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Song of Solomon

Song of Songs

About this book
Chapter 7

1 The Lover to His Beloved: How beautiful are your sandaled feet, O nobleman’s daughter! The curves of your thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a master craftsman. 2 Your navel is a round mixing bowl—may it never lack mixed wine! Your belly is a mound of wheat, encircled by lilies. 3 Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle. 4 Your neck is like a tower made of ivory. Your eyes are the pools in Heshbon by the gate of Bath Rabbim. Your nose is like the tower of Lebanon overlooking Damascus. 5 Your head crowns you like Mount Carmel. The locks of your hair are like royal tapestries—the king is held captive in its tresses!⁠ 6 How beautiful you are! How lovely, O love, with your delights! 7 The Lover to His Beloved: Your stature is like a palm tree, and your breasts are like clusters of grapes. 8 I want to climb the palm tree and take hold of its fruit stalks. May your breasts be like the clusters of grapes, and may the fragrance of your breath be like apples! 9 May your mouth be like the best wine, flowing smoothly for my beloved, gliding gently over our lips as we sleep together. 10 The Beloved about Her Lover: I am my beloved’s, and he desires me! 11 The Beloved to Her Lover: Come, my beloved; let us go to the countryside; let us spend the night in the villages. 12 Let us rise early to go to the vineyards, to see if the vines have budded, to see if their blossoms have opened, if the pomegranates are in bloom—there I will give you my love. 13 The mandrakes⁠ send out their fragrance; over our door is every delicacy, both new and old, which I have stored up for you, my lover.

Texts in conversation

Compare Song of Solomon 7:5 and John 12:3

Hebrew Bible · New Testament

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Summary

Song of Solomon pictures the king held captive in the woman's flowing hair. The gospel of John uses a similar image of a man and a woman's loose hair when Mary of Bethany wipes Jesus's feet dry at dinner.

Passages

Song of Solomon 7:5

Hebrew Bible · Song of Songs
4 Your neck is like a tower made of ivory. Your eyes are the pools in Heshbon by the gate of Bath Rabbim. Your nose is like the tower of Lebanon overlooking Damascus. 5 Your head crowns you like Mount Carmel. The locks of your hair are like royal tapestries—the king is held captive in its tresses! 6 How beautiful you are! How lovely, O love, with your delights! 7 The Lover to His Beloved: Your stature is like a palm tree, and your breasts are like clusters of grapes.
300–201 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in the Song of Solomon

John 12:3

New Testament
1 Then, six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus lived, whom he had raised from the dead. 2 So they prepared a dinner for Jesus there. Martha was serving, and Lazarus was among those present at the table with him. 3 Then Mary took three quarters of a pound of expensive aromatic oil from pure nard and anointed the feet of Jesus. She then wiped his feet dry with her hair. (Now the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfumed oil.) 4 But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was going to betray him) said, 5 “Why wasn’t this oil sold for 300 silver coins and the money given to the poor?”
90–110 CE (scholarly estimate) Read in John

References

... Like the woman in Luke, Mary anoints Jesus’ feet, but there are no tears, no kisses. There is no need here for extravagant contrast. She simply anoints his feet and wipes them with her hair. This action more nearly resembles the example from Sipre on Deuteronomy 33:24 where a female slave washes her master’s feet in oil, yet the intimacy of Jesus and Mary’s relationship suggests something more. One possibility is that the narrator is evoking images from the Song of Songs (see Winsor). Two phrases, in particular, resonate with the scene described in John: In Song of Solomon 1:12, the king (a title of affection for the beloved) is said to be reclining on his couch, while the woman’s nard gives forth its fragrance (12:2–3), and in Song of Solomon 7:5b–c, the king says of the woman, ‘the curls of your hair are like purple, the king is bound in your tresses’ (12:3a; see Winsor: 21–22). “King” is among the images John uses for Jesus (1:49; 12:13, 15; 18:33–19:22; compare 6:15) while Mary is described as one whom Jesus loves. In evoking these images from the Song of Songs, the narrator describes Mary’s intimate relationship with Jesus, her beloved, who, like the king in the Song of Songs, is caught in her tresses. The erotic overtones signal the depth of this relationship between the lover and the beloved ...
Holly E. Hearon, “The Story of ‘The Woman Who Anointed Jesus’,” in Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity, ed. Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher, SemeiaSt 52 (Atlanta: SBL, 2005), 115.

References are not endorsements of their contents. Read each reference in full to understand its author's intentions in using these texts.

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Song of Solomon 7:5 and John 12:3

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