Original Meaning
THE DIALOGUE BETWEEN the lovers continues in chapter 2, although with frequent third person references and an occasional aside. The opening verses are best taken as representative of this dialogue (even though it is not absolutely clear from the grammar that v. 1 is indeed spoken by the woman). She compares herself in verse 1 to two flowers, and her lover responds in verse 2 by agreeing with her self-description in at least the second case, and possibly even praising her more highly than she herself does.
Our uncertainty as to what exactly is being claimed by each speaker stems from uncertainty as to the precise nature of the flowers mentioned in verses 1–2, with their roots in the fertile soil of the plain of Sharon (extending from the borderlands in the region of Egypt up to the promontory of Carmel on Israel’s western side) or in the equally fertile river valleys. If we are indeed dealing with a “rose,” then as far as we can tell we are dealing with a flower that would have been unusual in Palestine before the third century B.C. The imagery would in this case suggest the rarity of the woman’s beauty (in line with 1:5–6). Isaiah 35:1, however (the only other occurrence of Heb. ḥabaṣṣelet), may be taken to imply a more freely blooming and common Palestinian flower that carpets the ground, such as the crocus, hyacinth, or narcissus.
The ancient versions are already uncertain, as their renderings of both Song of Songs 2:1 and Isaiah 35:1 illustrate. A looser translation might be preferable, following the lead provided by LXX: “I am a wild flower.” We are unable to decide on the basis of the specific evidence, however, whether the sense is “I am a particularly beautiful wild flower” or “I am only a common wild flower.” All that can be said is that the confident tone of 1:5–6 perhaps favors the former understanding.
We are not helped much in our determination here by the reference to the “lily,” for we cannot be certain that the Hebrew word šošanna refers to the same plant as Egyptian sššn, “water lily,” nor whether the šošanna was considered a plant of especially rare beauty.1 It is only with the man’s response in comparative terms that we gain a definite sense that he, at least, regards the woman’s beauty as unparalleled: She is a lily among thorns (the unprofitable plant of Job 31:40). If there is any hint of concern in her statement in 2:1, then, that she is only one among many and therefore that her beloved might fall for one of the others who are pursuing him (cf. 1:3–4), he is quick to reassure her. This woman is the only one he thinks of as a beautiful flower (2:2). The others are a bramble patch, which only serves to highlight her uniqueness.
This affirmation from her beloved now leads the woman into an extended reflection on her love for this man who chases after her, woos her, and delights—but exhausts—her (vv. 3–13). As she is to him a flower among thorns, so he is to her a fruit tree among other, nondescript trees of the forest (v. 3). The precise nature of the fruit tree (which reappears in 8:5) is, again, uncertain. It has variously been identified as a tree bearing apples (NIV), apricots, oranges, lemons, and quinces, with the first of these attracting most attention and already being found in the LXX. Yet one wonders whether the suggestion of strong fragrance in both the verbal root npḥ (“breathe, flow upon”) and the allusion found in 7:8 best fits the apple.
More important than identifying the tree, however, is to understand the imagery, which speaks of both protection and pleasure. This is a tree that offers “shade” (ṣel) from the harsh sun (which an apple tree in truth does not)—protection from the outside world analogous to that provided in political terms by those with power, including God (cf., e.g., Heb. ṣel in Judg. 9:15; Ps. 17:8; Lam. 4:20). This tree, while it provides shade, also provides delightful sustenance. Its fruit is not only nourishing but also sweet to the taste. The woman thus feeds from the man, while sitting in the safety of the orchard.
The imagery of verses 4–6 also suggests both protection and consumption. The beloved man provides the woman not only with food but also with wine. He takes her into a “house of wine” (lit. trans.; NIV “banquet hall”; cf. similar expressions in Est. 7:8; Eccl. 7:2); the NIV translation conjures up in our minds an urban context that does not sit well with the resolutely pastoral imagery throughout the passage. A more rural “drinking spot” is perhaps intended or even just a vineyard.
If the correct translation of Hebrew diglo is indeed “his banner,” then the allusion is perhaps to a sign hung at a “drinking spot” to indicate the nature of the activities there, rather in the manner of the painted and pictorial signs that hang outside traditional English public houses. The “sign” that the man hangs over his metaphorical drinking house is “love,” indicating that love is the defining activity in which the man and the woman engage.
It is stretching the meaning of Hebrew degel somewhat, however, to translate it simply as “banner,” particularly in this nonmilitary sense. In fact, the primary meaning of the word in the book of Numbers (the only other book in the Bible in which the word occurs) seems to be not “military standard,” but “military unit.” The associated verbal root dgl is found in Psalm 20:5, also in a military context, where any reference to banners is likewise dubious, but a reference to fighting in the name of the Lord makes sense.2 The root dgl is further found in Song of Songs 5:10; 6:4, 10, where warrior imagery can plausibly be accounted for (see below).3
Our interpretation should be guided by these other occurrences as well as by the material in chapter 1 that makes it clear that other men find this beautiful woman attractive and by the language of protection in 2:3. The man sustains the woman with wine, as he has in 2:3 with food, but he also offers her military protection, as in 2:3 he offered her “shade.” The “military force” that looks after her is his love. His protection of her is attentive, committed, and prepared for trouble, in the manner of a royal bodyguard looking after a well-loved king or queen.
The beloved thus experiences overwhelming, overpowering love and finds herself faint or ill when confronted by it (v. 5). She seeks sustenance—more food to give her strength to meet this power and to heal her lovesickness. She may be seeking this food from bystanders (note the masc. pl. form of the verbs in v. 5, which can conceivably refer to the daughters of Jerusalem mentioned in v. 7, where there is also a surprising masc. suffix on Heb. ʾetkem), or perhaps she addresses the man himself using a plural verb.
Certainly it is more of his fruit that she asks for (NIV “apples” in v. 5). This suggests, of course, that although she is overwhelmed, she has no desire that his attentions should cease. There is some evidence, in fact, that the “raisins” or raisin cakes (cf. NIV in 2 Sam. 6:19) she requests were associated with ancient Near Eastern fertility cults (e.g., Isa. 16:7; Hos. 3:1; cf. also Jer. 7:18; 44:19, for “cakes” offered to the Queen of Heaven) and may more generally have been considered to possess aphrodisiac qualities. We note the association of “apples” with love and fertility in Song of Songs 8:5. If so, she asks for food that, while strengthening her, will also heighten her experience of love. Verse 6 finds her lying still in her lover’s arms, his left supporting her head and his right embracing her (note the same phrase in 8:3; Heb. ḥbq refers to sexual embrace also in Prov. 5:20).
As the lovers embrace, the woman (or possibly the man)4 addresses the puzzling aside in verse 7 to the “daughters of Jerusalem” (cf. also 3:5; 8:4). They are asked to swear an oath that they will not “arouse or awaken love until it so desires.” If “love” is taken to refer to one of the lovers themselves, this is then a request from either the man or the woman that their beloved should not be disturbed as he or she sleeps and should be left in peace until eager to arise. But if love is understood more abstractly as the power that has just been described in verses 3–6, the request becomes more of a warning to these other girls. Because of the devastating and overpowering results of love, they should ensure that it is awakened only when the timing and circumstances are right. There is, in effect, “a time to embrace and a time to refrain” (Eccl. 3:5), and it is as dangerous to awaken love when it does not desire to be woken as it is to rouse the sleeping animal of modern proverbial tradition (e.g., the English dog or the Korean lion).
The terrible power of love is indeed well expressed in Song of Songs 8:6–7, which follows closely on a similar aside to the daughters of Jerusalem in 8:4; this latter passage above all tips the balance in favor of interpreting the aside as a warning. The oath laid on the Jerusalem girls refers, appropriately, to “gazelles” (ṣebaʾot) and “does” (ʾayyalot; see also 3:5). The man himself is portrayed as a gazelle (ṣebi) or young stag (ʾayyal) in 2:8–9, 17; 8:14, while 4:5 and 7:3 compare the woman’s breasts to two fawns of a gazelle (ṣebiyya; cf. Prov. 5:18–19, where the woman is “a loving doe, a graceful deer”). The emphasis of the imagery falls, among others things, on grace and beauty (underlined by the fact that ṣebi also means “beauty,” cf. Ezek. 7:20; 26:20).
The oath, in shifting the focus from the singular “gazelle” and “doe” to the plural, thus appears to set the particular relationship described in verses 3–6 in the context of all other relationships of the same kind. The daughters of Jerusalem are to think of the “gazelles and . . . does” generally (i.e., all lovers) as they consider whether to “arouse or awaken love.” Whether the speaker makes a request or delivers a warning, the verse thus has a “love your neighbor as yourself” aspect to it, for these daughters of Jerusalem are themselves some of the “does” who might in the future be found embracing their “gazelles.” They swear as those who have common cause with our speaker and his or her beloved.
The scene now changes as the imagery of the gazelle is developed in 2:8–17. We find ourselves no longer hearing of embrace, but of wooing. The gazelle is swift and athletic as well as beautiful, and he speeds across the mountains and hills toward the woman who waits for him (vv. 8–9). As he arrives at her home, he tries to catch a glimpse of her through the windows5 and to strike up a conversation with her. She is indoors, along with unspecified others; she addresses a broader group, probably female (cf. esp. v. 15, “our vineyards”), with whom she has solidarity and with whom she shares her life (note “our wall” in v. 9). He seeks to draw her out from this shared and protected space into the beautiful springtime countryside (in the same way that in ch. 1 she has moved from indoors to outdoors to find him).
The winter rains are past, and we have arrived at a season in Palestine when the flowers are blooming, the vines and figs have begun to ripen (cf. Mark 13:28), and migrant birds have begun to appear (Song 2:11–13; note the migratory dove in Jer. 8:7, which knows and keeps its times). The silence of the wet winter has given way to the joyful sounds of spring—“the season of singing” (zmr, v. 12), whether of birds or humans.6 Yet while these doves sing, enjoying the springtime air, the beloved woman, who is also the lover’s “dove” (v. 14), is to be found hidden away inside the house, as inaccessible as if she were lodged in the rocky crevice of a high mountain, where not even a gazelle can go (cf. Jer. 48:28). She is, to him, a divinity (the dove being a symbol of the goddess of love in various ancient cultures),7 but she is beyond his reach, hiding her face from his gaze. He desires her to come out and be seen.
To this plea that the woman should emerge from the shadows and the safety of her home and fly away with her lover (vv. 10, 13–14), the words in verse 15 are best understood as a female response. The man has suggested to her that her present location is a limiting one defined by fear, and he has spoken of the outside world only in glowing terms, designed to make it attractive to her. Her response is to remind him, however, that the outside world is in fact a dangerous place for herself and other women (the “us” of v. 15). Their reluctance to come outside is justified. It is a world in which there are “foxes” determined to ruin “vineyards”—something for which foxes were well known in the ancient world, as the famous lines from Theocritus (Idylls, 1.49) illustrate:
I hate the brush-tail foxes, that soon as day declines
Come creeping to their vintaging mid goodman Micon’s vines.8
The “vineyards” in question in 2:15 are the very women whom men would like to persuade to come outside (cf. 1:6), and the “foxes” are presumably those men intent on sexual conquest. If the woman’s lover and his friends really do wish women to come out into the countryside, then, they are invited first to ensure their safety: “Catch [pl. masc. imper.] for us the foxes.” As in 1:7 it is difficult to know whether the threat is considered to be a real one or whether the tone is more lighthearted and teasing.
The woman herself has shown no true reluctance to meet her lover in 2:3–6. As the chapter ends she is found once more in his arms (vv. 16–17). The couple are entirely given over to each other (“my lover is mine and I am his,” v. 16; cf. 6:3; 7:10) and lie together, safe from all “foxes.” As they do so, he “browses among the lilies”; in the light of 4:5, where the woman’s breasts also browse among the lilies, implying that the lily field is the female body on which the breasts move and have their being, this phrase may suggest that he covers her body with kisses. The woman has already been described in 2:2 as a lily.
The final verse draws the whole section from verses 8–17 together by explicitly returning to the imagery of gazelle/young stag, but now probably with a different sense. In verses 8–9 the gazelle/stag bounded across the hills in the hope of persuading his beloved to come out to him. In verses 16–17 his hopes have been realized, and he is invited in all his athletic beauty to bestride “the rugged hills” (Heb. hare bater)—hills cut by a deep valley. These are most naturally understood in the context as referring to the beloved’s breasts, especially when compared with 4:5–6 and 8:14. In 4:5–6 the description of woman’s breasts, which are like twin fawns of a gazelle browsing among the lilies (4:5), is also followed by a reference to the day “breaking” and the shadows fleeing (4:6, paralleling 2:17) and then by a statement of the man’s intention of going “to the mountain of myrrh and to the hill of incense” (4:6).
Myrrh has already been associated with the woman’s breasts and the presence of the lover there in 1:13, and 8:14, which is similar to 2:17, replaces hare bater (“rugged hills”) with hare beśamim (“spice-laden mountains”). The “gazelle” begins his quest on mountains and ends it there also—but on mountains of a different kind, divided by their own kind of “valley.”9 Whether the lovers are lying together during the night or the day is unclear. The breaking or breathing (pwḥ) of the day can refer to daybreak (the fresh breeze of morning) or to the day’s end (when the day grows cool and it is possible to breathe freely). Likewise the fleeing of shadows can be caused by the sun rising or going down. In any case, the lovers are together for an extended period and revel in each other’s company.
Song of Songs 2 plays with similar ideas to chapter 1. The lovers know both separation, in that he lives in the outside world and she (currently) in the inside world, and intimate communion, in that it is possible to overcome the disjunction at least for a while and enjoy the freedom and joy of the springtime countryside. They are both in solidarity with broader communities, and the woman in particular looks to her broader community for support in her love for the man.
Yet the broader communities also threaten their relationship in various ways, offering places to hide from the lover and presenting certain dangers (rivals for the woman’s affection; “foxes”). Strength and protection, as well as passionate love, are therefore themes of the poem. This love is itself a powerful and dangerous force, which must be treated with respect. One of the implied threats to their relationship, the king, is not mentioned in this chapter, but he will return in chapter 3.
Bridging Contexts
THE STORY OF creation in Genesis 1–2 is the story of emergent beauty. God speaks into being the wondrous world we inhabit, and it is in every respect “good” (Gen. 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31). The trees in this glorious garden, in particular, remind us that the goodness of the world is not simply a matter of practicalities but also of aesthetics, for they are “trees . . . pleasing to the eye and good for food” (Gen. 2:9). Human beings were never intended to live by bread alone, starved of beauty.
We ourselves are described as the pinnacle of divine creation, fashioned in the image of God and reflecting, therefore, divine beauty and glory—the beauty that the psalmist so desires to behold as he visits the Jerusalem temple (Ps. 27:4). There is therefore no embarrassment among Old Testament authors in drawing attention to human beauty, which they do frequently (e.g., Gen. 12:11–14; 24:16; 29:17; 1 Sam. 25:3; 2 Sam. 11:2; 14:25, 27). It is only one aspect of the amazing goodness and wonder of creation on which the psalmist in Psalm 8 reflects, remembering above all the position of great dignity and responsibility in which human beings have been placed by God (Ps. 8:3–9):
When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
the son of man that you care for him?
You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.
You made him ruler over the works of your hands;
you put everything under his feet:
all flocks and herds,
and the beasts of the field,
the birds of the air,
and the fish of the sea,
all that swim the paths of the seas.
O LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
It is important to place Song of Songs 2 first of all in the context of this wider biblical embrace of beauty in part because significant numbers of Christians throughout the ages have been either hostile to beauty or dismissive of it, as if it were something trivial or even dangerous in respect of Christian faith and life. This unease with beauty has often been bound up with a theology that focuses in an unbalanced way on what is wrong with the world and with human beings at the expense of what is right and good. This theology has often in turn been bound up with a low sense of self-esteem.
We might best refer to this theology as “worm theology,” taking as our text Psalm 22:6, “But I am a worm and not a man, scorned by men and despised by the people.” The point about the psalmist here, however, is precisely that he has been dehumanized by suffering and oppression. He is not really a worm; he simply feels he is. He is truly a man—a precious creature made in God’s image with a view to enjoying God and God’s creation to the fullest extent. His true calling is not to crawl into a hole in the ground, that is, to escape the world that is currently causing him so much pain. His true calling is to live, as he is able, in joyous affirmation of God, his own humanness, and the rest of God’s creation, thus glorifying God even among those who will not acknowledge him as God. It is this vocation that he is able to own once again later in Psalm 22:22–31, as lament over great pain gives way to extravagant praise.
Worm theology, as a principled stance rather than as a temporary aberration, is not truly Christian theology. It denies the truth that the cosmos is good, even though it is touched in every way also by sin; that human beings are invested with dignity and glory by God, even though they are also touched in every way by sin; and that it is this same creation, human and nonhuman, that has been redeemed in Christ, so that it may reflect once again the undiminished glory of God. We are not summoned to hate ourselves and to despise the rest of creation, as if these attitudes somehow honor the Creator. We are summoned to understand ourselves as precious creatures loved by God and thus to love ourselves and the rest of creation (even while lamenting the dark side of reality as it spoils and corrupts what is good). Such perfect love casts out not only fear (1 John 4:18) but also self-loathing and all contempt for the rest of the universe.
It is the beauty of creation that is the driving theme of Song of Songs 2, as it has also been a focus of chapter 1 (e.g., 1:5, 8, 15–16). The glory of springtime provides the backdrop, as life bursts anew from the earth and all creatures stir and renew their activity. We are invited to picture flowers and fruit trees, mountains and hills, deer and doves, and to marvel at it all. The lovers identify themselves with this wider creation, merging with it and embracing it as they affirm each other with images drawn from the flora and fauna that they see around them, each competing with the other as they try to find ways of extolling the other’s beauty. He is to her an apple tree, strong and sweet, and a graceful and athletic stag. She is to him a lovely flower and a beautiful dove.
There is no darkness in all of this. There is only joyous, mutual affirmation and a glorying in what is good. If Genesis 2:23 cites the male cry of delight when confronted by the woman (“bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh”), then Song of Songs 2:16 provides us with the reciprocal female cry (“my lover is mine and I am his”). The warning of 2:7, it should be understood, is not a warning about love as such. It is only a warning about the importance of always placing love in the right context.
There is a broader biblical context in which our thinking about beauty must be set, of course, once we have grasped that it is an intrinsically good thing. We need to remember that it is transient and vulnerable to destruction, as is everything created (Isa. 28:1; 40:6–8). Beauty should not blind us to our mortality and thus lead us to live foolishly. It is indeed capable, like every aspect of creation, of leading us astray from God and into damaging relationships with other people (Prov. 6:25–26).
It is entirely possible, of course, to be beautiful but to lack important qualities of character and perhaps even to neglect the development of these through attachment only to the outward appearance of things (Prov. 11:22; cf. also Matt. 23:27). Most centrally, beauty is not to be compared in value to godliness (Prov. 31:30; 1 Peter 3:1–6), and it is no more important than those many other attributes or gifts that make up the human person (note, e.g., the emphases in Prov. 31:10–31). We remember that the suffering servant of Isaiah 53:2–3 is said to lack notable physical beauty and yet to be central to God’s redemptive plans for the world.
From all this material we learn not to despise beauty or to trivialize it, but at the same time not to divinize it or to allow it to become more important to us than it should. It is one thing (and an important thing) for two lovers to affirm each other for their beauty, and even for a man to speak of his beloved in terms that compare her to divinity (see comments on 2:14). When he does so, he has precedents in the poetry of the ancient Near East (e.g., in King Keret’s description of the beauty of his bride in terms of the divine ideal represented by the goddesses Anat and Ashtarte).10 It is quite another thing, however, for beauty to become the lens through which all reality is filtered and in the light of which all human worth is judged, and thus to become essentially a false god.
Biblical literature stands apart from its ancient Near Eastern context precisely in its insistence that what is created cannot itself be truly divine, and particularly in its teaching that what is human, although reflecting divinity, is not itself truly divine. Biblical authors are acutely aware that when created things become the objects of worship, they cause great human damage. Insofar as beauty becomes to us an idol, it too causes great human damage—to those who have it or desire it or lack it. Insofar as it is received as a gift of God and set in the context of all that is good in God’s creation, it enhances our lives and becomes itself a pointer to God, whose own person it reflects.
Contemporary Significance
Since God Almighty has sealed me with the stamp of beauty, I desire that men should behold it and recognize His grace towards me, and I will not veil it.11
It is strange that those who believe in a God who has created all things should have been found so frequently throughout history trying to “veil” beauty in various ways. It seems that we human beings, in our fallen state, have a deep and insistent urge toward repression. The physical veiling of women as they participate in public life, extending sometimes to the covering of the whole body, is still insisted upon in some (mainly Islamic) cultures to this day, lest the exposure of feminine charms should lead on to male lust and perhaps even to something worse. The idea that it is perhaps men who have a problem here, if they cannot look on beauty without exhibiting a perverse response to it, does not seem to be on the table for discussion.
The same is true of some modern Christian books on male-female relationships, which do not demand of their female readers any literal veiling but do tend to suggest that the main responsibility for improper male attitudes and actions toward females lies with women and not with men and to urge all kinds of semi-veiling as part of a package that might prevent the Christian brother from stumbling. It is all too often the same books that also place the main burden of responsibility on the woman for the prevention of extramarital sexual intimacy with a man.
Christians are the heirs at this point of a long-standing tradition that has characterized (and caricatured) the female as a calculating temptress and the male as the beleaguered victim of temptation and has sought to repress both beauty and sexuality in the cause (as men thought) of a purer spirituality—a spirituality that indeed eschewed all that was sensual and that set faith over against all normal appetites. The Reformation reflected this same understanding of the world in its sometimes deliberately destructive assault on beauty as it came to expression in medieval churches and in its advocacy of worship in barren spaces where nothing could “distract” the worshipers.
A spiritual person comes to be regarded, in the tradition of Christian asceticism (whether Protestant or Catholic) of which we are thinking here, as a person who disguises and or trivializes his or her own beauty, and perhaps even comes to deny it or hate it. Such a person in general pronounces himself or herself much more interested in heavenly, internal things than in what is merely external, earthly, and transient, whether in creation generally or in human beings especially. One cannot be spiritual, in fact, if one does not “veil” beauty, whether in oneself, in others, or in creation at large.
The issue is still a live one in the modern church. The Song of Songs is therefore of great contemporary significance for the modern church. It is not at all uncommon to meet Christians whose faith, as it has been taught to them or has simply been “caught” as they have grown up, has left them with extraordinarily low self-esteem and an inability to affirm the world as a good and beautiful place. They have, in one way or another, imbibed “worm theology,” in which it is crucially important that one at all times and in all ways affirms how sinful and dark the world and the self truly is and denies that apparent goodness, truth, and beauty is anything other than a cover for deep depravity. It is a theology that always sees the world as a glass of water half empty rather than a glass of water half full.
One test of the extent to which worm theology has laid its clammy hands on our souls would be to discover whether we ourselves feel comfortable as Christian people taking the words of the woman in Song of Songs 1:5 or 2:1 (or even the words cited at the head of this section) on our own lips or would regard someone else badly for taking them on his or her lips. If we have grown up in a family where our ordinary humanity has been constantly diminished and set in conflict with what is spiritual, and where criticism for falling short of an ideal has been more common than affirmation of who we are, or if we have been adopted later in life into a Christian community that has emphasized how sinful we are much more often than it has told us how wonderfully we are made and how marvelously our whole beings have been redeemed, then it is unlikely that these words, as Christian words, will leave us untroubled.
This is even more likely to be the case if we have had to endure at some point in our lives the trauma of physical or sexual abuse, for such experiences make it still more difficult to believe that the real material world in which we live is either beautiful or good. They create all sorts of obstacles to the acceptance of either ourselves or others in all our human physicality. The “veiling of beauty” often becomes, in this case, a necessary means of emotional survival.
Whether for this reason or for others, Christian people often seem deeply ill at ease with their humanness, most specifically their bodies, and find it difficult to accept their entire humanity as a divine creation, whatever their theology may theoretically tell them. A repression of the self that may have begun as an external force has now become a driving, internal force, to such an extent that even long-married couples do not attain to a state of “naked but not ashamed” (Gen. 2:25) but are haunted by the ghosts of times past (as well as sometimes being oppressed by the words of preachers present).
The Song of Songs, especially chapter 2, offers the church both challenge and healing. It challenges false dichotomies between the earthly and the heavenly, demanding that we give up all notions that beauty is somehow incompatible with godliness and even with God. It undermines our false belief that beauty should be veiled because it can be dangerous and that a strong sense of the self and its beauty are undesirable in those (specifically women) who walk the Christian path. It legitimates, rather, the enjoyment of and the mutual embrace of beauty as an aspect of the enjoyment and the embrace of God, and it encourages the affirmation of each other in our beauty and “very goodness” (cf. Gen. 1:31).
This mutual affirmation is itself a direct means by which our healing begins, whether in general community terms or in the unique intimacy of the one-to-one committed relationship of marriage. None of us can ever receive too much affirmation from others of the reality that we are beautiful and beloved. No husband and no wife can ever offer the spouse too much affirmation of this kind, in the midst of the intimacy of lovemaking, or be too frank in their language in doing so. It is one of the most direct ways in which the repression in our lives, along with the causes bound up with it and the consequences that flow from it, begins to be addressed and resolved. It is one of the means by which redemption and healing come to us. As two Christian authors have recently well said:
God . . . calls husbands and wives to use our words to push back the chaos and shape our lives into order and beauty. He calls us to use our words to bring life to those who hear them.12
Affirmation of beauty is one way in which this is achieved, for as we understand deep in our being that we are affirmed and loved by God and by others, we will find ourselves able to affirm beauty elsewhere. Only as the church thus reintegrates beauty and godliness in its thinking, in fact, will it be able to act as salt and light in a Western culture that is obsessed with physical human beauty but has lost all sense of perspective about it. Human beauty has indeed become, for the culture, an idol. It is something to be worshiped and adored. It is the provider of all earthly blessings, comfort, and financial security. It is devotion to its cause that leads to such widespread and neurotic attempts artificially to cultivate and prolong it.
The damage to the souls and to the physical and emotional well-being of those who are beautiful is obvious, as is the damage to those who exploit them for profit or pleasure and those who measure themselves by their standard and feel they fall far short. The Christian response to this idolatry should not, however, be that beauty should be repented of (as if this were possible or desirable). It should be that beauty is God-given and not a god.
It is already implicit that in speaking such words, whether to those who worship God or those who do not, Christians are following God’s example, who called beauty out of nothing with his words and yet also set it in order. The affirmations of beauty that flow between the lovers in Song of Songs 2 are in fact not dissimilar to those that flow from God to Israel in Ezekiel 16:7–13, which also employs typically frank biblical language:
You grew up and developed and became the most beautiful of jewels. Your breasts were formed and your hair grew, you who were naked and bare.
Later I passed by, and when I looked at you and saw that you were old enough for love, I spread the corner of my garment over you and covered your nakedness. . . . I clothed you with an embroidered dress and put leather sandals on you. I dressed you in fine linen and covered you with costly garments. I adorned you with jewelry: I put bracelets on your arms and a necklace around your neck, and I put a ring on your nose, earrings on your ears and a beautiful crown on your head. So you were adorned with gold and silver; your clothes were of fine linen and costly fabric and embroidered cloth. Your food was fine flour, honey and olive oil. You became very beautiful and rose to be a queen.
The story of Ezekiel 16 has an unhappy ending, of course, for Israel trusted in her own beauty and betrayed her lover. That God looks for an “intimate ally” in his people, however—that he may make her beautiful and affirm her as his own—is clear enough. Human love at its best reflects this divine pursuit of the beloved, for our love for one another reflects (albeit imperfectly) God’s love for us. It actually helps us (even enables us), in fact, to believe that God does love us and is pursuing us. It is a means of grace, pointing us toward the end of all things as it is pictured in Revelation 19:7:
Let us rejoice and be glad
and give him glory!
For the wedding of the Lamb has come,
and his bride has made herself ready.