A marriage of cosmic proportions is about to take place between Yeshua the Messiah and his saints who keep his commandments, have the testimony or faith of Yeshua, who are washed in his blood and follow him (the Lamb) wherever he goes. This ministry is dedicated to helping to prepare you (the bride) for Yeshua (the Bridegroom). The Song of Solomon is a poetic and romantic picture of this wedding process.
Maybe this will give you a different, more Hebraic, perspective on the Song of Solomon—the most romantic book in the Bible.
The Three Main Phases to the Jewish Wedding and the Biblical Feasts
1) Betrothal (Shitre Erusin) – Passover, Unleavened Bread and Pentecost
2) Consummation and the Wedding Feast (Nesuim) – The Feast of Trumpets, Day of Atonement and Feast of Tabernacles
3) Together for Eternity (Olam Haba) – The Eighth Day picturing the New Jerusalem
The Three Main Phases and Sub-Phases of the Wedding in the Song of Solomon
Song 1:1–3:5 — The Betrothal Phase (Erusin)
a) The Ketubah. The young man prepares a marriage contract or covenant which he presents to the young woman and her father called a ketubah (writing). This is a formal written document which stipulates the terms of the proposal he is making.
b) The Bride’s Price or Mohar. This is the price the young man is willing to pay the father for the father’s permission for the young man to marry his daughter.
c) The Cup of Acceptance. If the marriage contract and the bride’s price are acceptable to the father, the young man would pour a cup of wine for his intended and would hold it out to her. If she would accept it and drink it then this would be her acceptance of his proposal. The bridegroom would then prepare for the joyous occasion of the upcoming marriage by bringing gifts for his beloved which would be tokens of his love for her. After the young man left to return to his father’s home, the bride would begin to prepare herself for the upcoming marriage ceremony. She would start with a ceremonial cleansing (or mikveh) whereby she would purify herself in preparation for her husband. At this point the young couple were betrothed.
The Preparation Phase
a) The groom would go to prepare a place for her. Though the couple was legally bound in marriage they would not cohabit. The groom would return to his father’s house and begin to prepare a wedding (honeymoon) chamber for his wife. This process would take up to a year or more. Only when the father of the groom would approve that the chamber was ready would the groom be released to get his bride.
b) The bride would make herself ready. While the groom was preparing a place for his bride, she would be busy preparing herself by making herself beautiful. When the young bride would leave the house she would wear a veil to show that she was “spoken for” and that she was no longer available since she was “bought with a price”. She was consecrated to her bridegroom.
Song 3:6–6:1 — The Reunion Phase
a) Upon receiving word from the father the wedding chamber was complete, the groom would steal away to fetch his bride. She would not know the day or the hour of his coming, so she had to be continually ready for his arrival. She had to be ready at a moment’s notice. She and her bridesmaids had to make sure they had plenty of oil in their lamps in case he came at night.
b) Coming for the bride. The coming of the groom would be a surprise to the bride. He would come accompanied by his two groomsmen (or two witnesses). When the wedding party would get close to the bride’s house they would give a shout and blow the ram’s horn (shofar) to let the bride know they were coming. They would charge right into the house and carry off the bride and bridesmaids.
Song 3:6–8:4 — The Wedding Phase or Nuptials (Nesuim)
c) The wedding party would arrive at the groom’s father’s house where the newlyweds would enter the wedding chamber and consummate the marriage and honeymoon for seven days. This established their covenant union. During intercourse, blood is spilled proving that the bride was a virgin.
The Celebration Phase
The celebration would last for seven days while the newlyweds are in celebrating their honeymoon. Following this would be the marriage supper which is given in honor of the newlyweds.
Song 8:5–14 — Eternity Together (Olam Haba)
The newly married couple begins life together.
Do I have to pay a Bride Price or is asking the Father and Mother of the Bride good enough if the bride to be is no longer a virgin ?
Paying the bride’s price was the cultural norm of ancient Near East culture. Why? Because that culture was basically agrarian, and each child worked on the family farm. When a young man took the young lady away from the family farm, this diminished the economic viability of the family farm-economy. This is why the young man paid a price to the father to compensate for the family’s financial loss. The economic “asset” of another worker was lost to the family, but to the gain of the young man’s family, which is why it was worth it for him to pay the brides family a compensation. These factors don’t exist in our Western modern culture, so it’s no longer an issue today.
WOW WOW WOW! What a great exegesis…I did not know this….thanks you! How awesome is our Elohim!
The really neat thing about the marriage of Christ and His Church is that it symbolizes the “blood covenant” that God made with Abraham, whereby blood (e.g. life!) is intermingled between man (Christ) and the bride (Church). The Divine Blood brings Eternal Life.
This is what Paul referred to as a “great mystery”, wherein he revealed that the marriage of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is a foreshadow of Christ’s marriage to the Church and that “the two shall become one flesh” (i.e. our resurrection body like Christ’s!)
I’ve read commentaries on the Song of Solomon and I’ve read…even “ingested” the book and honesty, finding Christ and His bride in it has always been a case of special pleading. There are too many “loose ends” in the narrative that don’t/can’t be wedged into the Christ and His bride theme.
I doubt you’ve read any commentary on the Song of Solomon from a pro-Torah, Hebraic perspective. Perhaps if you did, the lose ends would fall into place. I have written one, but it’s not published yet.
We have to be multidimensional in our approach to understanding Scripture instead of linear. The former approach is the Hebraic context in which the Scriptures where written, as opposed to latter approach, which is the more syllogistic, linear logic of Greco-Roman thinking, which is how most of us were taught to think.
As with most poetry, the Song, I believe, can be read from various perspectives while all are true at the same time; there are different levels of meaning and interpretation all occurring at the same time. For example,the Jewish sages teach that there are four levels of interpretation to understand the Scriptures: peshat (literal), remez (suggested or hinted at meaning), drash (allegorical) and sod (mystical). There are numerous examples of this in the Scriptures. I have written on this in the past. When applied to the Song, it could be the literal love between a man and his wife to be (or peshat), and also between Yeshua and his bride (drash).
I hope this gives you some food for thought.
Well, pro-torah? I think the one book I found most enlightening as far as hebraic thought, while not strictly “prophetic” in its intentions, was Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek Thought by Thorleif Boman.
Yes! I can see strands of the Christ and His bride theme but…the whole narrative is more experiential of two people and their “historical” tension than Christ and His many membered “body”.
SoS 3:4…at what time did the church find the Christ and desire to bring Him into the house of “her” mother? Into the chamber of “her” who conceived me? This and other verses (8:1-2) are evocative of a male who isn’t sold out for love and commitment…it speaks of a man who has to be umm…persuaded. Christ?
I have Thorlief Boman’s book in my library (an autographed copy) and quoted him extensively in my paper on the subject (http://www.hoshanarabbah.org/pdfs/heb_grk.pdf).
Regarding the subject of the Song, you are free to believe what you want, and this is not the place to get into a lengthy debate as to the merits or demerits of one view point or another. As noted earlier, I have written a whole running commentary on the Song explaining why I believe as I do. Presently, it’s unpublished and not ready for public release.
Suffice it to say, once one has a deep understanding of the layout of the biblical hebraic wedding, how that relates to the biblical feasts and how that relates to the seven/eight steps of salvation as outlined in the Tabernacle of Moses, it is easy to see the love of Yeshua and his bride outlined in the Song. If one doesn’t have that background of understanding, then, I agree, it would be difficult to read this angle into the Song, and probably nothing I can say will convince them.
What I am suggesting here in no way replaces a more literal reading of the Song. It is simply an additional level or layer of understanding on the more allegorical level in addition to a plain, simple or literal understanding of the text.