Charles Ellicott Commentary Song of Solomon 6

Whither is thy beloved gone... By a playful turn, the poet heightens the description of the lover’s beauty by the impression supposed to be produced on the imaginary bystanders to whom the picture has been exhibited. They express a desire to share the pleasures of his company with the heroine, but she, using the figure previously employed (Song of Solomon 4:12–16), declares that his affections are solely hers, and that, far from being at their disposal, he is even now hastening to complete his and her happiness in their union.

Difficulties crowd on the dramatic theory at this passage. Most of its advocates resort to some arbitrary insertion, such as, “here the lovers are re-united,” but they do not tell us how the distance from the harem at Jerusalem to the garden in the north was traversed, or the obstacles to the union surmounted. In the imagination of the poet, all was easy and natural.

Beautiful ... as Tirzah. There is no sufficient reason for using Tirzah alongside Jerusalem in this comparison except that they were both capitals, one of the northern and the other of the southern kingdom. This fixes the date of the composition of the poem within certain limits (see Excursus I.). Jeroboam first selected the ancient sanctuary of Shechem for his capital but, for some unexplained reason, moved the seat of his government first to Penuel, on the other side of the Jordan, and then to Tirzah, formerly the seat of a minor Canaanite prince. (See 1 Kings 12:25; 1 Kings 14:17; 1 Kings 15:21; 1 Kings 15:33; 1 Kings 16:6; 1 Kings 16:8; 1 Kings 16:15; 1 Kings 16:18; 1 Kings 16:23; Joshua 12:24.)

Robinson identified Tirzah with Tellûzah, not far from Mount Ebal, which agrees with Brocardus, who places Thersa on a high mountain, three degrees east of Samaria. Tirzah remained the capital only until the reign of Omri but came into notice again as the scene of Menahem’s conspiracy against Shallum (2 Kings 15:14–16). The Septuagint translates Tirzah as εὐδοκία, and the Vulgate as suavis; the ancient versions generally adopt this approach, as Dr. Ginsburg thinks, to avoid mentioning the two capitals, because this argued against Solomonic authorship.

As Jerusalem. See Lamentations 2:15. Regarding the idea involved in a comparison so strange to us, we notice that this author is especially fond of finding a resemblance between his beloved and familiar localities (see Song of Solomon 5:15; Song of Solomon 7:4–5). Nor was it strange in a language that delighted in personifying a nation or city as a maiden (Isaiah 47:1), and which, ten centuries later, could describe the new Jerusalem as a bride coming down from heaven adorned for her husband (Revelation 21:9 and following).

An army with banners. Hebrew: nidgalôth, participle of the niphal conjugation, meaning “bannered.” (Compare:

“And what are cheeks, but ensigns oft,
That wave hot youth to fields of blood?”)

Overcome. — Margin: puffed up; Hebrew hirîbunî, from the verb rahab, a word whose root-idea seems to be to show spirit against oppression or prejudice. (Proverbs 6:3.) The Hiphil therefore means: make me spirited, or bold. (Compare Psalms 138:3.) The Septuagint and Vulgate, however, followed by many moderns, take it in the sense of scare or dazzle.

For the rest of the description, see Note, Song of Solomon 4:1 and following.

There are threescore queens. — Presumably this is a description of Solomon’s harem (compare with Song of Solomon 8:11–12), though the numbers are far more restrained than in 1 Kings 11:3. Probably the latter marks a later form of the traditions of the grand scale on which everything at the monarch’s court was conducted, and this, though poetic, is a truer version of the story of his loves. The conjunction of alamôth with concubines, pilageshîm (compare παλλακή, pellex), determines its translation as puellœ rather than virgines.

My dove ... is but one. —“While the monarch’s loves are so many, one is mine, my dove, my perfect one: one, the delight of her mother, the darling of her who bore her.” It is impossible not to see in this a eulogy on monogamy, which, in practice, seems always to have been the rule among the Jews, the exceptions lying only with kings and the very rich. The eulogy is made more pronounced by putting an unconscious testimony to the superiority of monogamy into the mouths of the “queens and concubines,” who praise and bless this pattern of a perfect wife.