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This morning I’m beginning a series on one of the most unique books in the whole Bible, the Song of Solomon, or Solomon’s Song of Songs. Tucked away in the writings section of the Bible, after Psalms and Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, this eight chapter book is a collection of love songs between a man - possibly King Solomon - and the woman he loves. My intention over the upcoming weeks is to preach through this whole book verse by verse, in the hopes of encouraging and challenging all of us in the areas of love, sex, and marriage.

I’m very excited about this study, but also a little nervous. This is quite possibly the hardest book of the Bible for me to preach on, in my opinion, and there are four questions I’ve been wrestling with in preparation for this series. The first question is this:

- How do I preach this to you? What I mean, is, many books and sermons I’ve read and listened to on the Song of Solomon tell you the story of this couple as an example to follow. Look at how this man speaks to the woman he loves, for example. Now go and do likewise. Is that how this book is meant to be read? As examples to follow? If you’ve been around, you know that I do not believe the Bible was meant to be preached in this way. Abraham, Jacob, Joseph – there are times their behavior is worthy of imitation, but more often that not, it is God who is the hero, who saves and uses people who continually screw up, turn their backs on him, and do their own thing. God is the hero, and every story in the Old Testament points to the gospel, to our need for a Savior. So I struggle with how to preach this book. My conclusion is that this is a descriptive, not a prescriptive book. This is not a book of laws telling you how to be married, how to live your love life. It is a description of a godly couple in love, and brings up many good points for discussion and reflection on what godly love is like. There will be lots of discussion questions that are designed to challenge you to a deeper level in your relationships.

Another consideration along these lines is that many in church history have preached this book as an allegory of God’s relationship to His people. It takes some serious stretching of metaphors – the woman’s breasts, for example, were allegorized as Moses and Aaron to the Jewish theologians, and as the Old and New Testament to the Christian ones. I would say that this owed more to the influence of Plato and the stoics, who saw the body as bad and the soul as good; the goal was to leave body and be spirit, and therefore marital intimacy and sex were seen as bad. For example, Tertullian & Ambrose preferred the extinction of human race to marital intercourse. Origen allegorized the Song of Solomon and castrated himself, following Jesus’ words that if it causes you to stumble, cut it off. Jerome believed that a man who too ardently desires his own wife was an adulterer. Chrysostom taught that Adam & Eve had no sex pre-fall, that until sin, there was no such thing as sex. Gregory of Nissa likewise believed that there was no sexual desire, no intimate relations in the garden, that there was a special tree in the Garden that if Eve ate of it, she would become pregnant. The church fathers in 550 AD banned any literal reading of the Song of Solomon. And soon, this is what happened: “Church authorities issued edicts forbidding sex on Thursdays, the day of Christ’s arrest; on Fridays, the day of his death; on Saturdays, in honor of the Blessed Virgin; and on Sundays in honor of the departed saints. Wednesdays sometimes made the list too, as did the 40-day fast periods before easter, christmas, and Pentecost, and also the feast days and days of the Apostles, as well as the days of female impurity. The list escalated until only 44 days a year remained available for marital sex.”(Philip Yancey) It was not until the end of the 18th century that the literal meaning of the book began to be rediscovered.