While we were taking our adventure through Ecclesiastes, I was thinking about future blogging subjects; future adventures, trips and journeys, and it occurred to me that the other wisdom writings of Solomon would be a lot of fun to tour. Since I am on a tour of my own right now, when we completed Ecclesiastes, I ran a series on forgiveness because those were very easy to write while I get accustomed to the schedule and demands on my time while I’m away… and so that’s what I did. Now, being a couple of weeks into this, and having completed both Ecclesiastes and Forgiveness, the time has come to resume writing about wisdom literature from Solomon…

Solomon’s other two books of wisdom are Proverbs and Song of Songs, and they both present interesting challenges for blogging. Proverbs is a long book of 31 chapters that has long stretches of no narrative at all, so aside from literary criticism or strict academics, how should one approach it? Song of Songs is short, but it isn’t really a book that many write about these days, partly because parts of it would make some people blush. Oh what fun this is going to be!

After a bit of consideration, here’s what I’ve come up with: Let’s do both!

The next adventure for us here at The Life Project is the Song of Songs, and while this is going on, I’ll also begin Proverbs as an extra post 2 or 3 times a week, more like a feature than a series. Song of Songs will be done in much the same way as other series or studies that have come before.

The first hurdle with this book is to figure out just exactly what Solomon was up to when he wrote it, since that is far from clear. The most obvious solution is that Solomon intended the work to be understood literally as a piece of writing about marriage and intimacy between men and women, and if you just pick it up and start reading, that is sure what it seems to be. Yet I can’t help wondering why Solomon would write such a book about physical intimacy in marriage, especially since his marriage arrangements weren’t exactly what most of us would consider “traditional.” If this is what he was up to, why would it be included in the Bible? Why would God inspire such writing?

Oh there are plenty of questions…

And then I remember that back in ancient times, this was read aloud for Passover…

A love manual?

Of course, there is another way to understand the book, and that is as an allegory about the relationship between God and God’s people. Without going through the litany of objections to this approach, I will add my own little objection to this: In Solomon’s time, the relationship between God and His people had the huge impediment of sin between them, and with that being the case, how could there be any expectation of such intimacy: Was this Messianic?

After all of this, how can we study Song of Songs at all? Maybe that is why there aren’t many studies, books or sermons about it… Did Jonathon Edwards have a sermon on Song of Songs? Maybe like an intimate view of what happens to a sinner in the hands of an angry God just before he is tossed into the fire?

Frankly, that seems unlikely to me, but I haven’t bothered to check before writing this and asking the questions.

Well dear reader, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how we deal with this book until the next post!