Diving Past Awkwardness into the Divine

Song of Solomon 1:13 My beloved is to me a sachet of myrrh

resting between my breasts.

14 My beloved is to me a cluster of henna blossoms

from the vineyards of En Gedi.

Okay! Let’s jump right into the awkwardness. It’s a bit awkward for some people when the Bible  starts talking about breasts. Some are like, whoa! Others may have the what??? reaction that I did at first.

The Song of Solomon is beautiful poetry celebrating marital bliss and can be interpreted as an allegory of the relationship between Christ and the church. Sometimes when it hits verses like 1:13 people give sideways glances and look for the exit.

Stay with me! I promise it’ll be worth it!

First, let me unpack some of the symbolism.

When interpreting the Song of Solomon as a love song between Christ and the church, all of the symbols connect to other uses of the symbols throughout the Old and New Testaments.

The breasts are a picture of the breastplate as depicted in the following verse from 1 Thessalonians:

5:8 But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, putting on faith and love as a breastplate, and the hope of salvation as a helmet.

So we see that the poetic symbols represent FAITH and LOVE.

Myrrh was used as an embalming spice and in scripture it often speaks of suffering and death.

Let’s look at this first verse with these symbols in mind:

I hold the death of my Beloved Jesus, that awful death on the cross, close to my heart, nestled in the depths of my faith and love, and I meditate on all that He did for me.

In the next verse we have henna. Henna is a scratchy dessert brush that has fragrant blooms, but what henna is most known for its the red dye that stains the skin and can be painted into beautiful designs. Red like the scarlet cord that hung from Rahab’s window (see Joshua 2:18). Red like the blood that washes away all our sin.

This henna is growing in the vineyards of En Gedi. En Gedi is an oasis in a desert region in southern Israel, so the idea of vineyards and beautiful henna blossoms there gives hint of God’s promise about there being blooms in the desert. The name of the town can be translated as The Spring of the Young Goat.

Huh?

Can we do anything with that?

Do you remember how, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the priest would lay hands on two goats. One goat he would slaughter, the other he would send out into the desert. And that young goat who “bore the sins”, where would it go but toward water?

Jesus is the Yom Kippur sacrifice, and the “Scapegoat” who bore our sins. He is fragrant and beautiful. He is my best thought, my sweetest meditation.