Song of Solomon 5
The Song moves into its sharpest turn yet. The beloved speaks first, answering the invitation at the close of the previous chapter: I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse (v. 1). But the scene quickly shifts to night, and to a line that has echoed in the church for centuries: I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying, Open to me (v. 2). He stands at the door and asks to be let in - and she, already at rest, hesitates over the small trouble of rising. I have put off my coat; how shall I put it on? (v. 3). The hesitation is brief, but it costs everything: by the time she opens, my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone (v. 6).3
What follows is one of the most affecting passages in the book - a night of seeking that does not, at first, find. I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he gave me no answer (v. 6). She goes out into the city after him, and the watchmen who should have helped instead smote me, they wounded me (v. 7). Undeterred, she lays a charge on the daughters of Jerusalem: if you find him, tell him, that I am sick of love (v. 8). Their reply is a question that draws out the heart of the whole chapter: What is thy beloved more than another beloved… that thou dost so charge us? (v. 9). Why this one? What makes him worth the wounds and the wandering?
Her answer is the great descriptive song at the center of the chapter, and it rises to some of the most quoted words in all of Scripture: My beloved is white and ruddy, the chiefest among ten thousand (v. 10). She praises him from head to foot - his countenance like Lebanon, his hands like gold rings, his lips like lilies - and gathers it all into one final word: his mouth is most sweet: yea, he is altogether lovely. This is my beloved, and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem (v. 16). The whole night of seeking is answered not by a list of his deeds but by the sheer worth of who he is - and the long Christian tradition has heard, in this voice raised in love, an echo of the soul's desire for the One who first stood at the door and knocked.2
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
Song of Solomon 5:1-6It Is the Voice of My Beloved That Knocketh
1I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice; I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk: eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved. 2I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying, Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night. 3I have put off my coat; how shall I put it on? I have washed my feet; how shall I defile them? 4My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him. 5I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh, and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock. 6I opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone: my soul failed when he spake: I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he gave me no answer.
The chapter opens with the beloved's own voice, answering the invitation that closed the previous chapter: I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice; I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk (v. 1). The garden has been, all through the Song, an image of the bride herself - her love, her person, her welcome. Here the beloved enters it and delights in it, and the language is one of glad and full enjoyment: he has gathered, he has eaten, he has drunk. There is nothing grudging or partial in it. And then the verse widens its arms to include others: eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved. Joy this full is not hoarded; it spills outward and calls the companions to share in it. The opening sets a tone of consummated gladness - which makes all the sharper the turn that comes next, when night falls and the same beloved is found, not at the table, but outside a closed door.
Now comes the line that has echoed in the church for centuries: I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying, Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled (v. 2). The bride is at rest, asleep - and yet not wholly asleep, for her heart is awake, listening, attuned even in the night. And what wakes her fully is a sound: the voice of the one she loves, knocking at the door. He has come through the dark to reach her - my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night - and he asks, tenderly and with a string of endearments, simply to be let in. Notice how much is carried in that small picture. He does not force the door. He knocks, he calls, he waits on the other side of it for her to open. The whole weight of the moment rests on whether she will rise. Love that knocks is love that honours the freedom of the one it seeks; it asks, it does not break in.
And here the chapter turns painfully honest about the human heart: I have put off my coat; how shall I put it on? I have washed my feet; how shall I defile them? (v. 3). The bride hesitates. Not out of any great refusal, not because she does not love him - but because rising is, in the moment, a small inconvenience. She has undressed for the night; she has washed her feet; to get up and cross the floor means undoing her comfort. The reasons are almost embarrassingly trivial, and that is the point. It is rarely a grand betrayal that keeps us from the door. It is the accumulation of small disinclinations - the warmth of the bed, the trouble of rising, the preference for ease over response. The Song does not flatter her here, and it does not flatter us. The cost of the chapter's whole long night is set in motion by a hesitation most people would not even notice in themselves.
Then something moves her past the hesitation: My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him. I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh, and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock (vv. 4-5). His gesture - reaching toward the latch, his hand visible through the opening - breaks her resolve. In the Hebrew idiom, the bowels are the seat of deep feeling; she is stirred to her core. So she rises at last, and even her rising is fragrant: her hands drip with myrrh upon the lock, as though love itself has perfumed the act of opening. The detail is lovely and a little aching. She does come; she does rise; the hesitation gives way. But the Song is careful about timing. By the verse that follows, we learn that the delay, however brief, was not without consequence.
The blow falls quietly: I opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone: my soul failed when he spake: I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he gave me no answer (v. 6). She opens the door - and the doorway is empty. He has gone. The reach of his hand was the last of him she saw. And the grief that follows is total: my soul failed, the Hebrew suggesting that her very life seemed to go out of her at his departing word. She does the only thing love can do: she seeks and she calls. But for now there is no answer. This is not punishment in any harsh sense; it is the strange experience, known to every deep love, of a felt absence - the beloved near enough a moment ago to touch the latch, and now somewhere out in the night, sought and not yet found. The Song refuses to pretend that love is always met the instant it reaches out. Sometimes the answer to opening the door is an empty threshold and a long search.3
Song of Solomon 5:7-9I Am Sick of Love
7The watchmen that went about the city found me, they smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took away my vail from me. 8I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if ye find my beloved, that ye tell him, that I am sick of love. 9What is thy beloved more than another beloved, O thou fairest among women? what is thy beloved more than another beloved, that thou dost so charge us?
The night-search takes a hard turn: The watchmen that went about the city found me, they smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took away my vail from me (v. 7). The very ones whose office was to guard and to help instead strike her, wound her, and strip away her veil. The contrast with an earlier scene in the Song is sharp - once she found the watchmen and they pointed her toward the one she sought; now they are the source of her injury. The detail is left undeveloped, and the Song does not pause to explain it, but its effect is plain: the path of seeking is not always safe, and those who set out after a deep love sometimes meet not help but hurt along the way. What is striking is what the wounding does not do. It does not turn her back. She is beaten and shamed in the open street, and her very next breath is still about him. The injury does not cool her longing; it only sets it in starker relief.
Undeterred by the blows, she turns and lays a charge on the women of the city: I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if ye find my beloved, that ye tell him, that I am sick of love (v. 8). The phrase sick of love - lovesick, faint with longing - has sounded before in the Song, but here it carries the weight of the whole night behind it: the missed encounter, the empty doorway, the wounds of the watchmen. She is not asking the daughters to find a remedy for her longing; she is asking them to carry word of it to him. The message is the longing itself. There is something searching in this. Real love does not want to be cured of its ache when the beloved is absent; it wants the beloved to know the ache, and to come. Her commission to the daughters is, in effect, a love letter sent out into the dark: tell him I cannot be well until he is found.
The daughters of Jerusalem answer her charge with a question, and it is the hinge of the whole chapter: What is thy beloved more than another beloved, O thou fairest among women? what is thy beloved more than another beloved, that thou dost so charge us? (v. 9). They are not mocking her; they are genuinely asking. What makes this one worth so much? Why him and not another? What is it about your beloved that justifies the search, the wounds, the lovesickness, the charge laid on us? It is the question every great love eventually has to answer - the demand to say, in words, why this one and no other. And it is a generous gift to the chapter, because it opens the door to the answer that follows. Were it not for the question, we would not have the praise-song. The daughters' what is thy beloved more than another? is the very thing that draws out of her the portrait that has been treasured ever since.
Song of Solomon 5:10-16He Is Altogether Lovely
10My beloved is white and ruddy, the chiefest among ten thousand. 11His head is as the most fine gold, his locks are bushy, and black as a raven. 12His eyes are as the eyes of doves by the rivers of waters, washed with milk, and fitly set. 13His cheeks are as a bed of spices, as sweet flowers: his lips like lilies, dropping sweet smelling myrrh.
Now the bride answers the daughters' question, and her answer is a portrait: My beloved is white and ruddy, the chiefest among ten thousand (v. 10). The opening line sets the key for everything that follows. White and ruddy speaks of health and vitality - a fair, clear complexion flushed with the colour of life; he is radiant, vigorous, fully alive. And then the line that has rung through the centuries: the chiefest among ten thousand. Out of a multitude - ten thousand, a number that simply means past counting - he is the one who stands out, the one marked, the one lifted above all the rest. The Hebrew has the sense of a figure raised on a banner, conspicuous above the crowd. This is the heart of her reply to what is thy beloved more than another? He is not one beloved among comparable others; set him in a host of ten thousand and the eye goes straight to him. Everything that follows is simply the unfolding of that first claim.
She begins, as such descriptions did, at the head, and reaches for the most precious things she knows: His head is as the most fine gold, his locks are bushy, and black as a raven. His eyes are as the eyes of doves by the rivers of waters, washed with milk, and fitly set (vv. 11-12). His head is fine gold - the costliest of metals, the image of what is most valuable and most pure. His hair is thick and dark, full of youthful life. And his eyes are likened to doves by the rivers of waters, washed with milk - gentle, clear, calm, perfectly set like jewels in their place. This is the language of treasure and tenderness together: gold for worth, doves for gentleness. She is not cataloguing features in a cold inventory; each comparison reaches for something rare and lovely in the created world - gold, doves, milk, water - to say that he gathers all of it into himself. The praise is unhurried and adoring, lingering over each part as a heart in love will linger.
The portrait grows fragrant: His cheeks are as a bed of spices, as sweet flowers: his lips like lilies, dropping sweet smelling myrrh (v. 13). Now the senses widen from sight to scent. His cheeks are a garden bed of spices, raised and aromatic; his lips are lilies, and they drip with sweet smelling myrrh. The same myrrh that dripped from her own hands upon the lock when she rose to open (v. 5) now drips from his lips - a quiet thread tying her love to his, the fragrance shared between them. There is a particular tenderness in praising the lips, for the lips are what speak, what kiss, what bless. The bride dwells on the part of him that addresses her. And the whole image - spice beds, sweet flowers, lilies, myrrh - returns us to the garden of verse 1, into which he had come to gather his spices. The beloved she describes is himself a garden: a place of fragrance and life, beautiful and good to be near.
14His hands are as gold rings set with the beryl: his belly is as bright ivory overlaid with sapphires. 15His legs are as pillars of marble, set upon sockets of fine gold: his countenance is as Lebanon, excellent as the cedars. 16His mouth is most sweet: yea, he is altogether lovely. This is my beloved, and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem.
The praise builds toward grandeur: His hands are as gold rings set with the beryl: his belly is as bright ivory overlaid with sapphires. His legs are as pillars of marble, set upon sockets of fine gold: his countenance is as Lebanon, excellent as the cedars (vv. 14-15). The materials grow more magnificent - gold rings set with precious stones, bright ivory inlaid with sapphire, pillars of marble on bases of gold. The imagery is almost architectural, as though she is describing not merely a man but a temple or a king's hall: stately, strong, adorned, built to last. And then the comparison lifts to its height: his countenance is as Lebanon, excellent as the cedars. Lebanon was the great northern range famous for its towering cedars - the very wood from which Solomon built the house of the LORD. To say his bearing is like Lebanon is to say he is majestic, lofty, awe-inspiring, the way a mountain crowned with ancient cedars takes the breath. The tenderness of the doves and the lilies has not vanished, but it now stands beside true grandeur. He is both gentle and magnificent - near enough to love, lofty enough to wonder at.
And then the whole portrait gathers into one summit of a line: His mouth is most sweet: yea, he is altogether lovely. This is my beloved, and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem (v. 16). She has gone from head to foot, naming part after part, and now she sums it all: not lovely in this feature and lacking in that, but altogether lovely - in the Hebrew, his whole being is made of desirable things. There is nothing in him the heart does not delight in. And then, having reached that height, she does something quietly remarkable: she names him not only her beloved but her friend. The two words together hold the whole relationship. He is the one she loves with all the longing the chapter has shown - and he is also the one she knows, trusts, is at home with. Desire and friendship in the same breath. This is her full answer to the daughters' question. What is her beloved more than another? He is altogether lovely, and he is her friend. There is no higher thing she could say.
Further study
- The Hebrew text of Song of Songs 5 with Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and other classical commentators side by side - useful for dagul me-revavah (v. 10, “the chiefest among ten thousand,” literally marked out from a multitude) and for kullo machamadim (v. 16, “altogether lovely,” literally all of him desirable things), the two phrases on which the whole praise-song turns.
- Song of Solomon 5 ↔ Revelation 3 · Psalm 45 · John 15Intertextual BibleTraces the threads tying Song of Solomon 5 to the rest of Scripture - the beloved knocking at the door (v. 2) read alongside Behold, I stand at the door, and knock (Rev. 3:20), the beloved fairer than the children of men (Ps. 45:2), and the beloved who is also my friend (v. 16) beside I have called you friends (John 15:15).
- The NET Bible's detailed footnotes on Song of Solomon 5 - the imagery of the knock and the dripping myrrh on the lock (vv. 2-5), the difficult night-search and the watchmen (vv. 6-7), and the descriptive praise-song (the wasf) of verses 10-16 with its head-to-foot catalogue of precious materials.
Where this echoes in Scripture
It Is the Voice of My Beloved That Knocketh
- Revelation 3:20Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.The beloved knocking at the door (v. 2) taken up by the risen Christ - a voice, a knock, and a supper for the one who opens.
- John 10:27My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.The bride knows him by <em>the voice of my beloved</em> (v. 2) - as His own know Him by His voice.
- Mark 13:35-36Watch ye therefore... lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping.The cost of the bride’s hesitation while she rested (v. 3) - the call to be ready and not asleep when He comes.
- Luke 12:36like unto men that wait for their lord... that when he cometh and knocketh, they may open unto him immediately.The opposite of the bride’s delay - the servant who opens to the knock <em>immediately</em>.
- Isaiah 55:6Seek ye the LORD while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near.The seeking and calling of verse 6 - the urgency of answering while the beloved is near.
I Am Sick of Love
- Jeremiah 29:13And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart.The promise behind the bride’s long search (vv. 6-8) - the seeking that searches with the whole heart does find.
- Psalm 73:25Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee.The answer to the daughters’ question (v. 9) - the beloved valued above every other.
- Philippians 3:8I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord.The lovesickness of verse 8 in another key - counting all else loss for the worth of the One sought.
- Song of Solomon 3:1-2By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.The same night-search as verses 6-7 - the soul rising to seek the one it loves.
- 1 Peter 2:7Unto you therefore which believe he is precious.The bride’s coming answer to <em>what is thy beloved more than another?</em> (v. 9) - the preciousness of the One believed on.
He Is Altogether Lovely
- Psalm 45:2Thou art fairer than the children of men: grace is poured into thy lips: therefore God hath blessed thee for ever.The beauty of the beloved (vv. 10-16) sung of the King - fairer than the children of men.
- Philippians 2:9-10God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name.<em>The chiefest among ten thousand</em> (v. 10) - the One lifted above every name.
- John 15:15Henceforth I call you not servants... but I have called you friends.The bride’s closing word - <em>this is my friend</em> (v. 16) - the very name Christ gives His own.
- Colossians 2:9For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.<em>He is altogether lovely</em> (v. 16) - the whole fulness gathered in Him.
- Hebrews 1:3Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person.The surpassing loveliness of verses 10-16 - the radiance and exact image of the Father.