with reality. She hesitated at the door in verse three and lost him. She has paid for that hesitation with humiliation. And she does not spend a syllable on self-pity or self-justification. Her spiritual landscape is grief turned outward into praise, which is one of the rarest movements a human heart makes. Most of us, wounded, talk about ourselves. She talks about him. There is something almost priestly in it, standing in a hostile street with nothing left, holding up the worth of the one who is not there.

Reflection

When someone asks you why your faith is worth the cost, do you defend yourself or describe him? What would change if you answered the second way?

She praises the beloved she has just lost through her own hesitation. Where has hesitation cost you something, and can you still speak well of what you hesitated over?

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