Commentary on the Song of Songs

Contents

All surviving fragments are staged. Except for 0.1, the English will be translated from Bonwetsch's German version of the Slavonic and Armenian and marked as such (route 3).

Reading pages: 0.1–1.15 · 1.16

1. 0.1Of Solomon's thousands of proverbs and songs only a few books survive, because Hezekiah's scholars selected what served to build up the church.
2. 1.1The breasts of Christ are the two Testaments, whose commandments are milk that nourishes the disciple.
3. 1.2The king's chamber is the church, and the breasts preferred to wine are the two Testaments, which make the faithful sober, unlike the wine that shamed Noah and Lot.
4. 1.3The synagogue, left behind as Christ goes to the Gentiles, asks where he pastures his flock.
5. 1.4The bride is beautiful not of herself but through Christ, fairer than the sons of men, by the washing of regeneration.
6. 1.5Christ warns the bride who does not know her beauty to go out and tend the kids, the souls of sinners; the sheep and goats of the judgment, and Jacob's flock, show that Israel is no longer counted among his sheep.
7. 1.6Christ, the mediator of law and Gospel, lies between the two breasts, the Testaments.
8. 1.7Christ calls the forgiven soul beautiful; the believer from the circumcision is the lily among thorns, bringing out things old and new.
9. 1.8The Bridegroom leaping over the mountains is the Word, who leaped from heaven to the virgin's womb, to the cross, to Hades, to the earth, and back to heaven, and will come again in glory.
10. 1.9The bride is called a dove for her meekness, and is invited, like the burdened, to come to Christ's rest.
11. 1.10The bride is to show herself boldly with the seal of Christ on her forehead, and to confess him with a sweet voice.
12. 1.11The little foxes that spoil the vineyard are the heretics, to be caught while small; Samson's foxes with burning tails foreshadow their judgment.
13. 1.12The bride seeking her beloved by night foreshadows the women at the tomb, who found the risen Christ, held his feet, and became apostles to the apostles, a new Eve undoing the first Eve's disobedience.
14. 1.13The women's witness to the resurrection silences the synagogue; the bride coming up from the wilderness is the Gentile church, and her myrrh and incense signify Christ's burial and the worship of God.
15. 1.14Solomon's couch is Christ, the rest of the weary and of all the righteous fathers; its sixty mighty men are the sixty generations from Adam to Christ, from whose thigh the Word came forth.
16. 1.15The spices of the garden marked Joseph as the king's son and anointed Mary when she conceived the Word.
17. 1.16A long running commentary on Song 1:5–4:16 preserved in Armenian: the black and beautiful bride is humanity renewed by Christ, the watchmen are angels, the breasts are knowledge and sight, and the spices are the manifold good deeds of the righteous.