Song of Solomon 1
Song of Solomon 1
The Beloved opens the Song with an imperative — let him kiss me — and defends her dark, sun-darkened beauty to the daughters of Jerusalem. The Lover answers with the first of his praise poems.
Song of Solomon — chapter by chapter
All 8 chapters, song by song — from the Beloved's first imperative to her final call for the Lover to come away.
The Song of Solomon is too short for conventional chapter groupings; it reads more naturally as a sequence of songs with recurring voices and images. The eight chapters fall into two broad movements: the songs of meeting and longing (1–4), which establish the voices, the geography (city and garden), and the two dream sequences; and the songs of praise and declaration (5–8), which contain the Beloved's wasf of the Lover, the book's great climax ("love is as strong as death"), and the closing call. Read in a single sitting if possible — the book is twenty minutes. Read aloud to feel the Hebrew verse rhythms under the King James translation.
Songs of meeting and longing
The Beloved speaks first. The Lover comes to the lattice. The first dream, the royal procession, the garden opened.
Song of Solomon 2
Song of Solomon 2
The Lover arrives bounding like a gazelle to the lattice window, calls the Beloved to come away into spring, and the chapter closes on the threefold oath not to waken love before its time.
Song of Solomon 3
Song of Solomon 3
The first dream sequence: the Beloved searches Jerusalem's streets at night and finds her lover. Then Solomon's wedding procession — perfumed with myrrh, escorted by sixty warriors — comes up from the wilderness.
Song of Solomon 4
Song of Solomon 4
The Lover's first wasf: he describes the Beloved part by part from eyes to breasts, calls her his locked garden and sealed fountain, then invites himself into the garden she has prepared for him.
Songs of praise and declaration
The Beloved searches and is beaten. The ascending wasf. Love as strong as death. The Beloved calls him to come away.
Song of Solomon 5
Song of Solomon 5
The Beloved hesitates at the door; the Lover vanishes; the watchmen beat her in the streets. She answers the daughters of Jerusalem with a wasf of the Lover's body — the book's most sustained female gaze.
Song of Solomon 6
Song of Solomon 6
The daughters ask where the Beloved's lover has gone; she says he is in his garden. The Lover praises her again — terrible as an army with banners — and calls out to the mysterious Shulamite.
Song of Solomon 7
Song of Solomon 7
The Lover praises the Beloved from feet to head in the book's most ascending wasf. She answers with the third form of the mutual-possession formula and invites him to the vineyards to see the first blossoms.
Song of Solomon 8
Song of Solomon 8
The Beloved wishes for a freedom to love openly in public. Then the climax: love is as strong as death, jealousy fierce as Sheol, and many waters cannot quench it. The book ends on her voice, calling him away.