Sacred declaration of love: What is glorified in the "Song of Songs"

"Song of Songs" is an Old Testament book about love. Photo: UOJ

There are books we read and think: should this really be in the Bible? The Song of Songs is one of those. We open the first page and immediately come across lines that make even adults blush: "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine."

It gets even hotter. "Your breasts are like two fawns of a young gazelle." "Your belly is a heap of wheat." The beloved's body is described with such frankness that, in ancient times, young men under thirty were forbidden from reading this book. It was believed that an immature mind would see pornography in it. But what does a mature mind see?

The book they wanted to remove

In the first century AD, rabbis gathered in councils and seriously discussed whether to remove this book from the Scripture. After all, God's name isn't mentioned even once in it. This is the only such case in the Bible, apart from the Book of Esther. But there’s no shortage of eroticism. However, Rabbi Akiva stood up and said words that settled the debate forever: "The whole world is not worth the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all Scriptures are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies."

The Holy of Holies. The innermost, most sacred part of the temple, where the high priest would enter once a year, trembling. And this book about kisses and naked bodies turns out to be the holiest text of all.

Origen, a Christian theologian of the third century, wrote ten volumes of commentary on the "Song of Songs." Twenty thousand lines. Blessed Jerome testified that Origen surpassed himself in these commentaries – so elevated and profound they were. Origen warned: only those who are no longer troubled by sexual desires can safely read this book.

This sounds almost funny for our time, when erotica is available with one click. Why censor ancient poetry? But it is precisely this censorship that points to the fact that the book is dangerous. It can ignite the flesh.

When a kiss cecomes Communion

On the surface, this text contains love lyrics, the most passionate in world literature. A beloved and his beloved who cannot live without each other, seeking meetings, describing each other's beauty with a directness that seems shocking to us, people of the 21st century with our "personal boundaries."

And beneath the surface is theology.

Christian exegetes read every line as allegory: the bridegroom is Christ, the bride is the human soul or the Church.

Then all these descriptions of the body transform into descriptions of spiritual gifts. "Your belly is a heap of wheat" – this is the Eucharist, the bread of life. "Your breasts are like twin fawns of a gazelle" – these are the two Covenants, Old and New, with which the Church feeds her children.

One might smile at such interpretations. They seem forced, an attempt to cover embarrassment with spiritual meaning. But here's the strange thing: it was precisely these interpretations that kept monks at the text for centuries. Bernard of Clairvaux delivered eighty-six sermons on just the first two chapters of the "Song of Songs", He died without finishing. For him, this was a text about the mystical marriage of the soul with God.

Why did the most ascetic people, who renounced marriage and family, read erotic poetry as prayer?

Love stronger than death

We come to the key verse: "Set me as a seal upon your heart... for love is as strong as death, jealousy is as fierce as the grave; its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of the Lord" (8:6).

Love is strong as death. Death is the only force that cannot be persuaded or deceived. It comes and takes. Love in the "Song of Songs" is the same. It doesn't ask permission, it invades and conquers.

We're used to thinking of Christian love as agape – sacrificial, calm, and reasonable. But the "Song of Songs" speaks of eros. Of desire. Of hunger for the other. And this eros turns out to be the language in which one can speak about God.

God in the good sense of the word thirsts for us – this is what this book says.

Not as a benefactor distributing alms, not as a teacher explaining lessons. But as a lover who stands at the door and knocks.

The guards who beat the bride

There's a strange scene in the book: the bride searches for her beloved at night through the city. The city guards meet her, beat her, and tear off her veil. Such public humiliation looks to a literary critic like just a dramatic episode. But if you read the book spiritually, this is the soul's path through the dark night when God seems absent. When even those who should protect cause pain.

Love in the "Song of Songs" is the risk of being beaten. It's the readiness to seek when you're rejected.

We, living in wartime, know this state. We seek God in the darkness of destroyed cities. We ask: where are You? Why are You silent? And the "Song of Songs" gives no comforting answers. It shows only one thing: even when the guards beat the bride, she continues to seek the bridegroom.

Pink hearts and fiery arrows

February 14. Shop windows with pink hearts, plush bears, cards in the style of "You're my only one." Modern love looks like comfort, partnership, and mutual respect for boundaries. And against this background, the "Song of Songs" looks barbaric. There the bride says: "I am sick with love" (2:5). Literally – ill with love.

There no one negotiates boundaries. There love is fusion, wounding, and loss of self.

We choose safe love. The kind that can be controlled, turned on and off at will.

And monks, reading the "Song of Songs," made a different choice. They understood: monasticism is not a rejection of love, but the choice of the Only Beloved – God.

Bernard of Clairvaux, speaking about the kisses from the first chapter, said that this is an image of Communion, when Christ kisses the believer's soul through the Eucharist.

This Old Testament book teaches us the language in which we can speak about what cannot otherwise be expressed. About God's desire. About passion for God. About the fact that a soul that has met Christ can no longer live an ordinary life.

Perhaps, this is precisely why the rabbis wanted to throw it out of the canon. It's too dangerous. Because it shows God not as a judge with scales, not as a lawgiver with tablets, but as a lover who stands under the window and calls: "Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come away!" (2:10). And waits for an answer.

Read also