One last bit of background before we jump into the verse by verse (mostly) look at the Song.

The Song is a short book as compared to other books like Genesis with its 50 chapters or Isaiah with its 66. It is made up of 8 chapters and a total of 117 verses. It would not be a difficult matter to memorize the entire song.

And yet…

In this short song the writer users 470 unique words.

47 of those verses (fully 10%) don’t show up anywhere else in scripture.

51 appear 5 times or less outside of the Song.

45 occur 6 – 10 times.

27 clock in 11-20 times.

That leaves us with 300 more common words.

Since this is an ancient language, many of these unique words can’t be found outside the Song either. For this reason, much of what we understand about this work must be derived by context and interpretation.

As striking as these unique words that fill the book, that which is missing may be more perplexing. There is no mention of God in the Song or any of the normal names for God.  But that’s not all. It does not contain any of the major religious words of the Old Testament, such as glory, mercy seat, (a.k.a. atonement,) throne, ark, ram, ox, bull, altar, offering, evil, law, faithful, truth, atonement, sin, honor, bless, prophet, save and many more. This Song stands distinct from all other literature in the canon of scripture. This uniqueness tends to explain why there are so many different ways people look at this song, and why we need to keep from being too dogmatic about our approach to it. *

My Goals in this study:

Each of us would take the Song into our own prayer life.

We would identify ourselves in the Song.

We would each see and sense God’s passion for us.

We would each see God’s passion for every believer.

Each of us will take steps toward greater spiritual maturity. I would define this as a passion to work with Christ in His ministry to others.

OK – Next week we dive in. Are you ready?

Thanks for coming by.

Ben

* The Song of Solomon – an Introduction and Commentary – G. Lloyd Carr – Intervarsity Press – 1984 pp 41-42