Charles Ellicott Commentary Song Of Solomon 8:6

"Set me as a seal upon thy heart, As a seal upon thine arm: For love is strong as death; Jealousy is cruel as Sheol; The flashes thereof are flashes of fire, A very flame of Jehovah." — Song Of Solomon 8:6 (ASV)

Seal. —See Jeremiah 22:24; Haggai 2:23, and others. A symbol of something especially dear and precious.

Jealousy. — Strong passion, from a word meaning to be red with flame; not in a bad sense, as the parallelism shows:—

“Strong as death is love,
Inexorable as Sheol is ardent passion.”

Grave. —Hebrew sheôl. Perhaps, as in the Septuagint, Hades, with its figurative gates and bars (Psalms 6:5, Note).

Coals. —Hebrew resheph; in Psalms 78:48, hot thunderbolts ; in Job 5:7, sparks; Margin: sons of the burning;Deuteronomy 32:24, burning heat of the burning fever of the plague.

A most vehement flame. —Literally, a flame of Jah, the only place where a sacred name occurs in the book, and here, as in the Authorised Version, adverbially, to express something superlatively great and strong. Southey’s lines are a faint echo of this:—

“But love is indestructible,
Its holy flame forever burns,
From heaven it came, to heaven returns.”