Song of Solomon 8
The Beloved wishes the Lover were her brother so she could bring him home openly; then the Song's climactic declaration: love is strong as death, and many waters cannot quench it.
Summary
Chapter 8 opens with the Beloved's social wish — O that thou wert as my brother, that sucked the breasts of my mother! When I should find thee without, I would kiss thee; yea, I should not be despised — which reveals, without editorialising, that the lovers are not related, not married, and that the public world does not permit their love to be expressed openly. She would lead him to her mother's house, give him spiced wine and pomegranate juice; his left hand would be under her head and his right hand would embrace her. The threefold refrain occurs for the last time — I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that ye stir not up nor awaken my love until he please. A voice asks: who is this that cometh up from the wilderness, leaning upon her beloved? And the Beloved speaks: I raised thee up under the apple tree; there thy mother brought thee forth; there she brought thee forth that bare thee.
The chapter's great passage comes next: set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned. This is the Song's only explicit theological claim about what love is. The Hebrew for most vehement flame — shalhevet-yah — contains what may be the only occurrence of the divine name in the book, read by some as a compound (flame of Yah, a divine superlative) and by others as a common intensifier; the translation debate has shaped the allegorical tradition's reading of these lines. The book closes with a brief exchange about the Beloved's brothers and a vineyard — my vineyard, which is mine, is before me — and then the Beloved's final words: make haste, my beloved, and be thou like to a roe or to a young hart upon the mountains of spices. The same image of the gazelle-swift Lover with which chapter 2 ended closes the whole book on her voice, calling him to come.
- 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.