Day 326: Song Of Songs 1-3 | Bible Reading Plan | Bible Study with Commentary by Dr. Manny Arango

Welcome to the Bible department podcast powered by Arma. We are walking through the entire Bible in a year. You can go to the description or thebibledepartment.com to download a reading plan and join the journey. (upbeat music) - Family, welcome to day 326. We are diving into a brand new book of the Bible. We are diving into Song of Songs. And today we've got Song of Songs chapters one, two and three. Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the freaky yes book of the Bible, it's gonna be fantastic. God invented sex, yes he did. It's God's idea, sex is not the enemy's idea. Sex is not just what your flesh wants to do. And for so long in church, we have perpetuated this demonic idea of purity culture. And Song of Songs honestly debunks the entire idea that sex is dirty, filthy, bad. You know, that there should be any guilt associated with it. And so over the next three days, we're gonna dive into this amazing, awesome, wonderful book of the Bible. And so if you haven't done the reading, if you haven't done Song of Songs chapters one, two and three, and I wanna challenge you to stop the video, pause the audio, go get the reading done. You go get the reading done and then come back when we're gonna dive in. I'm gonna give two big disclaimers before we jump into our context clues,

our nerdy nuggets and then obviously our timeless truth for the day. The first disclaimer is we have an entire song of Songs course on the armor platform, where I really do walk through this book, chapter by chapter, verse by verse, line upon line, like a really nerdy deep dive into Song of Songs. We have a purity culture course and a Song of Songs course on the armor platform. Obviously you gotta be a subscriber in order to access that content. So maybe that's something that you want or maybe you're like, you know what? I like the free 99 plan, I'll just stick with what you're doing on the Bible department. Other way, I'm glad that you are here, just wanted to make you aware that if there's something that we don't cover here in the next three days, we got way more than three days worth of content on the library and so you may wanna check out the armor library. All right, second disclaimer is that Song of Songs and the way that the church has engaged with this one book of the Bible is actually indicative of a bigger issue that the church has and that is a real disdain or dislike or maybe even like a denial of humanity like things that are just human. And so there's a lot of things that kind of typically

or stereotypically or generally speaking can make like Christians or church people uncomfortable. And one of those is like the humanity of Jesus. We love talking about the divinity of Jesus and we started talking about the humanity of Jesus. I think it makes people uncomfortable, right? That Jesus, you know, drank, ate, pooped, peed, like that Jesus got tired, he went to sleep. Like, I think, you know, Jesus humanity makes us really uncomfortable, but also when we talk about the humanity of the Bible, we get uncomfortable. So anytime we say, yeah, this is the word of God. People will say, amen. And then you're like, yeah, but it's also the word of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Moses. And people are like, man, I don't know about that. And the same thing is true when we start talking about sex, people are uncomfortable with sex and sexuality really because we're uncomfortable with our own humanity. And there are two extremes, okay? And God is trying to help us to avoid both extremes. And I think that's a big reason why a book like Song of Songs is even in the Bible is the two extremes for the human is to either try to act like an animal or an angel, okay? These are two extremes. The secular society that we live in can be very animalistic. So have sex with whoever you want.

Do whatever you want. No guardrails around sex or sexuality or sexual expression. Just kind of, you can be an animal. You know, you can indulge all your primal urges, you know, being animal. And then in the sacred world or maybe in the Christian world or in the religious world, the emphasis is being angel, be angelic. So app like your sensual, sexual, fleshly desires aren't even there. Suppress them, ignore them, you're an angel. that these two extremes both have pitfalls. I would say equally damaging pitfalls. These extremes are both like really toxic, really dysfunctional and very, very problematic. Whereas song of songs is a celebration of the sexual union and the thrill and the fun and the excitement of sex and the pleasure that comes along with sexual expression and the confines that God says is good for his people and that's the context of marriage. And so, you know, for people who are married there's no angelic behavior. We ain't angels baby, we're gonna act like humans and we're gonna do what humans do, but we're also not animals. And extremes are easy, but truth is found when you hold things in tension. And I think that's what the book of song of songs is doing. I mean, I believe that's what it's designed to do.

And if we believe that the devil invented sex or that it's evil or inherently wrong, man, that creates so many problematic ideas. Not only did God invent sex, but that makes me like God. Way more. I can rock with a God who could invent something as awesome and pleasurable and fun and fantastic as sex. And that God, whatever God invented sex, I'm rocking with that God, I like that God, okay? That sounds like a fun God to me, all right? God could have made it so that humans procreate with no pleasure, but he did it. He wanted the act of procreation to be pleasurable. God could have made it so that food or drinks like coffee didn't have a taste, but he created taste buds, okay? 'Cause he's a God of pleasure. And there's nothing wrong with pleasure. And one of the things that you're gonna notice throughout the book of song of songs is that it's not just about sexuality, but sensuality, that your senses should be engaged, the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the ears, the feel, okay? That your senses should be engaged. And one of the problems with purity culture, it's almost like if you make people feel like sex is bad, sex is bad, sex is bad, don't do it, don't do it, don't do it, don't do it. And you just turn all of someone's sexual urges off. And then it's almost like we have this unrealistic

expectation that once people get married, it's just gonna flip on. And now it's back, whereas I know so many Christian couples where it's like, you know, they got sold this lie that if they ignore sex, don't think about it, you know, just it's bad, it's bad, it's bad, you know, they got sold this lie that God's gonna bless you with the best sex life ever. They're gonna get married and it's gonna be fantastic. And the reality is that I know a lot of those couples, I've counseled a lot of those couples, I've passed a lot of those couples, where they got married and it wasn't awesome, it wasn't fantastic. Actually, all that messaging of this is bad, this is bad, this is bad, this is bad, has created an inability in both men and women for their bodies to even function the way that God is on the function. I know young women who, because of religious ideas and because of purity culture, struggle with issues like vaginismus, which means that like your vagina literally just closes up and nothing's getting in, nothing's getting out. And they've gotten married, realized that nothing could happen and how to go get, you know, how to go seek a therapist and like get healing because the church's messaging is sex is bad, sex is bad, sex is bad, sex is bad, sex is bad. On the other end of the extreme, you know,

that's the angelic, you know, you're an angel, you're an angel, you're an angel, you don't have desires, you don't have desires, suppress, suppress, ignore. Like that's damaging, that literally creates damaging effects. I know married people who are Christians who barely have sex, they're in a relationship that is sanctioned by God, God is like, go for it, have fun, and they still can't get over the guilt or the shame that they learned in church, okay? The other extreme is I know people who, you know, prior to getting married lived animalistic lives, just like no guardrails, no self-control. And, you know, it's like because of the effects of pornography have now come into marriage. And again, being human, they've been, they've acted like animals for so long And if you act like an animal for too long, you won't know how to be human. My goal over the next three days is just to quiet down all those animal urges and quiet down all that angelic purity culture crap and just kind of restore humanity. Humanity. You're human and you were designed for sex. You were designed to enjoy sex. You were in designed God made sex for you. Like he made it so that you could enjoy the union of becoming one with one person for one lifetime. That anything outside of that is outside of God's you know realm desire for you. So all right, I only got a couple of minutes left and I've talked a lot. So those disclaimers took up a lot of time. Let's actually get to a context clue and at least a couple of nerdy nuggets for the day without this episode getting too too long. I hope that that's helpful. And let's talk about our big context through for the day. So there are four main interpretive approaches for even looking at a book like Song of Songs. Now the first one is probably the one that most of you are familiar with. Okay. And it's the one that I'm going to debunk the most. Okay. So there are four interpretive approaches before you even read the book. You kind of have to decide how am I going to interpret this book. Okay. So I'll give you the

four should take a notes. There's an allegorical approach. And I would say that part of the reason that we allegorize a book like Song of Songs is because sex makes it uncomfortable. And I'm going to try to help us to fight the urge to allegorize this book. An allegorical approach is just going to make Yahweh the groom Israel the bride or Jesus the groom and the church the bride. And none of this is about sex. None of this is about sexual sexuality or sensuality. And it's just all about you know, Jesus in the church. There's a lot of people who preach that and teach that. I'm going to say that's nonsense. That's literally not founded in an academic or scholarly approach to read in the Bible. That's not exegetically honoring to the text. That is a total manipulation of the scriptures. Anyway, all right. Number two, there's a cultic approach. This approach kind of views or this view okay holds that these are originally Canaanite mythological erotic poems that would have been used in their first form in fertility cults. Okay. And then what happened is that the the Jewish people got ahold of this stuff and cleaned it up and y'all will find it. Okay. This view points to the fact that there are similar poems that existed in the cults of Baal and Tamuz which were used in sexual fertility rights as a part of worship. The idea is that these poems were taken by the Israelites edited with the obvious Canaanite pagan elements removed to create a sanitized Israelite version to be used in wedding ceremonies. Okay. So that's that. Okay. I don't line up there but legitimate approach. Okay. So allegorical approach, cultic approach. Third, you may be familiar with this one. We call this the dramatic approach. Okay. This attempts to create a plot within this collection of poems. So the separate erotic poems are in fact one story of the beloved and the bride. Okay. This is why in many translations the text is separated into characters to give the impression that you are reading a screenplay. There are two versions of this drama which either two uh so two versions. Okay. It's either that there are two main characters or what is effectively a love triangle. Okay. Those are the two uh options for the dramatic approach. The first option is the story of the beloved who could be Solomon who falls in love with a simple country girl and brings her back home to the palace. The second is a love story between a shepherd and a country girl who is then taken by Solomon to his harem. The girl ultimately rejects Solomon and returns to her shepherd lover. In both dramas chapter three verse six to chapter five verse one is seen as the wedding in the first night of the honeymoon. And so is the central part of the story. This is a very popular view uh way to view the book especially in Protestant circles. But there's one issue with it. An issue that is also problematic

in certain ways of viewing Job and Revelation. The issue is that there is no evidence that Israelite or the wider Semitic world had this form of drama or theater in their culture. Greeks. Yes. Jews. Not so much. So that leaves us with a fourth approach and it's going to be the approach that honestly we're going to focus on the most. It's the one that has the most So we've talked about allegorical, cultic, dramatic and now lyrical. Possibly the most common view held by scholars today. And one of the things that I want to emphasize all the time on this podcast is that there are things that are normal in school, like theology school or like Bible school or like seminary, normal views to have, but that are weird at church. And part of what we're doing or trying to do is like bridge the gap that exists between academia and the church. We need like a church that's smart. Like we need Christians who are intelligent, okay? I wish there was a more tactile way to say that, but it's just a reality. All right, family, the weight is over. My brand new book, "Crushing Chaos" is out now and available everywhere books are sold. Literally today, I walked into a Barnes and Noble and I signed a bunch of copies at a physical location. So you can grab this book at a physical Barnes and Noble or you can go to a books a million or Amazon or anywhere books are sold and grab a copy. If you enjoy reading the Bible from an ancient perspective, if you understand that the beauty of scripture is actually knowing it in context,

then you'll love this book. And if there's any chaos in your personal life, I think that reading the Bible from an ancient perspective can actually help to crush the chaos in your life. I think this book is gonna be a New York Times bestseller. I really do. I think we wrote a good one. I think you should get a copy today. All right, back to the episode. The most common view held by scholars today is that this song of songs that we have here in the Bible is a collection of wedding songs, possibly written by different authors at different times, but then later brought together in this collection. It is not meant to be an allegory, is originally Hebrew, which means it's not cultic and is not meant to be seen as a story. It does, however, show how Jewish wedding ceremonies often reflected on the original marriage in Eden. This is why the garden setting and the garden metaphor is used throughout the poems. Weddings are when man and woman come together as one flesh in a reflection of what happened in the garden with Adam and Eve. That is the garden ideal where the man and the woman were naked together with no shame. How many poems there are as debatable? With some saying there's little as five poems

in song of songs. In some scholars saying there could be up to 34 individual poems right here in Song of Songs, just in eight short chapters. So I think that the cultic approach has zero legitimacy. I think that the dramatic approach has small amounts of legitimacy. I actually do think that the allegorical approach has a small amount of legitimacy, but only in that Yahweh is seen throughout the Old Testament as a groom and Israel is seen in the Old Testament as a bride. Now, here's what Judaism and Christianity... Well, here's what Judaism 100% definitely tried to avoid. In the Greco-Roman world, it was normal for gods to have sex with humans. Think about like Hercules. Okay, Hercules is the combination of a god Zeus, having sex with a human, which creates a demi-god named Hercules. And there's tons of gods in the Greek pantheon and that's how they came to exist. It's because the gods are really humans with superpowers and these gods have sex with women. The ancient world, especially the books like Luke, go out of their way to make it very clear there's no, like Jesus is not a demi-god. So like there's no world where Yahweh had sex with Mary in any way, shape, or form. And so I would caution anyone

who's trying to allegorize these poems and make them about Christ in the church because I would actually say the New Testament, particularly, is doing the exact opposite. Like the New Testament is trying to separate God the Father from erotic or sexual activity as much as possible. And to be honest, that's kind of gross. Like if we're just talking about love, then yeah, like, yes, God loves his children and Jesus loves the church. But this song or song isn't just about love. It's about erotic sexual love. And when we talk about erotic and sexual love, that is the kind of love. We do not have an erotic or sexual type of love relationship with God, we don't. I'm sorry, like, we don't. Does the Father love us? Yes, like does Jesus love us? Yes, but we should be avoiding all kinds of ideas that God is somehow involved with us sexually or erotically. Well, how people don't see that natural pitfall when you allegorize a book like Song of Songs? I don't know, but hey, so what is Song of Songs actually designed to do? It's designed to help humans celebrate this amazing thing that God made called sex and to put it back in its original context, which is the Garden of Eden.

All right, I'm gonna give a couple of nerdy nuggets and then we're gonna close the episode 'cause I'm already over time. Okay, I'm gonna just outline where the poems actually start and finish. So the first poem is gonna be from chapter one, verse two to chapter two, verse seven. Okay, that's poem number one. Poem number two is chapter two, verse eight, to chapter two, verse 17. So that poem is pretty short, okay, nine verses. And then poem number three is even shorter. It's chapter three, verse one to chapter three, verse five. And then poem number four, which we'll really get into tomorrow, is chapter three, verse six, to chapter five, verse one. So it starts in today's reading, but it really ends in tomorrow's reading. So we'll talk about it tomorrow. Couple of things that I just wanna highlight as we kind of move through this. First, the female character is the first to speak, which is really cool because one of the things that Song of Songs is trying to do is trying to get you back to the ideal, which is Adam and Eve as co-leaders in the garden. It's not 'til the fall that we have Adam who's placed over Eve and there's a lot going on there and we don't have time to get into it. But what we have here is that the woman is initiating.

The woman's the first voice that we hear because it's not God's goal for men to subjugate women but for women to be leaders in the relationship. Also, the woman's voice is contrasted to Eve's voice whereas Eve spoke and led Adam to sin. The woman here is gonna speak but she's gonna continually be saying, "Hey, don't arouse love or wake in love until it's time." You can tell she's a little insecure about her darkness. So, as being a black male, it's important for me to really exegete like what's going on here. Well, in this culture, paler skin was more desirable and had nothing to do with race but had everything to do with wealth and status. So, if you were wealthy, you didn't have to work the vineyards. You could stay indoors, protected from the sun. But if you were outside it, the issue wasn't the darkness of your skin. The issue was that the darkness of the skin proved that you were poor or that you were working class, okay? And so, she's saying, "Oh man, I'm dark. "I'm still beautiful, she's still confident." But she's like, "Ah, I hope the fact that I'm, "that I come from a working class family "isn't an issue for you, okay?" And it's not, and he then compares her to a mayor. Now, what's the, this is verse nine. Now, what's the analogy here? What's going on is that Pharaoh's chariot horses

would have been pulled by stallions, male horses. And what she's saying, what he's saying is that imagine a mayor in heat, a female horse in heat walks by, those stallions are gonna go crazy. And what the man here is saying is like, "You aroused me. "You're dark skin ain't a problem for me, girl. "You make me go crazy, okay? "It's hard for me to have self-control "when I'm around you." I would say that's a good thing, that's a good thing. All right, I don't have time to go into the rest of these nerdy nuggets. I got a lot of them here. We'll pick up with nerdy nuggets tomorrow, but I will say this as our timeless truth, two things in our timeless truth. We need to be leery of purity culture. I had a couple come to me and, you know, it was premarital counseling. They were engaged, ready to get married. And I was like, all right, like, is it hard, you know, like to keep your hands off each other? And they're like, no, pastor, we're good. And I went, well, that's a red flag. I think I threw them off guard by being very like, well, that's weird. Like, if you're not so attracted to each other that it's not hard to keep your hands off each other,

I don't know that I would get married. You should be struggling. Like, that's good. You shouldn't be falling into temptation, but you should actually be attracted to each other physically. And if you're not having a problem keeping your hands off each other, to actually be in a long-term relationship. That's just timelessly true. Is if you're a man and you're dating a woman and you guys are Christians, you should feel like you're a stallion and she's a mayor and he. You should feel like, god dang man, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I gotta, I gotta figure something out here, okay? If you're just kinda like, yeah, we're fine. I'm not tempted. That's a red flag. You may wanna break up. You may not like that girl. You know, she may know how to pray and do all types of things, but you just may not be attracted to her and it's okay to admit that. Second, our second time is true. The timing is everything. We're gonna get a repeated phrase throughout the book but definitely throughout today's reading, but just as daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you by the gazelles and by the doughs of the field.

Well, gazelles and doughs wait to their in heat. They have a time to mate. They don't just mate constantly all year long. Okay, so I charge you by the gazelles and the doughs of the field. Do not arouse or awaken love until it's so desired. So timing is everything. And so if you're 20, I don't know, two, 23 and you're broke, well then, you have no choice but to control your sexual urges because you don't, you need to put love to sleep. You don't need to awaken anything. And so timing, timing is everything. Timing is everything. And you don't want to make a decision about marriage just because you lack self-control. Timing and part of what the wisdom literature is doing is helping us with timing. That's what books like Ecclesiastes are gonna do. It's like, hey, there's a time under the sun for everything. That's what song or song's gonna emphasize. Hey, there's time for love, the time for sex, there's a time for marriage and you shouldn't rush into this just because you're horny. Like that would be foolish. And that's not just true for the daughters of Jerusalem in the context of song or songs. That's true for you. That's true for me. That's timelessly true.

All right, tomorrow we got day 327. We're gonna continue our trek through song or songs. We're gonna be looking at chapters four, five and six. Same time, same place. I hope to see you right here as we continue looking at the freakest book of the Bible is gonna be fantastic. I love you guys so much. Hey, if you're on the street, I'm proud of you. If you are not on the street, I still love you and I'll see you right here tomorrow. Peace. - Thanks so much for joining us on the Bible Department podcast. If this episode was helpful, how about you leave a comment, share with a friend and subscribe so that you never miss an episode. To learn more about the show, head to thebobledepartment.com. We'll see you right back here tomorrow.