Song of Solomon 7:9

The Text

He has been climbing his way up her body in images: feet, thighs, waist, neck, hair, and now the mouth. Her palate, he says, tastes like the finest wine, wine that slides down easily. And then, mid-sentence, the voice shifts. The wine goes down smoothly "for my beloved," which is her word for him, not his word for her. She has taken the sentence out of his mouth and finished it herself. The last clause hangs open, strange and unresolved: "gliding through the lips of those who are asleep." Nobody is quite sure whether that means drowsy lovers, or sleepers being stirred awake, or something else entirely. The verse ends before it explains itself.

The Core

What strikes me here is that the praised one refuses to remain a portrait. Seven verses of admiration, all of it flowing one direction, and then she interrupts, and the very next line is "I am my beloved's. His desire is toward me." Love in this book is never a man describing and a woman receiving; it is two voices that keep colliding and finishing each other. That matters theologically more than it may seem. Scripture's picture of God's love is not a monologue of praise poured over a passive object. Covenant means two who speak. The Lord who says "you are mine" waits to hear "and I am yours," and the whole strange dignity of being loved by God is that our answer counts as part of the sentence.

The Common Thread

Wine runs like a thread through Scripture's picture of God's dealings with his people: the cup of judgment, the cup of blessing, the vineyard that is Israel, the feast at the end of all things. Here it is the taste of a mouth. That is not a detour from the story of redemption; it is a hint about its direction. The Bible does not end in the dissolving of bodies into spirit but in a wedding. When Jesus, at a village wedding in Cana, keeps the best wine for last, he is doing in a stone jar what this verse does in a line of poetry: insisting that God's future tastes better than its beginning. And the closing vision of Scripture gives the last word not to a monologue from the throne but to the Spirit and the bride, speaking together.

The Mirror

Sleep is the quiet enemy in this verse. Not adultery, not conflict, just the drowsiness that settles over people who have shared a bathroom for fifteen years, or a pew, or a prayer list. You still know the shape of the other person, but you have stopped tasting anything. The lover here does not describe his beloved from memory; he is looking, in detail, at feet and hair and breath, and what he says wakes her up enough to answer him. Attention is the labor of love, and it is nearly always a decision before it is a feeling. So: before this day ends, look at the person you have stopped noticing and say out loud one specific thing you find lovely about them, not their usefulness, something particular you can only know because you looked.

The Question

What does "gliding through the lips of those who are asleep" actually mean? The Hebrew is genuinely murky, and interpreters have made it mean drowsy lovers, sleeping mouths that murmur, even the dead who somehow speak. The verse will not settle. And that is uncomfortable, because we come to Scripture wanting the sentence to close. Yet here is a book about desire, and desire is precisely what refuses to be pinned down and archived. Perhaps the obscurity is doing work: love talk is not administrative prose, and a poem that could be fully decoded would no longer be about longing. I do not know what the sleepers are. I notice that the verse leaves my mouth open, which may be the point.

Context

The Song moves in two worlds at once: a royal court with ivory towers, purple, imported wine, and a farming landscape of vineyards, wheat, pomegranates, mandrakes. The place names in the surrounding verses (Heshbon, Lebanon, Damascus, Carmel) sketch the map of a small kingdom looking outward with confidence. In that society a woman's voice in public was tightly bounded; her body was family property, negotiated between men. This book hands her more lines than him. She names her own desire, walks the streets at night looking for him, and in the very next verse claims possession of him before she reports his desire for her. That was socially startling, and the canon kept it anyway.

The Intertext

Twice earlier this same book warns, in the woman's voice, against stirring up love before it is ready, a caution about awakening what cannot then be controlled. Set that against the sleepers in this verse and you feel the tension the Song holds: love is powerful enough to require timing, and good enough to be worth waking for. The other echo is Cana again, deliberately. Jesus does not begin his ministry by feeding the hungry or healing a leper but by keeping a party going, providing wine nobody strictly needed. Grace has a taste, not only a function. The best wine, in both texts, arrives later than expected and better than deserved.

Reflection

Where in your life have you settled for knowing someone's shape instead of tasting anything: a marriage, a friendship, your praying?

What would change if you believed God waits for your answer, that "I am my beloved's" is a line he actually wants to hear rather than a formality?

Go deeper in Song of Solomon

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