Guiding readers through the Song of Songs verse by verse, this fresh, practical explanation will reveal important insights into romance, marriage, friendship, and human sexuality that are relevant today.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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Myth #4: The Song of Songs was written by King Solomon, based on his lived experience.<\/h2>\n
If Solomon is the author\u2014after all, we know that he wrote more than a thousand songs (1 Kings 4:32)\u2014then he must be telling us to do as he says, not what he did. I say this because the Song of Songs is all about an exclusive relationship between one man and one woman, yet we know that King Solomon married seven hundred wives and had three hundred concubines (1 Kings 11:3).<\/p>\n
So if this is Solomon\u2019s book, he must have been writing with the chastened wisdom of his later years, when he finally realized what a massive mistake he had made by not being a one-woman man. The perspective of this book contrasts sharply with Solomon\u2019s life experience in many ways. Rather than seeing sex as a conquest and marriage as a political alliance (see\u00a01 Kings 11), the Song of Songs views marriage as a romance and sex as the seal of a sacred covenant. The author\u2014whoever he was\u2014dedicated his song to Solomon in order to cast a divine vision for marriage that stood against the idolatries of his contemporary culture. This biblical song can do the same thing for us.<\/p>\n
Myth #5: The Song of Songs must only be read as straightforward narrative.<\/h2>\n
The word\u00a0poetry<\/em>\u00a0is also important for knowing how to approach this book. A love song is simply a love poem set to music. So we need to read the Song of Songs poetically. This may seem intimidating to people who think they don\u2019t like poetry and say they have a hard time reading it. But in fact most people encounter love poems every day through listening to popular music. The love songs we listen to are really poems set to music. Like the Song of Songs, most of them have something to do with love, and sometimes sex. Their words have a way of getting inside us and connecting with our life experience, which explains why people often put song lyrics on their profile pages.<\/p>\nThinking of the Song of Songs as a love song makes the book more accessible than we might at first think. Read this book the way you read the liner notes to an album of love songs. And listen to its message as you would listen to the playlist for the dance at a wedding reception. If we read the Song of Songs as a short story, we will be frustrated by its lack of clarity. But if we read this book the way it was meant to be read\u2014as a loose collection of love songs from a steamy romance that became a happy marriage\u2014we will enter into its joy.<\/p>\n
Content adapted from\u00a0The Love of Loves in the Song of Songs\u00a0by Philip Graham Ryken. The article first appeared on\u00a0Crossway.org; used with permission.<\/p>\n
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Myth #1: The Song of Songs is just a human love story. I do not intend to treat the Song of Songs like an allegory, in which everything in the book stands for something else, and in which we start coming up with meanings that the author never intended. But I do want to be … Continue reading “5 Myths Regarding the Song of Songs”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33179\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}