Thomas J Parlette
“The Raciest Book in the Bible”
Song of Solomon 2: 8-13
9/1/24
Once upon a time – this story actually happened. It happened in a local high school in Toms River, New Jersey, in the early 1960s, before the Supreme Court ruling that banned Bible reading in public schools.
Back in those days, the school’s opening exercises included a prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance, daily announcements, and a selection from the Bible read by a student over the PA system. According to school tradition, it was up to the student to choose the Bible reading.
Students sat sleepily at their homeroom desks most days, only half-listening as the opening exercises droned on, even the teachers sipped their coffee and read their newspapers as they waited for the day to officially begin – until one particular morning that would be forever etched into local history.
On that morning, one by one, the students in homeroom sat up straight and paid close attention to the words of the Bible reading from the venerable King James Version:
“How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O price’s daughter!
The joints of thy thighs are like jewels.
Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor:
Thy belly is like a heap of wheat set about with lilies.
Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins.
Thy neck is like a tower of ivory…”
Then the PA system and whistled and crackled, and suddenly went dead – as you could hear the principal shout, “That’s enough of that!!”
The effect of those words on a school full of adolescents first thing in the morning was, to say the least, memorable. So memorable that the townsfolk still tell the story decades later.
As you might imagine – by order of the principal himself, the student leader was replaced, despite his fervent protests that all he had been doing was reading from the Bible! From that day forward, at least until the Supreme Court banned Bible reading in public schools on June 17th, 1963, the principal chose the Bible passages for the opening exercises. (1)
Dangerous, scandalous stuff those bible verses!
The offending student was reading from the Song of Solomon in Chapter 7, that sensuous love-poem sandwiched between the stern philosophy of Ecclesiastes and the soaring prophecies of Isaiah.
To generations of Christians, the Song of Solomon – or the “Song of Songs” as it is sometimes called – has been a bit of an embarrassment. It is without a doubt the raciest book in the Bible, and it’s one of only two books in the Bible that don’t mention God by name. Esther is the other one, by the way.
Back in the Middle Ages, Bible scholars went to elaborate lengths to interpret this book as highly symbolic. Some taught that this explicit love poetry was really about the soul’s relationship to God. Others claimed that it was about God’s love for the Virgin Mary, and she for God. If you think you’re hearing lovers sighing to each other in a moonlit glade, then think again, say these medieval scholars. When you the woman’s voice crooning, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine,” – well all that lovey-dovey romantic talk is like a secret code for an earnest and devout, and thoroughly chaste, piety.
I know that sounds pretty far-fetched. What possible reason could the author have for hiding religious sentiment behind steamy love poetry? It’s more faithful to take the Song of Solomon at face value. It’s a joyous celebration of committed love – in every respect, including the physical – as a wonderful gift of God.
But still, something about the Song of Solomon makes many of us feel uneasy. This has as much to do with the hang-ups of our society as with the book itself.
Our society tends to understand human love in a binary way. Love is either idealized and spiritual – or it is sensual and physical – but never both. On the one hand, you have lacy valentine hearts and bouquets of roses. On the other is graphic content from the darkest corners of the internet. One extreme, according to our culture is good – the other bad. There is no middle ground.
But in the Song of Solomon, there is no separation between the physical and the spiritual. “Love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave,” the poet writes in chapter 8 “Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame.” The author sees no need to construct a wall between the spiritual and the physical. To this divinely inspired poet, they’re two sides of the same coin.
So what are we to do with the Song of Solomon, this most racy of books in the Bible? This is where it becomes helpful to read this passage alongside the one from James for this morning. There we’ll find a principle for interpreting the Hebrew scriptures. One of the wonderful things about the lectionary – those readings recommended for each Sunday – is often the Scriptural texts have conceptual links between them. They often elaborate or interpret each other. Not always – but sometimes. Today, the lectionary works out pretty well.
In James 1: 19, we hear these words… “Let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger…” When we hold that text up next to the love poem from Song of Solomon, it gives us a new perspective. If there’s one thing the two impassioned lovers have elevated to a fine art, it’s the skill of listening to one another.
Listen to how Eugene Peterson puts it in The Message:
“Look! Listen! There’s my lover!
Do you see him coming?
Vaulting the mountains,
Leaping the hills.
My lover is like a gazelle, graceful;
Like a young stag, virile.
Look at him there, on tiptoe at the gate,
All ears, all eyes – ready!
My lover has arrived
And he’s speaking to me!”
The Song of Solomon is one of the few places in Scripture where we hear a woman’s voice. The voice in this song is listening attentively for her lover – every thought, every action is attuned to his return. When she hears the sound of his footsteps, and moments later his voice, “Get up, my dear friend, fair and beautiful lover – come to me,” her heart is thrilled.
In today’s epistle reading, James advises everyone to be “quick to listen” Listen like the woman who sings this song about her lover. Listen intently just as she does.
We all know that when a relationship is young, listening comes pretty easy. We can’t wait to hear each other’s stories and listen for our loved one’s opinions and feelings. Yet, as the years go by and loving relationships mature, whether it’s marriages or long-term friendships, we reach a point when we’ve heard the stories, perhaps many times. We’ve heard our loved one’s feelings and opinions maybe too often. The what becomes of listening?
You may have seen the classic cartoon that depicts a husband reading from his newspaper. “Honey, it says here that one of the reasons for marital problems is that couples don’t really listen to each other.” Then you look over to the where the wife ought to be sitting, and you see an empty chair. Turns out she got up and walked out of the room some time ago, but her husband never noticed. Such are the challenges of love that’s no longer new.
Listening is in fact, one of the greatest gifts we can give to those we love – or anyone else, for that matter. There’s a universal human need to be listened to. Listening is a wonderfully easy gift to give. Anyone can do it – but it does take conscious effort, and some practice. Once you figure out how to do it, you discover, as writer Fran Lebowitz points out, “The opposite of talking isn’t listening… but waiting.” (2) All you need to do to be a good listener is open up some space and give the other person time. The space will get filled. As the bumper sticker says – “When I listen, people speak.”
The late psychologist Carl Rogers was an expert at attentive listening. The non-directive school of psychotherapy he developed is all about waiting, reflecting, and opening a gracious space for clients to share what’s on their hearts. Here’s what he had to say:
“Hearing has consequences. When I truly hear a person and the meanings that are important to them at the moment, hearing not simply their words, but them… many things happen. There is first of all, a grateful look. They feel released… Almost always, when a person realizes they have been heard, their eyes moisten. I think in some real sense they are weeping for joy. It is as though they are saying, “Thank God, somebody has heard me. Someone knows what is like to be me.” (3)
One of the marvelous aspects of being in love is precisely that feeling of being heard – the certainty that someone else “knows what it’s like to be me.” Jesus assures us many times that God listens to us when we pray. And Jesus certainly knows what it’s like to one of us. Look back to the very first human, Adam – in Genesis 2, he looks at Eve for the first time and says, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” Someone who knows what it’s like to be me.
The Song of Solomon, for all its racy bits, revels in this sort of meticulous attention – this exuberant recognition and naming of another. In Song number 4, the man says of the woman:
“You’re so beautiful, darling,
So beautiful, and you dove eyes are veiled
By your hair as it flows and shimmers,
Like a flock of goats in the distance
Streaming down a hillside in the sunshine.”
And in Song 5, the woman describes the man as,
“Strong and deep-rooted, a rugged mountain of a man,
Aromatic with wood and stone.
His words are kisses, his kisses words.
Everything about him delights me, thrills me
Through and through!”
The rich cascade of metaphors (some of them odd, I admit), tumbling down one upon the other sound almost ridiculous after a while – but whoever said two people in love are the picture of dignity. Remember that time when Tom Cruise was on the Oprah Winfrey talk show and jumped up and down when talking about his love for Katie Holmes? Not very dignified.
The point is, lovers demonstrate a high degree of very focused attention for each other, and it is this attention that makes love wondrously renewing – both the kind of love we experience in our personal relationships, and the love and intimacy with God that we experience in our spiritual relationship.
“Let everyone be quick to listen,” says James. The couple in the Song of Solomon has no trouble with that.
It may be the raciest book in the Bible – but it does show us how much God cares for and listens to us, and how much we should care for and listen to God. To re-word song 5 just a bit – “Everything about God should delight us, thrill us, through and through.
May God be praised. Amen.
1. Homileticsonline.com, retrieved 8/5/24. Used with permission.
2. Ibid…
3. Carl Ransom Rogers, A Way of Being (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1995), p 10.
