GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
SONG OF SOLOMON 7:5
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5 Your neck is like an ivory tower.
Your eyes are like the pools in Heshbon,
the ones by the gate of Bath-rabbim.
Your nose is like the tower of Lebanon,
that overlooks Damascus.
The husband continues his praise of his wife’s features. Here his gaze shifts from her neck to her eyes and then to her pretty nose. His comparisons are not obvious to us, but that’s okay. Would my wife have understood what I meant if I told her that her slender fingers were like the narrow rills that flow into Rowan Creek on a quiet summer morning in glorious Poynette?
It seems that the more important word in the comparison of her neck is not so much the tower as the ivory part. She was embarrassed about her sunburn at the beginning of the Song (1:6), but he assures her that her neck is ivory to him. Some readers may not know that ivory is taken from the tusks of elephants and other creatures like walruses (2 Chronicles 9:21); it’s the stuff that piano keys were once made from, or the white pieces in a chess set. Ivory is mentioned in the Bible as something craftsmen inlaid into furniture (1 Kings 10:18; Amos 6:4). It would be wildly impossible to construct a tower of it, or even to inlay the exterior of one with ivory (the deck of a visionary ship is inlaid with ivory in Ezekiel 27:6). But the overall color of the stone or bricks might be ivory-colored.
One creative critic added a letter to “ivory” (ha-shen) to get “Heshbon” to bring the first line into perfect symmetry with the second, but Hebrew parallelism doesn’t generally achieve its purpose that way.
The husband talks about his wife’s eyes with reference to a specific set (or pair) of pools. Heshbon was a city on the east (right-hand) side of the Jordan (Numbers 21:26-34). There are the remains of a very large reservoir there. These pools are probably lost to history, but deep waters suggest a dark eye color, whether blue or brown or even deep grey. “Bath-rabbim” either means the daughter of nobles or the daughter of many, but here it is only the reference to a place, and the words should not be taken to have any other special significance in the Song.
What about her towering nose? Is he saying that she has a great big sniffer? He could be saying that her nose is like one of those lovely, firm peaks that could be said to have a certain symmetry. Was one of them called “the tower of Lebanon” in ancient times? Surely he is at least saying that her nose is not flat or weak, but also not atypical since the peaks all around Damascus are quite uniform and impressive. It is therefore probably not the size of her nose, but the quality of it, that he praises. But sometimes the ancient people of the orient were a little more direct than we might be, and maybe he really is just saying that he likes her big old honking nose. This is an excellent way for a husband, if only in a teasing way, to cheer his wife up about a feature she might be self-conscious about.
Neck, eyes, and nose. We have seen how a husband compliments his wife about these things. What about the union of Christ and his church? The neck supports the head, of course, but since “the head is Christ” (Ephesians 4:15; 5:23; Colossians 2:10), we turn our attention not to the support of Christ, but to his position. He is over all, and therefore he is over even the highest authority of man, which in the church is represented here by the ivory neck of the bride (who stands for the whole church). Even those valuable and most honorable leaders, such as the apostles and other “pillars” (Galatians 2:9) are subordinate to Christ in all things. We hear Christ praising these leaders here; which will also take place in the final judgment (Matthew 25:21, 23).
Her eyes see all things. The vigilance of the church might be at least one point we can make here. We watch, as Christ often commanded: “Keep watch, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming” (Matthew 24:42; 25:13). The church watches for the signs of the end (Mark 13:37), but also for the work of the church, correcting what needs to be corrected (2 Timothy 4:2), encouraging when there needs to be encouragement (Romans 12:8), and praising one another when it is right (1 Corinthians 11:2). We watch our doctrine closely (1 Timothy 4:16; 2 John 1:8), and we watch for false teaching and false teachers (Romans 16:17).
The nose catches fragrances; those it likes it tries to smell again, for this delight fills the body with pleasure. If it smells something bad, it leads the whole body to turn away so that it won’t encounter that again. “We are to God the aroma of Christ,” Paul said, “among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. To the one we are the smell of death; to the other, the fragrance of life” (2 Corinthians 2:15). In this way, the nose stands for those ways in which we express fellowship, both embracing it with some and also rejecting it with others. The stench of the unbeliever will surely rise (Joel 2:20), but the fragrance of the sweet knowledge of Christ is like the delightful scent of the cedars of Lebanon (Hosea 14:6; 2 Corinthians 2:14).
Encouraging each other– most especially those who are dearest to us– is part of the Christian life. Don’t take each other for granted. Don’t assume that people know you love them, or what you mean by the clipped shorthand you’ve been using with them for your whole relationship, friendship, or marriage. If you mean to say “I love you,” say, “I love you.” After all, to love one another is one of the last things the great Apostle John said to the church (2 John 1:5). And simply to greet one another? To say that we’re pleased to see each other? He said that, too (3 John 1:14). I’ve had the pleasure of seeing most of my family in the past few weeks and days. To simply reaffirm lifelong love and friendship is a priceless gift. But as Job says, it is God’s intimate friendship that blesses a man’s house most of all (Job 29:4).
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
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Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota
God’s Word for You – Song of Solomon 7:5 Neck, eyes and nose