My Beloved Is Mine

Part Two followed the union God made at the beginning, in which a man and a woman become one flesh and one spirit and come to know each other. Part Three follows what God did with that union, for He took the marriage He had made and used it as the picture of His covenant with His people.

From here on, Scripture speaks of His love in the language of a bride and her husband. The prophets will call the LORD the Husband of Israel, Yeshua will call Himself the Bridegroom, and the last book of the Bible ends with a wedding. Before any of that, though, the Bible gives a whole book to the words of lovers themselves. Its first line reads: “The Song of songs, which is Solomon’s.” It is a song of a bride and her beloved, and in it the two talk to each other and about each other openly, as people in love do. If we want to know how Scripture itself describes the love of a covenant, this is the first place to listen.

“My Beloved”

Near the end of the second chapter, the bride says the simplest sentence a bride can say.

Song of Songs 2:16 My beloved is mine, and I am his, who feeds among the lilies.

Her word for him is dodi, “my beloved,” from dod (דּוֹד), the Song’s own name for the one she loves, and what she says about him takes only a few words: he is mine, and I am his. No price is named and no terms are written down. Two persons are given to each other, and each belongs to the other. The belonging is mutual, and it is exclusive: there is no third person in the sentence.

Four chapters later she says it again, but the order has turned around.

Song of Songs 6:3 I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine, who feeds among the lilies.

The first time, she began with what she has: “My beloved is mine.” Now she begins with whom she belongs to: “I am my beloved’s.” Both halves are still there.

Near the end of the Song she says it a third time, and now the first half is gone altogether.

Song of Songs 7:11 I am my beloved's, and his desire is toward me.

(YLV Song of Songs 7:11, Masoretic verse order) She no longer says “he is mine.” She says “I am my beloved’s,” and she adds what she knows about him: “his desire is toward me.”

Belonging Both Ways

This two-sided belonging is not a decoration that the Song adds to love. It is the shape God gave to marriage at the beginning, when a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife and the two become one flesh. Neither one owns the other as a thing is owned; each is given to the other.

It is also the shape of the covenant. When the LORD promised the new covenant through Jeremiah, the promise ended with a sentence of exactly this kind: “and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.” He is theirs, and they are His. The covenant does not say only that God owns a people, and it does not say only that a people has a God. It says both, as the bride says both.

That is why the Song comes first here. When the prophets after Solomon spoke of the LORD as the Husband of His people, a reader who has listened to the Song hears in them the same voice: my beloved is mine, and I am his.

A Seal on the Heart

The Song reaches its height in two verses we met at the very beginning of this book.

Song of Songs 8:6-7 Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, jealousy is hard as Sheol; its flames are flames of fire, a flame of Yah. Many waters cannot quench love, neither do the floods drown it. If a man (ish אִישׁ eesh) would give all the wealth of his house for love, he would be utterly despised.

The bride asks to be set as a seal (chotam) upon his heart and upon his arm. In the ancient world a seal was the stone or ring a man pressed into clay or wax to mark what was his and to confirm his word. She asks to be that mark: on his heart, where no one sees, and on his arm, where everyone sees.

Chapter 1 introduced the three words that carry the verse: ahavah, love, “strong as death”; qin’ah, jealousy, “hard as Sheol”; and shalhevetyah, “a flame of Yah.” One of them needs a second look here, because Scripture uses the same family of words for God Himself when He renewed His covenant with Israel at Sinai:

Exodus 34:14 For you shall not bow down to another god; for the LORD, Jealous is his name, is a jealous God.

“Jealous is his name.” The jealousy of the Song, qin’ah, and the “Jealous” of Sinai, qanna, come from one root. A love that will not share its beloved is the love that says, “you shall not bow down to another god.” In the covenant, that jealousy is not a weakness in God. He will not share His people with another god, and the flame of this love, “a flame of Yah,” is His.

Many Waters

“Many waters cannot quench love, neither do the floods drown it.” In Hebrew the many waters are mayim rabbim. The flood account does not use that phrase, but it says that “the waters increased” and “increased greatly” (Genesis 7:17-18), and the picture recalls the flood we read about at the close of Part Two, through which God brought eight souls safely while the whole earth was judged. The Song is not telling the story of the flood, but the echo fits: no water could put out His love. Death could not hold this love either, for it is “strong as death.”

And it cannot be bought. “If a man (ish) would give all the wealth of his house for love, he would be utterly despised.” A man may buy land, servants and gold, but he cannot buy the heart of a bride, and the attempt only makes him contemptible. Love of this kind is given, never purchased.

This is the love God would use to describe His own covenant.

That raises a hard question. If God’s love is a flame of jealousy, strong as death, what happens when the one He loves betrays Him, not once but again and again? In the days of the kings of Israel, the LORD told one of His prophets to live out the answer. He was to marry a woman who would go after other lovers, so that Israel could see in his house what it had done to its God.