Song of Solomon 6:1-13: My Dove...is the Only One

She has lost her husband and goes looking again, and the daughters of Jerusalem ask where he went so they can help her search. He turns up in his garden, grazing among the lilies, and tells her there are sixty queens and eighty concubines, but “my dove, my perfect one, is the only one.” And yet, 1 Kings says he finished with seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, so this line is a confession as much as a compliment. How do we make sense of Solomon’s not-so-exclusive love?

The Rev. Peter Burfeind, pastor of Our Savior Lutheran Church in Union City, Michigan, and Agnus Dei Lutheran Church in Marshall, Michigan, joins the Rev. Dr. Phil Booe to study Song of Solomon 6:1–13.

To learn more about Our Savior and Agnus Dei Lutheran churches, visit facebook.com/oursaviorunioncity and agnusdeimarshall.com.

The Song of Solomon is a book of love poetry, a bride and her bridegroom singing to each other across eight chapters. God's people have sung it since Solomon's day, and Jewish congregations still read it at Passover. The Church has heard in it the voice of Christ and His bride, and Luther quoted the Song in The Freedom of a Christian to describe what happens when Christ takes a sinner as His own. Paul was working the same ground in Ephesians five, where he set marriage beside Christ and the Church and called it a great mystery.