Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Song of Solomon · About this commentary
Altogether Lovely
Song of Solomon 5:9-16
9 How is your beloved better than another beloved, you fairest among women? How is your beloved better than another beloved, that you do so adjure us? · WEB
The daughters' challenge produces Scripture's one extended praise of a man's body, and its last word is friendship.
The daughters answer her plea with a challenge: how is your beloved better than another beloved? Asked twice, with an edge. It is the question every love must eventually answer in public — what exactly is so special? Her reply is eight verses long. It is the only sustained praise of a man's body in Scripture, and the woman speaks it.
Radiant and ruddy, the best among ten thousand. His head finest gold; his hair black as a raven; his eyes doves bathing by full streams. His cheeks are beds of spices, his lips lilies dripping myrrh. Even in her praise, his mouth matters as much as his frame — these lovers never stop prizing each other's voices. His arms are rods of gold set with beryl, his body ivory work with sapphires, his legs marble pillars on gold bases. His bearing is like Lebanon, choice as its cedars.
The materials are worth noticing: gold, ivory, marble, cedar. She describes him in the vocabulary of temple and palace construction, the way his praise made her a defended city and a locked garden. Each builds the other into architecture. Neither describes a body so much as a place where they live.
Then the summary, after all the gold: this is my beloved, and this is my friend. The last word is companionship — the plainest word in the list, and the one the whole inventory was building toward. Her answer to what is he more than another ends not in his splendor but in what he is to her.
settled What this mark means