A few days ago we read about how, when King David was old and frail and suffering from what sounds like a prostate infection, they found a virgin named Abishag to be his bedmate to keep him warm (I Kings 1:1-3). “The girl was very beautiful … but the king did not know her sexually” (1:4). After David had died, Adonijah used up his second chance by asking that Abishag be given to him as wife (2:17). But as Absalom had demonstrated, when the prince takes his father’s concubine it’s tantamount to claiming the kingdom (II Samuel 16:20-22); and so Solomon had Adonijah put to death (I Kings 2:25). There is no further mention of Abishag by name.

Yet if the title “The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s” (Song 1:1) means it was written by or about Solomon (rather than, say, dedicated to his memory many centuries later), then it would be the story of how Solomon and his bride fell in love and got married. We will see that Solomon eventually became quite famous for the size of his harem, with 300 wives and 700 concubines (I Kings 11:3); the story of “how Solomon fell in love” with wife #178 or with concubine #593 would hardly be what anyone would write about. But they might tell the story of a very young Solomon falling in love with the most beautiful girl in the kingdom.

The heroine of the Song of Songs is called Shulammite (6:13). This probably means “Mrs. Solomon,” and it may also play on the word Shunammite (a person from Shunam, a village in the Jezreel valley – Abishag the Shunammite’s home town). This is admittedly not a lot to go one, yet a number of biblical scholars have proposed that Abishag was the heroine of the Song of Songs, and that the poetic saga given there is the story of the love of Solomon and Abishag.

It is perhaps surprising to find in the Bible eight chapters of erotic poetry about the beauty and challenge of human sexuality. The text certainly doesn’t appear to be talking about religion when it speaks explicitly about the bride’s beauty (Song 2:15-16, 4:1-7), about misunderstanding and miscommunications between lovers (5:2-6), and about sexual longing (1:2-3, 2:6) and fulfillment (4:16-5:1). If we take the words for what they plainly say, Song of Solomon shows us clearly that the Bible is not afraid, here and elsewhere, to urge us to celebrate and revel in the wonder of married love (Proverbs 5:18-19; Genesis 2:23-25).

Many commentators have taken the further step of seeing the passion of lovers as a parable of God’s love for humanity. Several centuries later, for example, Hosea saw that imagery like this could be used to describe God’s intense longing to reconnect with Israel (Hosea 2:14-19). Several centuries after that, Paul proposed that the joining of husband and wife is a great mystery that gives us a way of understanding the relationship of Christ and the church (Ephesians 5:31-32). What would it be like, then, if we today were bold enough to take Song 7:10-12 in just the same way?

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Set a fire in our hearts, O God! Let us yearn for union for you with eager longing, like bride and groom: with laughter and joy and passionate fulfillment in the depths of your love.

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