Song Of Solomon 1:4 - Exposition

Draw me, we will run after thee: the king hath brought me into his chambers: we will be glad and rejoice in thee, we will make mention of thy love more than of wine: rightly do they love thee. This is best taken as all spoken by the bride. It is the language of the purest affection and adoring admiration. "I drew them," God says ( Hosea 11:4 ), "with cords of a man, with bands of love." "The Lord appeared of old unto me," says Jeremiah ( Jeremiah 31:3 ), "saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with loving kindness have I drawn thee." In the same sense the Greek word ἐλκυεῖν is used by our Lord himself of the Father drawing to the Son, and of the Son, uplifted on the cross, "drawing" all men unto him (cf. John 6:44 ; John 12:32 ). If the spiritual meaning of the whole poem is admitted, such language is quite natural. The king's chambers are the king's own rooms in the palace, i.e. his sleeping, rooms and sitting rooms—the penetralia regis. We may take the preterite as equivalent to the present; i.e. "The king is bringing me into closest fellowship with himself, not merely as a member of his household, but as his chosen bride." The concluding words have caused much discussion. The meaning, however, is the same whether we say, "The upright love thee," or "Thou art rightly loved." The intention is to set forth the object of love as perfect. The plural, מֵישָׁרִים , is used to signify the abstract of the word, thought, or act; i.e. "righteous," for "rightly" (cf. Psalms 58:2 ; Psalms 75:3 ); but the best critics think it could not be the abstract for the concrete plural, as in the Vulgate, Recti diligunt re. The same use of the word is seen in Song of Solomon 7:9 , "The best wine that teeth down smoothly for my beloved" (cf. Proverbs 23:31 ). Before going further in the song, it is well to observe how chaste, pure, and delicate is the language of love; and yet, as Delitzsch has pointed out, there is a mystical, cloudy brightness. We seem to be in the region of the ideal. It is not a mere love song, though it may have been the commemoration of an actual past. The Eastern form of the words may be less suited to our taste than it would be to those who first embraced Christianity, and to the nineteenth century than to the first; but the loving rapture of the Church in fellowship with the Saviour is certainly seeking a more vivid expression in song, and there are many of the most simple-minded and devoted Christians whose joy in Christ pours itself out freely in strains not much less fervid and almost as sensuous as anything to be found in Solomon's Song. Some are beginning to remonstrate against this freedom of devotional language, but the instinct of the Church seems to justify it as the demand of the heart under the influence of the Word of God itself. Perhaps there is a state of religious feeling coming into the experience of Christians which will remove the veil from such a book as the Song of Songs, and we shall yet find that its language is needful and is not extravagant.