“Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle, that graze among the lilies. Until the day breathes and the shadows flee, I will go away to the mountain of myrrh and the hill of frankincense.” –Song of Solomon 4:5,6 (ESV)
The Song of Solomon is always a refreshing book to come to after proceeding through the somewhat dry book of Proverbs and the heavy book of Ecclesiastes. After hiking through all the wisdom of Solomon, we end with his crowning achievement, a treatise, in poetic form, on romantic love, and it comes like an oasis in a desert.
So, while we're here I want to touch upon a specific, historically favorite topic of the male of the species: the female breast.
Recently, a comment was made by a female member of my wife’s family that she did not understand why men are fascinated by breasts. This alone wouldn’t have been too shocking, except that my wife also echoed the statement, which left me a little floored. On the one hand I shouldn’t have expected her to understand the attraction the same way that any male does (i.e., from experience) but the fact that it was regarded as a puzzling peculiarity of the male sex was fascinating to me. My answer, as it always has been, is that whereas man has always been captivated by the beauty of the fair sex, it is insofar as woman physically differs from man that she is most captivating, and the female breast is one of the most uniquely feminine traits that she possesses. If men everywhere were not taken with them, I should consider it truly puzzling; that they are strikes me as being the most natural thing in the world. Certainly it was true of man some thousands of years ago, as attested by the account of Solomon here. In his Song he focuses his creative energies towards descriptions of his brides’ physical appearance, and although he touches on her from head to toe, he comes back to her breasts on multiple occasions. Even outside of the Song, in his Proverbs he admonishes men to rejoice in their wives, stating “Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight” (see Proverbs 5:18,19)
Of course, one may accuse me of being entirely too pedestrian with the message of the Song of Solomon. Many, throughout history, have attempted to sanitize the book, regarding it as purely allegorical of the relationship between Christ and the Church. It is true that God uses the imagery of marriage as a picture of our relationship to Christ, but it is also true that, although God did in many cases implant a prophetic double-meaning into many Old Testament scriptures, Solomon almost certainly had no such thing in mind when he wrote it. Moreover, although the parallels between marriage and Christ and the Church are useful so far as they go within scripture, much of the Song uses imagery that is so explicit it becomes difficult to reconcile with a purely spiritual meaning. If one examines the two voices in the book, that of Solomon and his bride, both extol the physical virtues of the other, but the bride often focuses on the character of Solomon, his strength and power, and her delight in both captivating him and resting securely underneath his protection; she delights in being delighted in. Solomon, on the other hand, speaks of his wife in largely physical terms, exalting not only in her beauty, but much more intimately in their physical relationship, making allusions to the captivating nature of her physical scent and taste, themes which the bride picks up on herself, beckoning “Awake, O north wind, and come, O south wind! Blow upon my garden, let its spices flow. Let my beloved come to his garden, and eat its choicest fruits.” (4:16). The message is extremely sexual in nature, which is awkward in a treatise of Christ’s love for the Church, and also, if allegorical, it appears backward, as the Church is now beckoning Christ to come and enjoy her delights, when in reality Christ’s relationship with the Church is more properly seen in the book of Hosea, who married a prostitute who betrayed him, running away and making herself destitute, but whom he, through no action of her own, brought back to himself to be his bride once more.
I can only assume that people wish to view the book as strictly allegorical because of a reluctance to view sex in a holy light, but in the Song of Solomon we see romantic, marital, sexual love lifted to a place of prominence, being joined to the rest of the holy scriptures; and what God has joined together, let no man tear apart.
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