GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
SONG OF SOLOMON 7:5
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5 Your head crowns you like Mount Carmel,
your flowing hair is like a royal crown.
The king is captured by your tresses.
Mount Carmel is not a massive, snowy peak like Mount Hermon. It’s not a perfectly rounded summit like Mount Tabor. It’s a long, a very long, ridge that begins at a modest 600 feet as it emerges out of the mountains of Samaria and runs northwest, climbing higher and higher, for eighteen miles, until it suddenly juts into the air, 1600 feet in the air, ending in a cliff that plummets into the Mediterranean Sea, forming the Bay of Acre. Just before it reaches the sea at its highest summit (1800 feet) is the place where the prophets of Baal faced Elijah (1 Kings 18:20). All along its slopes, and especially near the sea, it is studded with pines, evergreen trees of many varieties, as well as oaks and chestnuts. Flowering plants, shrubs and bushes are also there on the slopes, giving a wonderful fragrance at many times of year: “bay, storax, linden, artbutus, and innumerable others… with flowers of every hue, orchis, cyclamen, tulip, lily, like the Garden of Eden run wild.” It was the national park, so to speak, of the land of Israel; the best of everything in one place. No wonder a man might compare his wife’s pretty hair with this crown of the region covered in undulating forests and groves and pleasant flowers.
The second line of the verse uses the word “purple” as a proper noun rather than as a descriptive adjective. We need to supply something to understand the meaning, which here I’ve done with “royal crown.” The wife’s glory is her long hair (1 Corinthians 11:6) and a sign on her head that there is an authority in her life (her husband, 1 Corinthians 11:10). We read earlier that her hair is flowing and black (4:1; 6:5), and her husband is captivated by it, as if she has caught him in her robe by opening it up and wrapping it around them both. He has no reason to struggle; he is delighted by this capture.
He calls himself “the king” in a private joke. In their own humble house, he is king and she is queen, and they are content. But this also brings us back to calling her hair, her “purple.” Sometimes hair can be so black as to appear blue or purplish-blue in sunlight or lamplight, and that could also be part of what he means. This is also a point made in pagan poetry (Lucian, Anacreon). As a husband looks at his wife’s hair, especially if her hair is long, he may see it caught by the breeze into many strands, and these become ropes, bonds, and fetters in his happy heart; she catches him in these strands and holds him fast.
Spiritually, the term “king” is no joke or mere nickname. Christ the King loves his bride the Church. As John the Baptist said, “The bride belongs to the bridegroom. The friend who attends the bridegroom [who was John] waits and listens for him, and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom’s voice. That joy is mine, and it is now complete” (John 3:29). What is more, “the bride has made herself ready” (Revelation 19:7). How is this possible? Her bright clothing was given to her; it was not chosen by her or made by her, but was a gift (Revelation 19:8). This fine linen means “the righteous acts of the saints” (Revelation 19:8b), but those things are done in response to the King’s love, not in order to earn it or deserve it.
Later in John’s vision, the bride of Christ is shown to the apostle “on a mountain great and high” (Revelation 21:10), from which he saw the holy city, the Church, “coming down out of the heaven of God.” The mountain reminds us of Carmel, but it must be much higher. But how could the Church be in heaven already? Because its greater part is always made up of the souls who have gone before (1 Thessalonians 4:16). They were born again by faith, they were born through the Word of God (John 1:13), and Christ the King recognizes and proclaims that she, the Church, is the heiress of the kingdom of heaven (Romans 8:17; 1 Peter 3:7; Titus 3:7; Galatians 3:29, etc.). Our Confession (the Smalcald Articles) says very simply about the church: “Thank God, a child knows what the church is, namely, holy believers and sheep who hear the voice of their shepherd. So children pray, ‘I believe in the one holy Christian church.’ Its holiness does not consist of (special clothes) or ceremonies which people have invented over and above the Scriptures, but it consists of the Word of God and true faith.” Christ forgives, draws, and loves this bride of his, and in humility and eternal surprise we find that we ourselves, poor sinful wretches that we have always been, are part of that blessed estate, the bride of Christ our King.
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 The bride’s hair