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Song of Solomon 4
This is the man's long praise of the woman, head to chest, working downward in a catalogue of images: eyes like doves behind her veil, hair like a flock of goats, teeth like newly shorn ewes, neck like David's armory tower. He ends, "You are all beautiful, my love. There is no spot in you." Notice the new address, "my sister, my bride," repeated through the chapter. He invites her to come down from Lebanon's peaks and the lions' dens, turning distant, dangerous heights into a place he wants her to leave behind for him.
- 1
Behold, you are beautiful, my love. Behold, you are beautiful. Your eyes are like doves behind your veil. Your hair is as a flock of goats, that descend from Mount Gilead.
- 2
Your teeth are like a newly shorn flock, which have come up from the washing, where every one of them has twins. None is bereaved among them.
- 3
Your lips are like scarlet thread. Your mouth is lovely. Your temples are like a piece of a pomegranate behind your veil.
- 4
Your neck is like David’s tower built for an armory, on which a thousand shields hang, all the shields of the mighty men.
- 5
Your two breasts are like two fawns that are twins of a roe, which feed among the lilies.
- 6
Until the day is cool, and the shadows flee away, I will go to the mountain of myrrh, to the hill of frankincense.
- 7
You are all beautiful, my love. There is no spot in you.
- 8
Come with me from Lebanon, my bride, with me from Lebanon. Look from the top of Amana, from the top of Senir and Hermon, from the lions’ dens, from the mountains of the leopards.
- 9
You have ravished my heart, my sister, my bride. You have ravished my heart with one of your eyes, with one chain of your neck.
- 10
How beautiful is your love, my sister, my bride! How much better is your love than wine, the fragrance of your perfumes than all kinds of spices!
- 11
Your lips, my bride, drip like the honeycomb. Honey and milk are under your tongue. The smell of your garments is like the smell of Lebanon.
- 12
My sister, my bride, is a locked up garden; a locked up spring, a sealed fountain.
- 13
Your shoots are an orchard of pomegranates, with precious fruits, henna with spikenard plants,
- 14
spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with every kind of incense tree; myrrh and aloes, with all the best spices,
- 15
a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, flowing streams from Lebanon. Beloved
- 16
Awake, north wind, and come, you south! Blow on my garden, that its spices may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and taste his precious fruits.
The locked garden
From bodily praise the chapter moves to one controlling metaphor: she is "a locked up garden, a sealed fountain," planted with pomegranates, henna, spikenard, saffron, cinnamon and myrrh. The list of spices makes her enclosed and precious, not withholding.
Her reply flips the image open: "Awake, north wind... Blow on my garden... Let my beloved come into his garden." The sealed garden becomes, by her own invitation, his, which is exactly where chapter 5 picks up.
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