Song of Solomon 3
The Beloved searches the streets of Jerusalem by night and finds her lover; then a wedding procession comes up from the wilderness in a cloud of myrrh.
Summary
Chapter 3 opens on the first of the Song's two dream sequences. By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him but I found him not. The Beloved rises, goes into the city, searches the streets and the broad ways. The watchmen who go about the city find her; she asks them whether they have seen her lover. She finds him almost immediately after passing them, holds him and will not let him go, brings him to her mother's house, the chamber of her that conceived her. The refrain follows: I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up nor awaken my love until he please. The dreamlike quality of the sequence — the bed, the night, the sudden going out, the finding — has led most commentators to read it as the Beloved's interior experience rather than a literal event, though the Hebrew gives no explicit marker of dream versus waking.
The second half of chapter 3 shifts to a public, quasi-ceremonial scene. The daughters of Jerusalem are asked: who is this that cometh out of the wilderness like pillars of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, with all powders of the merchant? The answer is Solomon's litter — the word palanquin or carriage — which he has made of the wood of Lebanon, with pillars of silver, a bottom of gold, a covering of purple, the midst thereof paved with love by the daughters of Jerusalem. Sixty valiant men escort it, each holding a sword, expert in war, because of the terror of the night. The daughters are summoned: go forth, O ye daughters of Zion, and behold king Solomon with the crown wherewith his mother crowned him in the day of his espousals, in the day of the gladness of his heart. The procession's function in the book is disputed — it may be the Lover's arrival figured in royal terms, or a separate poem about a royal wedding, or the book's way of gesturing toward the Solomonic setting the opening verse established.
- Song of Solomon 1Chapter 1 is the Song's opening statement of desire.
- Song of Solomon 2Chapter 2 is the book's most famous sequence of natural imagery and contains the lines most associated with the Song in popular memory — I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.
- Song of Solomon 3Chapter 3 contains two of the book's most structurally important passages: the first of the two dream sequences (3:1-5) and the description of Solomon's wedding litter (3:6-11).
- Song of Solomon 4Chapter 4 is the first and most extended of the Lover's wasf praise poems — a form with close parallels in classical Arabic love poetry (wasf meaning 'description'), in which the body of the beloved is described part by part from head downward, using a sequence of metaphors from nature, architecture, and precious materials.
- Song of Solomon 5Chapter 5 is the Song's most dramatically concentrated chapter and contains both the second dream sequence and the Beloved's own wasf — her description of the Lover's body.
- Song of Solomon 6Chapter 6 is the briefest of the book's concentrated central chapters and turns on a structural pivot: the daughters of Jerusalem, who have been the passive audience of the Beloved's declarations, now ask a genuine question — whither is thy beloved gone? — and receive an answer that clarifies the garden as both literal meeting-place and something closer to the Beloved's interior life: my beloved is gone down to his garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens and to gather lilies.
- Song of Solomon 7Chapter 7 contains the fourth and most structurally unusual of the book's wasf passages — the only one that begins with the feet and moves upward, and the only one framed as a performance for an audience (return, return, O Shulamite, that we may look upon thee).
- Song of Solomon 8Chapter 8 is the Song's ending and contains its most famous lines and its most compressed theology of love.