Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Song of Solomon · About this commentary
You Are All Beautiful, My Love
Song of Solomon 4:1-7
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. · WEB
The first full praise poem compares by motion rather than by shape, and it ends in a verdict of no flaw.
The praise runs downward from the eyes, and nearly every image moves. Her eyes are doves behind the veil. Her hair is a flock of goats descending the slopes of Gilead — black goats flowing downhill, a dark cascade seen from across a valley. Her teeth are ewes coming up from the washing, every one paired, none missing — matched and complete, a flock with no gap in it. The comparisons are not photographs; they are landscapes in motion, and what they praise is the life in her, not an arrangement of features.
Her lips are a scarlet thread; her temples behind the veil glow like cut pomegranate. Then the tower: her neck like David's tower hung with a thousand shields — ornament described as armament. He praises her the way one praises a defended city, and the book remembers the image: at the end it is she who says I am a wall, my breasts like towers Song of Solomon 8:10. Her strength is part of her beauty from the first inventory.
Her breasts are twin fawns among the lilies — young, soft, alive; the one line of this poem he will repeat exactly, much later Song of Solomon 7:3.
Verse 6 answers her own earlier clock Song of Solomon 2:17: until the day breathes, he will go to the mountain of myrrh — her scent-country. And verse 7 closes the audit with a total: you are all beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you. Love's arithmetic finds nothing to subtract.
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