Song of Solomon — who's who

The young woman whose voice opens the Song (let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth) and closes it (make haste, my beloved). She speaks more than anyone else, initiates the lovers' meetings, describes herself with attention and without apology — dark as the tents of Kedar, lovely as the curtains of Solomon — and gives the Song its most quoted lines. She has been called the Shulamite (6:13), identified allegorically with Israel, the Church, the soul. On the page she is a young woman who knows what she wants and is not embarrassed about wanting it.

The Beloved's counterpart. He praises her body part by part in three extended wasf passages, calls her his sister and his bride (the kinship terms of formal love poetry, not literal blood), comes into the garden she has prepared for him, leaves and returns. He speaks less than she does. He has been identified with Solomon on the surface narrative, and allegorically with God and with Christ in the mystical traditions of both Judaism and Christianity.

A group of young women who speak as a collective voice throughout the Song. The Beloved addresses them repeatedly, charges them with the threefold oath (do not stir up or awaken love — 2:7, 3:5, 8:4), tells them about her searches for the Lover. They serve as a Greek chorus — framing, witnessing, asking the questions the audience would ask — and represent the social world of the city against which the lovers' more private garden exchanges are set.

Named in the opening verse — the Song of Songs, which is Solomon's — and named again in several places throughout (the royal procession of 3:6-11, the vineyard at Baal-hamon in 8:11-12). Whether Solomon is a character, the author, or simply a literary figure invoked for his association with love and luxury and song is one of the standing questions of the book's interpretation. Modern critical reading takes him as a literary presence — the patron of love poetry in the Israelite tradition — rather than a speaker or historical author.

The men who patrol the walls of Jerusalem and who appear in both of the Song's dream sequences. In the first (3:1-5) the Beloved asks them whether they have seen her lover and finds him soon after. In the second (5:2-8) they find her again, beat her, take away her veil. The watchmen are the figures of the city's social order — the rules governing who can be where and when. They are not villains; they are doing their job. The book does not editorialise about them. It records that the Beloved encountered them, that the second encounter ended with her beaten, and that she nonetheless continued her search.

Two passages — 3:1-5 and 5:2-8 — describe the Beloved going out into the city at night to search for the Lover she cannot find. The framing in both is dreamlike: she is on her bed, she rises, she goes out, she searches, she meets the watchmen, she finds him or does not find him. The first sequence ends in finding. The second ends in failure and pain. The dream sequences are the Song's most psychologically interior passages and the most clearly structured. They preserve the experience of longing in absence as one of the book's most concentrated images of what love is.