Reversing the Song and Reading it Write
Why is there no wedding? And why the soft porn—with an
anti-climax, a forlorn finale?
No, this is not a secret code about Christ and the Church.
Heard with post-exilic ears, the Song is a woman’s awakening in Solomon’s house
of Californication—tracing her arc from cursed longing to self-possession and
peace.
The end interprets the beginning. Desire is sifted, not
indulged. Empire is unmasked. Peace is found—not in Solomon—but in becoming a
wall.
At first, there is love, but at last, there is learning: the Song overturns
lust posing as love and leads desire toward reversal.
Read from the finish, not the start—where all stories begin to be understood.
Watch the metaphors. Let Eden and Exile echo. Listen for the voice that refuses
to be bought.
Thesis in One Breath
My hypothesis (to be tested, not swallowed) is that the Song
of Songs is a wisdom-protest voiced by a woman in Solomon’s harem, charting her
movement from Genesis 3:16 longing (“your desire will be for your man, and he
will rule over you”) to self-possession and peace. The poem exposes the
confusion of eros and empire—lust dressed as love—and ends with emancipation,
not union.
The arc in three lines:
1:6 “My vineyard I have not kept” → 8:12 “My vineyard—my own—is before me.”
2:4 “His banner over me is love” → 8:10 “I am a wall, my breasts are towers.”
2:17 “Turn, my beloved…” → 8:14 “Flee, my beloved…”
Or in one word: reversal.
Why the Song, why Now
The Song of Songs has long been read as either a private
romance or a sacred allegory of divine love. Both readings hide an allure. Yet the
way to listen to poetry is to press through the text so that the poet can be
heard on her own terms: a wisdom poem in late biblical Hebrew, set after the
exile, speaking in Solomon’s name while quietly unseating Solomon’s legacy. The
central voice belongs to a woman inside an erotic economy. She begins with
cursed longing and ends with wisdom and peace. The arc is not toward possession
but liberation. The journey arrives at a destination of awakening, just as the
reader needs to break the spell of enchantment that this Song protests.
Where is the Fidelity?
The first thing that should worry all traditional/conventional
readings of the Song is the absence of “marriage,” and the pure lack of
“fidelity,” or even a covenant ceremony narrative. That absence is not an
oversight; it is an angle. In a royal house with “sixty queens and eighty
concubines, and virgins without number” (6:8), exclusivity cannot be
presupposed. Instead of prescribing covenantal form, the poet dramatises desire
inside an acquisitive economy. The question is not “How to kindle passion
within marriage?” but “What becomes of desire under empire?” Fidelity is not
taught by theorem; it is revealed by contrast, by irony, by the woman’s
emergence from possession to peace.
The poem exposes that acquisitive world by contrast:
fidelity is not preached; it is discerned through irony and reversal. Holiness
emerges as freedom from being owned. Thus the Song dignifies the celibate, the
widowed, the single, the enslaved—any who seek peace beyond possession.
Begin Again
The second thing that should shock any reader into
re-reading is the ending: the plug hole is pulled, and the woman gets out, watching
it all drain away in relief. Begin again, at the end, and read backwards – stories
disclose themselves at the landing, not the launch. This poem is no different: The
landing clarifies the launch. The Song’s last notes (8:10–14) throw
retrospective light over every earlier stanza. There she stands, fortified: “I
am a wall, and my breasts are towers… I have become in his eyes as one who
finds peace.” Her vineyard is hers again. She pays Solomon, the stag, his
“thousand” with a cool dismissal. Then: “Flee, my beloved… to the mountains of
spices.” The conclusion is anticlimactic by design—a subversive reversal of
1:2–4 and the early intoxication of 2:4, 2:17. The end breaks the spell—an ending
of reclaimed agency and peace. Read forwards only after you have read it backwards.
Narratives are clarified by their endings. The Song closes
with subversive irony: the woman who once said, “draw me after you” now says
“flee.” The economy named “Solomon” is politely dismissed.
Early language that sounds romantic—banner, garden, mutual possession—reverses
meaning when heard through the finale’s filter. Desire is dignified; domination
denied. The “Solomon” who owns vineyards loses the one vineyard that cannot be
bought.
Read with Empathy
Put yourself in the ears of the first hearers.
Look through their eyes towards their horizon. Remember, “the
Bible is not written to you, but for you” (to borrow from John Walton); this poem
was intended for an original audience who, on receipt, would have heard the
Solomon brand against the memory of empire glory and later apostasy on perfumed
heights. They would have cringed at the irony that would have made them wince and
grimace.
Remember that this is a Judean audience, post-exilic,
literate in Torah and Kings, hearing the poem when Solomon’s splendour and
collapse (1 Kings 3–11) had become a moral memory. They are familiar with his
temple dedication (1 Kings 8) and his later high-place apostasy (1 Kings 11).
They know that royal love in Israel’s history can be a theatre for idolatry.
The Song’s metaphors—vineyard, banner, towers, silver, chariots, mountains of
spices (cf. 1 Kings 11)—were not decorative to them; they were loaded. The poem
trains their ears to hear desire in a world of power.
Put yourself in the shoes of a post-exilic Judean audience. For
them, royal “love” recalls idolatrous theatre, not covenant fidelity. To them,
the Song’s beauty would glitter with irony; its perfume, bittersweet memory. The
poet speaks into that memory with a woman’s wisdom—unmasking empire through
tenderness, power through poetry.
Listen before Deciding
Reading the Song is itself a test of literacy—comprehension
before conclusion.
The reader must both listen as ancient and discern as modern.
Five Moves
Make these moves your method:
- Let
the end interpret the middle; narrative arc above isolated lines.
- Hear
Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) metaphors in situ; resist modern romance
idioms.
- Keep
irony available—especially within a harem economy.
- Cross-echo
with Genesis, Proverbs, and Kings (authorial horizon first; Christological
horizon second).
- Ask
falsification questions: What in the text resists my assumptions, not
merely confirms them?
Four Commitments
Make these commitments your covenant:
- Historical-grammatical
humility: hear the Hebrew as late Persian-period idiom; treat its images
as ANE code, not modern sentiment.
- Literary
integrity: let structure and end-matter govern meaning; trace refrains,
reversals, and ironic echoes.
- Canonical
resonance without coercion: allow Genesis, Kings, Proverbs, and Prophets
to sound where the text suggests, not where theology demands.
- Pastoral
honesty: bring the poem to bear on marriage, singleness, abuse,
pornography, and pop culture—without euphemism.
Hear with your Head before feeling with your Heart:
Most linguistic evidence places the Song in the
Persian–early Hellenistic window. “Solomon” is a literary figure—a brand of
splendour and excess, not an authorship claim.
The woman speaks most lines. The male voice is powerful, ornamental, imperial
in tone.
A chorus comments, mediating the court’s gaze.
The stage is court, city, and garden—centres of wealth, attention, and control.
Read through the Genre of Poetry
The genre is not the authority, but it is the medium of revelation.
This is a poem—and so read as one would receive a poet. Poetry instructs by
paradox. The Song is loaded with metaphors, like all poetry, but these are audience-specific
metaphors for the ANE. The Song’s metaphors are not sentimental decoration;
they are moral diagnostics. To read the poem as romantic literalism is to
reenact Solomon’s mistake—confusing splendour for shalom.
The weight is inside the freight; the ancient metaphors are
carrying the meaning—
The “vineyard” (1:6; 8:11–12) is metaphoric. Early on she
says: “My vineyard I have not kept.” In ending she says: “My vineyard—my own—is
before me.” This is an arc from dispossession to agency. The vineyard is a
metaphor of sexual and economic possession.
So too, garden (4–5) is a metaphor. It connotes an ANE ear,
fertility, pleasure, cultivation, and also a space that can be locked, owned,
entered, and exploited. In the context of the Torah, the Psalms, and the
Prophets, the original reader would be subconsciously prompted to critique: Is
it Eden restored or an empire landscaped?
Most, if not all, images in the Song, as with most poetry,
are metaphors: Banner (2:4) literally means a military standard; it is a public
emblem of conquest. “His banner over me is love” in a harem reads as
acquisition branded “love.” Towers/walls (4:4; 8:10) are defence fortifications
against a siege: she may be erotic in his gaze; defensive in hers—desire can
fortify. Shalom / Shelomoh (8:10; Solomon’s name) is a pun and programmatic:
where is peace actually found—through Solomon, or apart from him? Mountains of
spices (2:17 → 8:14), for modern ears, means perfume, but for ANE hearers, signifies
high-place worship (1 Kings 11). The final “Flee… to the mountains of spices”
is a dismissal of him to idolatrous pursuit.
Each image operates within a world of power, economy, and theology. Their reversals form the grammar of the protest. Here are they key ANE metaphors:
· Vineyard — sexual and economic possession; body, agency, dowry, tenancy. Arc: from neglect to ownership.
· Garden / park (pardes) — fertility, luxury, king’s enclosure; Eden evoked, empire installed.
· Banner / hosts — military standard and spectacle; conquest masquerading as care.
· Towers / walls — defence, agency, visibility under siege; later reappropriated by the woman as fortification, not ornament.
· Shalom / Shelomoh — wordplay; peace apart from Solomon’s “peace.”
· Lebanon / myrrh / frankincense — temple trade and sacred scent folded into eros; religious glamour in the bedroom.
· Mountains of spices — perfumed fertility; for exilic ears, hints of perfumed high places; in finale, dismissed as false transcendence.
Snapshots within the Arc—Reversing the Song
Chapter 4 — The System on Display
Taken alone, chapter 4 feels romantic; within the arc, it is
a theatre of possession soon to be refused.
Eyes like doves, hair like goats, teeth twin flocks, neck
towered with shields—this beauty catalogued as inventory. The male gaze catalogue(s)
and decorates. The imagery blends rural fertility and militarised ornament:
temple perfumes enter the bedroom; sacred scent is eroticised. “Garden locked,
spring sealed” has double force—this is enclosure, asset control in a harem
economy. (In a ‘wedding-night’ lens, this reads as chastity—but in a harem
economy, it reads as enclosure and asset control.) At its climax, “living
waters” flow from Lebanon, where temple imagery bleeds into the empire’s luxury
trade. Taken in the arc, chapter 4 is eros aestheticised and sacralised within
a system she will later refuse.
Chapter 5 — Charm, Absence, and Harm
“I slept, but my heart was awake; I opened, but my beloved
had withdrawn.” Then, the watchmen strike, wound, and strip her. She is “sick
with love” and recites a catalogue of his splendour—gold, ivory, marble, cedar.
Desire survives harm; devotion idealises the abuser. This is not romance but
reportage—the psychology of enthralment under domination. The Song dares to
show trauma without sermon.
In modern language, the pattern resembles Stockholm
syndrome—abandonment and assault, yet praise for the one who harms. The poem
names how porn/casual-sex/celebrity culture binds desire to domination: arousal
without covenant; spectacle without personhood.
The Song names the mechanism: they bind desire to domination
using flattery as control.
Chapter 6 — Scaling the System
“Where has your beloved gone?” “He has gone to his garden…
to gather lilies.” Then, the refrain “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine”
sits beside “delighting himself among the lilies!” exposing non-exclusivity
wrapped in mutuality rhetoric. The praise maps beauty as city and army:
“awesome as bannered hosts,” lovely as Jerusalem—this is power optics. The mutuality
language (“I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine”) is recited beside
polygamous arithmetic—sixty queens, eighty concubines, virgins without number. Harem maths mocks exclusivity. When the crowd
cries, “Return, return, O Shulammite, that we may gaze upon you,” voyeurism
becomes liturgy. Desire is monetised spectacle—a demand for performance. Chapter
6 scales the abuse of Chapter 5.
Chapter 8 – The Endgame and Protest Sealed
The last movement (8:6–14) sets love as strong as death and
unbuyable by silver. Peace is reclaimed without Shelomoh. The vineyard is hers.
Solomon may keep his thousand—and the keepers their two hundred. The beloved is
sent away to scented heights. The circle closes with deliberate anticlimax; the
spell breaks, not by argument but by agency.
“Set me as a seal upon your heart… for love is strong as
death… its flashes are flashes of fire… Many waters cannot quench love; if a
man offered for love all the wealth of his house, he would be utterly
despised.” These lines are not a wedding slogan floated above a honeymoon
suite. Placed where they are—just before the woman’s reclamation—they function
as judgment on commodified eros. Love is unbuyable. Silver fails. Spectacle
fades. The poem drives a wedge between love’s strength and empire’s spend. In a
world of banners, brands, and bodies-as-market, the fire exposes the lie:
possession is not love; purchase is not covenant.
The final lines (8:10–14) land the reading:
“I am a wall, and my breasts are towers; then I was in his
eyes as one who finds peace (shalom).
Solomon had a vineyard at Baal-hamon; he let out the vineyard to keepers; each
was to bring for its fruit a thousand pieces of silver.
My vineyard—my own—is before me; you, O Solomon, may have the thousand, and the
keepers of the fruit two hundred.
Make haste, my beloved… be like a gazelle on the mountains of spices.”
Here, the puns and politics converge: Shelomoh (Solomon) versus shalom (peace).
Her peace is not in Solomon’s economy; it stands over against it. The
vineyard—earlier unkept (1:6)—is now guarded and owned (8:12). She recognises
the price and refuses the purchase. The final imperative— “Flee…”—is a countercharm
to the poem’s opening intoxication. The spell is broken by agency, not by his
reform.
Love is unbuyable; silver is useless. Her vineyard is hers. The
Pimp can keep his wealth, and his economy their money; the ‘beloved’ is sent to
scent-mountains—the last irony—an ending that overlays 1 Kings’ high places on
the final image: he is the one in slavery; a pawn hooked on his idolatry. His ‘redemption’
is reversed—he flees, as a lusty stag—and she walks free.
Falsification Checkpoints
This reading stands or falls on the text.
– If the poem culminated in consummation and mutual covenant, the thesis fails.
It does not.
– If “banner,” “towers,” “vineyard,” “thousand,” “mountains of spices” were
neutral romance tropes, the critique weakens. For Israel’s memory, they are
not.
– If 6:8 (harem arithmetic) were absent, exclusivity could stand. It is not
absent.
– If her agency did not rise at the end, emancipation would be projection. It
rises.
These are the honest brakes on overreach and the guardrails against eisegesis.
Theology of Desire — Ontology before Ethics
Before vocation, “you are dust”. Before marriage, person.
Genesis 2: humanity is Spirit-breathed earth; Genesis 3: humanity is desire
tangled in rule. The Song stages that tangle in Solomon’s world. Wisdom does
not erase eros; it orders it. Desire becomes vocation—love rightly aligned
under God. Her closing shalom is not desire extinguished, but desire freed from
domination—walls where walls are needed; generosity where generosity is holy.
Objectification and Idolatry
The garden can be Eden or enclosure. The tree of life can be
life—or anatomy. When sacred language perfumes possession, we meet idolatry
with incense: religion drafting eros into empire. Proverbs knows this lure;
Kings narrates its politics. The Song lets us feel splendour, then judges it by
the end. If beauty is worshipped, persons become altars. This poem protests
against that.
Chapter 5 refuses sentimentalism: charm, withdrawal,
assault, and then idealising praise. Longing that outlives harm is not
holiness; it is captivity. The text does not tidy trauma with piety. It gives
the church a grammar for naming coercion without shame and without silence.
Pastors and parents can point to the pattern: charm → absence → harm → pursuit
→ performance. Wisdom begins where glamour is unmasked.
Every age must discern whether its loves are covenant or
commerce. The Song holds up a mirror. Its beauty seduces; its irony convicts;
its ending redeems. In a culture that confuses wanting with loving, the Song
remains God’s wisdom sung in a woman’s voice—the protest that became prayer,
the prayer that became Scripture, Scripture that teaches that peace outlives
possession.
How Singles, Celibates, and Eunuchs can Read this Song
Fulfilment is not intercourse or marriage. The arc ends, not
in union, but in peace through agency and discernment. Chastity is
freedom—self-possession, not repression. Isaiah 56 dignifies eunuchs and
foreigners; 1 Corinthians 7 dignifies undivided devotion. The Song—read this
way—vindicates lives that are not organised around acquisition or coupling,
while also purifying marriage from possession.
Wisdom, not Cynicism
This reading does not denigrate desire. It purifies it. Desire is not
erased; it is reversed. The woman’s final stance—wall, towers, vineyard—does
not curse eros; it refuses commerce. Wisdom re-enthrones covenant, agency, and
peace.
What Romance Culture gets Wrong
Modern romanticism baptised intensity, crowned autonomy, blurred covenant,
and monetised the body. The Song’s protest speaks to image-obsession, hookup
scripts, and the pornography industry’s catechism. The poem does not scold; it
shows—possession dressed as poetry. Spectacle called love. And then a voice
that learns to say no.
Naming the Catechisms Shaping Our Kids
Our children are catechised daily by banners masquerading as
love—algorithms that sell conquest wrapped as care. We need to teach these
metaphors, not just morals.
– Banner = conquest vs covenant.
– Towers/wall = dignity and defence, not coldness.
– Vineyard = agency; a body is not for rent.
– Shalom ≠ Shelomoh; peace cannot be bought.
Resist porn’s liturgy with truthful art, worship, friendship, and communities
that protect vineyards. Honour singles publicly. Require marriages to be
covenantal mutualities, not pious acquisition.
A Brief Canonical Bridge
Proverbs crowns wisdom; Ecclesiastes sifts disillusion; the Song rescues
desire. Kings records Solomon’s shine and rot; the Song, under his name, closes
the ledger with a woman’s audit. Prophecy later finds Christ fulfilling the
role of Adam, the Bridegroom. Before that, wisdom poetry finds a voice that
will not be bought.
Breaking the Spell
The Song of Songs honours desire by refusing domination. It
honours beauty by refusing commerce. It honours God by refusing sacralised
possession. It honours women by giving the last word to one who learned to keep
her vineyard. The Song of Songs is not less holy for being this honest; it is
holy because it is this honest. Love is strong as death, and cannot be
purchased. Peace stands, wall and tower, in the place where Solomon cannot
rule.
The earliest communities kept the Song in part by allegory.
Let the literal protest do its work first; otherwise, Christ becomes wallpaper
to cover empire’s stains. On a second reading, Christ is not Solomon the
collector but Anti-Solomon—the bridegroom who empties power, pays no thousand,
takes no vineyard, and makes His people a wall with peace. He is the vineyard,
the garden, the tower, the shalom.
The Song’s protest is not only theological; it is local. In
cultures that turn the body into market and intimacy into currency, the Church
becomes a community of reclaimed vineyards. Here, in small towns and coastal
parishes, we can model peace that resists spectacle. Youth groups, schools, and
households can teach resistance through beauty—truthful art, friendship, and
prayer that honour embodiment without exploitation.
Nations that trade in desire need prophets, not puritans.
The Song trains prophets of peace—people who can see through glamour to the
grief it conceals. Missionaries and chaplains can read it as pastoral medicine
for disordered loves: Christ heals not by denial but by right desire.
Holiness is not the denial of the senses but their
re-ordering. The heart of asceticism is reverence, not repression. The Song
instructs the Church to love bodies truthfully—without turning them into idols
or instruments.
Ontology of Love and Being
The Song is not about sex; it is about being. Genesis begins
with dust and breath. Before command or covenant, there is ontology: existence
gifted, animated, called “very good.” Desire is the ache of incomplete being
seeking communion. Under empire, that ache degenerates into appetite. Under
wisdom, it becomes vocation—the invitation to love without domination.
The woman’s journey from “My vineyard I have not kept” to
“My vineyard is mine” is the journey of integration: soul and body reconciled.
Love is not technique but ontology made whole—spirit
enfleshed in peace.
The Song of the Age to Come
When the Church prays the Song rightly, it does not silence
the woman; it learns to hear God through her defiance. Every time “My vineyard
is mine” is read aloud, empire is contradicted. The poem anticipates the
resurrection body not by describing sex, but by dignifying embodiment. Desire
will be freed from domination, beauty from vanity, pleasure from purchase.
The walls and towers of the woman become symbols of the new
Jerusalem—fortified, not against love, but against corruption.
Love that is strong as death is not romantic exaggeration;
it is Calvary. Christ is the Anti-Solomon—the king who levies no tribute, keeps
no harem, takes no vineyard. He becomes the vineyard, the garden, the tower,
the peace.
The woman’s last word, “Flee, my beloved,” becomes the
disciple’s paradox: release every false lover so the true Beloved may enter.
The Song of Songs, which was Solomon’s, becomes the song
that is not Solomon’s— the protest of love against empire, the wisdom of
chastity against commerce, the promise that even amid banners and silver, peace
can still be found—quiet, guarded, whole.
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