Song of Songs 5:2

Context

Song of Songs 5:2–8 is a night scene narrated by the woman herself. A similar night scene appears in 3:1–5. The woman says, "I sleep, but my heart waketh," an expression understood to depict a state between sleep and dreaming. At that moment the man she loves knocks at the door, calling her "my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled," and asks her to open to him, "for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night."

In verse 3 the woman hesitates, saying that she has already put off her coat and washed her feet. When she finally opens the door, he has already gone (v. 6), and she wanders through the city searching for him. The word "sister" here does not denote a blood relationship; it is understood as a term of endearment for a lover in ancient Near Eastern love poetry. "Undefiled" means without blemish.

Interpretation

• Literal reading: Many modern commentators read the scene as a lyric poem portraying the longing, hesitation, and missed meeting of a man and a woman. This reading finds significance in the fact that Scripture treats love between a man and a woman as a gift from God.
• Allegory in Jewish tradition: Allegory is a method of interpretation that treats the figures and events of a text as symbols pointing to another reality. Jewish tradition has read the Song of Songs as a whole in terms of the relationship between God and Israel, and has interpreted this verse within that framework.
• Allegory in Christian tradition: Origen and other Church Fathers, along with many later interpreters, read the Song of Songs as depicting the relationship between Christ and the church, or between Christ and the individual believer. In this framework the one knocking at the door is Jesus Christ, and the hesitating woman represents a church or believer grown spiritually slothful. This reading is often connected with Revelation 3:20. The English Puritan Richard Sibbes is known to have developed this reading in his sermons expounding Song of Songs 4:16–6:3.
• Holding both readings together: Some evangelical preachers today take the primary meaning to be love between a man and a woman, while also reading that love, on the basis of Ephesians 5:31–32, as reflecting the relationship between Christ and the church.

Questions of Application

This verse is not the subject of marked disagreement among denominations. The point at issue is how far symbolic interpretation should be taken. Allegorical readings have been criticized for attaching symbolic meaning to details that have no basis in the text, as when the night dew is interpreted as the sufferings of Christ. Conversely, it is objected that a purely literal reading cannot adequately account for the spiritual significance the book holds within the canon (the books the church recognizes as Scripture).

In sermons in Korean churches, the verse is frequently cited as a text warning against spiritual sloth. Some point out, however, that reading verse 2 in isolation loses the flow of the passage that follows: the woman's hesitation, the missed meeting, and her setting out again to search for him.

Related Passages

• Song of Songs 3:1–5
• Song of Songs 2:16
• Revelation 3:20
• Ephesians 5:31–32
• Matthew 25:1–13