The greatest of all love songs…
The song of all songs. The greatest of all songs. The most beautiful of all love songs.
This song would be number one in one of those Top 50 Best Love Songs Ever countdowns on Channel 4. And there are an awful lot of love songs out there to choose from. It’s what people sing about. A lot.
And this song is no different from all the other love songs. It’s all about desire. Passion. Fantasy. Sex.
This love song has also been called Song of Solomon, which implies it is written by Solomon, but many Bible scholars do not think this is likely. For a start, it seems improbable that this would have been Solomon’s experience of love. Solomon had been married many times with 700 wives and 300 concubines. His sex life was pretty disastrous and he compromised devotion to the God of Israel by allowing his wives’ foreign gods and pagan idols into his world.
This song is not about that kind of sex. Not the kind of sex that had become the norm in the society of that time – a society in which sex has become abused and degraded. Permissive and promiscuous.
Not so very different from our society then.
This song is all about true love. Good sex. The desire and pleasure of sex that God has given as a gift to all his people (which like so much God has given us, we have twisted and exploited and turned into something it was never intended to be). God created the human body capable of many sensual delights, to be enjoyed at the right time in the right place with the right person.
Because sex has been misused and misrepresented throughout the course of human history, the Jews did not include this book in their scriptures until AD70. After all, the book contains vivid sexual imagery and doesn’t even mention God. But many Jews believe that this book portrays God’s love for His people. His adoration and faithfulness. And therefore in modern Judaism, certain verses from the Song are read on Shabbat eve or at Passover to symbolise the love between the Jewish people and their God. Many Christians see it as a beautiful image of the relationship between Christ and the Church.
Taken at face value, this book is a collection of poems in praise of sexual love. And right there is a great place to start. Because the world has taken sex and turned it into something less than it was intended to be. The media has taken sex and turned it into something less than it was intended to be. Society has taken sex and turned it into something less than it was intended to be. The Church has taken sex and turned it into something less than it was intended to be.
So spending a month redressing the balance and exploring what sex was always intended to be seems like a great plan. This is a celebration of sexual love and there’s no avoiding that – although why would we want to? What a great opportunity to evaluate our notions of sex and see if there is a better way, God’s best way!
Let’s be clear. I’m no expert here. Quite the opposite. And I’m not ready to share my personal sexual experience in this forum anyway. Which you will probably be relieved to hear. So this will not be about me. This will be about what we can all learn from this book as we continue our journey through the Bible together.
