Song 8:6-7

What to do with chapter eight of the Song? It’s lack of flow in our Bibles is not cleared up by going back to the original language. Jenson says it appears as either ‘a repository of an editors frustration,’ somewhere to place all the left over parts of poetry that fits or ‘that they are dialogue for a drama or liturgy.’ He goes with the former idea, but whichever it is, it does not unduly effect our reading of these two verses, regarded as the climax of the Song.

Poem and Man

The woman requests to be the ‘seal’ of her lover. In our day of writing and typing we’ve lost some of the significance of what this means. In the days when all handwriting looked more or less the same, a mans seal was the sure mark of his identity. No one could be sure he was who he said he was without his seal. This is no simile, the woman wants to be the seal of the man, she wants to be intrinsic to his identity. She wants them to be ‘one flesh.’ But how can this be a reasonable, or even realistic request, how can one person be indispensible to the very identity of another? 

The end of verse 6 and 7 give the womans reason. These are classic Hebrew prose that could be lifted straight from the Psalms or the Proverbs. Strong and fierce go together, as do death and grave. What about jealousy and love though? Is love jealous? You’d better believe that real love is jealous. I, the LORD your God am a jealous God. (Ex 20:5)

Death is absolute. It can not be negotiated with, and takes a man when it pleases. So too love, argues our woman. Her claim of love, her claim of ‘sealship’ is not up for discussion. The grave is fierce and will not give up those whom it claims, so too jealous love. All this merely explains the woman’s claim it doesn’t justify it. We know that love, no matter how strong, loses to death in the end. The woman’s claims only make sense if, in some way, love can defeat death. Only! Her claims are too audacious to be merely human, the scope of the poet is too broad to be captured by a man and a woman. Here the poet sees a love that will overcome death. Not a human love, a love deeper, wider, fiercer and more jealous than death. The poet talks about a love that can not be undone by either death, or natural disaster or finances.  We know from bitter experience that this can’t be a human love. This claim to love is too much to be human, as is the love that is the foundation for the whole song. Again, any human application hangs on the divine.

God and Man

Jenson suggests that a second look at the Hebrews yields the intended allegory for these verses. Death is not only the taker of life, but also the proper name for the Canaanite God that Baal, the fertility god battles with. Sheol is grave, but also the catch all name for the Judaic underworld. Flame is also the name of the Canaanite god of pestilence. Love is the flame of flames, which this god is not. The ‘many waters’ that do not defeat love are another reminder of the Jews’ relationship with the sea, a place of chaos and carnage. Simply, verse 6 and 7 take us back into the battle between the LORD and the false gods of Canaan.

The love these verses speak of can only be the victorious love of Israel’s God. The woman as Israel says here ‘we can not be separated by death or disaster because of your love, which is better than that of the false god’s.’ The fact that jealous love defeats death is central to the Old Testament. Jealous is a personal name of God (Ex 34:14). We may not like the idea of a jealous God, but the fact is that our salvation and sanctification relies on it. Here we celebrate God’s victory over the false god’s of the nations: death, disaster, chaos and material gain.

Our thoughts must naturally be drawn to the resurrection. Here a jealous God walks out of the grave for us all, here we become His seal. Jesus died for us, we rise with Him, in fact He can not complete the final resurrection without us! Bernard of Clairvaux says ‘He loved us before we existed, and went beyond that to love us when we resisted.’ Jesus will not share us with any other god, we are His seal and He will jealously defend us.

This is utterly wonderful isn’t it? The climax of the Song is the climax of the passion. Jealous love conquers the grave for His bride, who becomes an eternal part of who He is. See, yet again, the depth of Christ’s love for the Church, see again the depths of His commitment to His bride. Rejoice and bathe, Christian, in the love that God has for us, a love not to be overcome by disaster or even death. A lover who will not watch us go into the night. Compare this with Liberal love, a love that has God letting us go. No thank you, give me the jealous love that keeps me. Give me the jealous God of the Bible.

Woman and Man

What more can be said? We must compare the two types of human love, giving, and desire. The two types of love that found the Song, and indeed the Bible. Love is giving, but whatever we give to our lover, we are the greatest gift, as God is the Gospel. Love is rioted in desire, but the only way we do not consume our lover is to plug into the story of the Gospel.

If it were not for Christ’s death on the cross, we might be well advised to steer clear of love. Love will causes us to give ourselves away and cause us to consume another, antithetical to a post modern way of thinking. We remember Christ’s love. At the cross we see Christ’s gift and desire leading us into the grave and out again. On the first Easter we see jealous love, giving love and desiring love working in perfect harmony. The passion means we can risk giving ourselves to our lover and taking them wholly for ourselves. Here we meet death, but only death as the portal to new life. Where ever love occurs, it only occurs because our Trinitarian God and His love for sinners makes it possible. With that knowledge we can sing the Song and joyfully give ourselves to another, making another a part of who we are, safe in the knowledge that all we are doing is following in the footsteps of the One who has rescued us to life, through exactly this kind of death.

There is much richness here isn’t there? Good, deep, physical, Gospel love flows though these verses. This beautiful picture of human love is only possible because of God’s love for sinners. The human application is only possible because of the Christocentric one. In that we rejoice and love. Human love will sometimes scare us, often times swallow us whole, but that’s ok. It’s just an echo of the God who was swallowed whole by love, only to begin the wedding preparations three days later.