“For love is fierce as death. Passion is mighty as Sheol. Its darts are darts of fire, a blazing flame. Vast floods cannot quench love, nor rivers drown it. If a man offered all of his wealth for love, he would be laughed at in scorn.”
—Song of Solomon 8:6-7—
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Recently, in the course of my daily Tanakh reading, I finished the Song of Solomon. It’s a beautiful piece of erotic writing, and the imagery the poetry invokes manages to be graphic without in any way being raunchy.
The early Christians were so baffled by the book that many of the church fathers interpreted its libidinous content as symbolic of “God’s love for His people”, and further asserted that Chapter 1 Verse 2 in particular (“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth”) was talking about the church as a bride desiring intimacy with God, which is… weird. Yet outside of this outlier interpretation, a majority of Song of Solomon’s readers over the centuries have concluded that the book is most certainly the expression of sexual desires between an actual man and woman; making it an anomaly in the canon of the Tanakh (though Ruth comes closest in proximity).
Antiquity experts debate when exactly Song of Solomon was written. Early Jewish tradition puts the date at the 960s BCE, right at the center of Solomon’s reign (40 years before Israel split into two kingdoms), while literary analysts argue it was likely composed sometime in the 500s BCE, which would have been either during or shortly after Babylonian captivity. Its author is unknown, but in the past hundred years, archaeologists have discovered other ancient Near Eastern writings dating from the 500s that are remarkably similar; indicating that Song of Solomon was part of a genre of love poetry produced by the Israelites that was meant to imitate the love poetry popular among Israel’s neighbors post-captivity - especially Egypt.
The way the book has been typically understood is that the voice of the woman—the Shulammite—is King Solomon’s lover, and the male voice is only that of King Solomon. In this understanding of the Song, King Solomon is associated with a set of poetic “personas” intended to entice his lover the Shulammite: one being that of a steadfast shade tree that covers the flower that is his beloved (2:3), another being that of a gazelle whose body performs great athletic feats at the mere sound of his lover’s voice (2:8-9), and yet another being that of a shepherd who longs for the Shulammite to visit him in the secluded place where his flock reside (1:7-8). The Shulammite, then, in response, becomes enamored with Solomon’s “containment of multitudes” (to quote Wilde) and expresses her insatiable desire for him.
But I would contend that one of these Solomon “personas” is not a persona at all, but an entirely separate character: the shepherd. Moreover, I would argue that it is the shepherd whom the Shulammite is addressing throughout most of the book, not Solomon.
You see, the Song of Solomon is not just a love story. It’s a kidnapping story.
A story of a Shulammite woman and a shepherd in her tribe (Shulam, which sits in lower Galilee near a hill called Giv’at ha-Moreh) expressing romantic and sexual want for one another, and of King Solomon passing through their village during a journey who—upon seeing the Shulammite—decided to take her for himself. (Readers will note how this aspect of the story parallels Solomon’s father King David laying eyes on Bathsheba, who belonged already to another man.) Abducting the Shulammite to be a part of his harem, King Solomon still has enough honor to not lie with her against her will. Seeking to win her to his bed through bribery, he proposes to the Shulammite that if she will give her body to him and forget the shepherd, he will shower her with riches and provide a life of unimaginable luxury; a far cry from the life she had in her rural village. But the Shulammite cannot be bought. Her heart is set upon the humble shepherd, and eventually Solomon gives up trying to convince the woman to have sex with him, and sends her back to her village where she is reunited with her love.
Before I go into the text to make my case for this story, it should be noted first that there’s not much of a story. Song of Solomon is notorious for being heavy on poetic prose and light nearly nonexistent on overt plot; with places, voices, and even dreams-versus-reality pivoting at breakneck pace. It’s a strange book and its place in the canon was contested for a very long time; being approved once and for all only as late as the second century CE by a council of rabbis (and later adopted into the Christian biblical canon during that same century after heated debate among bishops).
That being said, throughout its eight chapters of highly sentimental and metaphoric language, there’s enough “there there” in certain passages that I believe points to the kidnapping take.
1:5 - Proponents of the conventional narrative that Solomon is the love interest will argue that the Shulammite was a woman who was already a member of his harem, and that the title of “Shulammite” being similar in sound to “Solomon” indicates the two were married. Verse 5 undermines this assertion. The Shulammite is tanned because she works outdoors in her family’s vineyard. Her mentioning this to the “daughters of Jerusalem” is likely because these particular women of Jerusalem have been in Solomon’s harem either their whole lives or have been there a very long time, and because they’ve been in Solomon’s harem a long time, that means they’ve been indoors a lot, which means they have lighter complexions and find the Shulammite’s “dark” appearance to be different from theirs.
1:7 - “Where do you pasture your sheep? Where do you raise them at noon?” Even with poetic prose being the norm for the book, these questions don’t make any sense if she is asking them to Solomon. They only make sense if she is asking them to her shepherd lover.
1:8 - Where can her lover be found? Not in the palace. Not even in Jerusalem. She has to follow the shepherds’ track if she wants to find her lover in the shepherds’ tents.
1:9-11 - The beginning of Solomon’s attempt at bribing the Shulammite to sleep with him upon taking her back to his palace.
1:12-14 - Whilst Solomon is trying to seduce his capture with glittering jewels, the Shulammite retorts that she already has in her possession the shepherd, who is the human equivalent of the jewels Solomon is offering.
1:15-2:9 - The Shulammite reminisces with longing about the moments her and the shepherd have shared in the past, using rural imagery to paint a picture of her love for the shepherd AND describes the shepherd as being “young” in verse 9. This is important, because 1st Kings 11:4 describes Solomon as being old when he built his harem and his wives and concubines began turning him toward idolatry. (As a side note, this is why I doubt Jewish tradition’s dating of Song of Solomon to the 960s BCE; because if Solomon’s reign began in 970, and the book was written circa the 960s, Solomon would have been in his twenties or thirties. And that was not the age range when he began taking hundreds of wives and concubines.)
3:1-4 - The Shulammite wishes to return to her lover, the shepherd, and suspects that he has made the journey to Jerusalem to find her and bring her back. Sneaking out of the royal palace at night, she is discovered by Solomon’s guards (charged with protecting the women of the harem) and asks if they have seen her lover while out in the city. (This would be a ridiculous question if her lover is Solomon, because Solomon is the king and he lives in the palace. The Shulammite would not have to wander the streets of Jerusalem looking for him.) Yet no sooner does she ask Solomon’s guards if they have seen her lover looking for her, when she spots her lover nearby, and they embrace before quickly fleeing back to her village.
3:6-9 - King Solomon sees that the Shulammite has fled, and travels with a carriage and warriors to recapture her. (As a side note, we see here how low Solomon has fallen morally from the wise king he once was in his youth.)
4:1-11 - This weird “You will learn to love me” routine begins again, where Solomon, upon kidnapping the Shulammite a second time, tries to flatter her appearance in an attempt to charm her into sleeping with him.
4:12-16 - Solomon eventually (and inevitably) gets pissed off when the Shulammite continues to refuse having sex with him. She’s a “locked garden” and a “sealed fountain”.
5:2-7 - The Shulammite dreams of her lover returning to Jerusalem to rescue her, and believing the dream to be a sign, she escapes the palace once again to look for him in the streets. But this time he is not there, and when Solomon’s guards catch her again, they beat her ruthlessly and haul her back to the palace. (Again, this is a passage that doesn’t make sense if her lover is Solomon. Why would the guards be knocking the Shulammite into next Tuesday if her lover is the king? They would all be disemboweled.)
5:8-6:3 - Solomon’s other ladies in the harem get curious—probably because they see that the tan Shulammite has returned to them black-and-blue—and ask her what’s so special about her beloved. Would they ask this if her beloved is King Solomon? No. So it’s not King Solomon. They also ask her where her beloved is. Would they ask this if her beloved is King Solomon? No. Solomon lives in the palace, they live in the palace. If they’re asking where the Shulammite’s beloved is, he’s not down the hall. So it’s not King Solomon.
6:4-13 - Solomon makes one last effort to sway his captive by telling her that she will be elevated above his other queens and concubines. When the Shulammite refuses to budge in her devotion to the shepherd, the king—at last—relents. “Return, return, O Shulammite, return, return.”
7:10-8:1-12 - When she returns to her village, her lover runs to welcome her and reassure her of his love. Wanting to be married at once, the two of them realize they both need the approval of their families. The Shulammite’s brothers worry that she has not been faithful in her devotion to the shepherd, but has allowed Solomon to have his way with her (8:8-9), to which she replies that she has been faithful to the shepherd, and they are persuaded (8:10-12).
8:13-14 - With their marriage approved by their families and the village, the Shulammite and her shepherd live happily ever after.
This reading of Song of Solomon—which I think has a lot to support it—not only extols the incorruptibility of true love against the snares and false promises of a cruel world, but also gives us a window into the tragedy of Solomon’s later years.
It was Marcus Aurelius who remarked in his Meditations (Book 3, Verse 9) “Never regard as a benefit anything which will force you at some point to break your faith, to leave integrity behind, to hate, suspect, or curse another, nor to covet anything needing the secrecy of walls and drapes.” And once again we see from this that the Jewish wisdom literature pairs so well with the wisdom of the stoics. For in warning against the corrosive effects of covetousness, Marcus reaches across time to wrap his arm around Solomon’s shoulder and whisper that his effort to “buy passion” was doomed from the start; that had the Israelite king only maintained the devotion of his youth to nation and God, then nation and God in turn would have freely blessed him with everything else and he could have saved himself a lot of unnecessary anger and heartache.