Song of Solomon 4

World English Bible 84 include this book

1 Behold, you are beautiful, my love. Behold, you are beautiful. Your eyes are like doves behind your veil. Your hair is as a flock of goats, that descend from Mount Gilead.

2 Your teeth are like a newly shorn flock, which have come up from the washing, where every one of them has twins. None is bereaved among them.

3 Your lips are like scarlet thread. Your mouth is lovely. Your temples are like a piece of a pomegranate behind your veil.

4 Your neck is like David’s tower built for an armory, on which a thousand shields hang, all the shields of the mighty men.

5 Your two breasts are like two fawns that are twins of a roe, which feed among the lilies.

6 Until the day is cool, and the shadows flee away, I will go to the mountain of myrrh, to the hill of frankincense.

7 You are all beautiful, my love. There is no spot in you.

8 Come with me from Lebanon, my bride, with me from Lebanon. Look from the top of Amana, from the top of Senir and Hermon, from the lions’ dens, from the mountains of the leopards.

9 You have ravished my heart, my sister, my bride. You have ravished my heart with one of your eyes, with one chain of your neck.

10 How beautiful is your love, my sister, my bride! How much better is your love than wine, the fragrance of your perfumes than all kinds of spices!

11 Your lips, my bride, drip like the honeycomb. Honey and milk are under your tongue. The smell of your garments is like the smell of Lebanon.

12 My sister, my bride, is a locked up garden; a locked up spring, a sealed fountain.

13 Your shoots are an orchard of pomegranates, with precious fruits, henna with spikenard plants,

14 spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with every kind of incense tree; myrrh and aloes, with all the best spices,

15 a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, flowing streams from Lebanon.

16 Awake, north wind, and come, you south! Blow on my garden, that its spices may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and taste his precious fruits.

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3 places named in this chapter.

Where this was written

Jerusalem disputed Associated with Solomon's court; the setting is literary rather than documentary.

When this was written

Traditions differ. Each position is shown rather than one asserted as settled.

Traditional: 970 BC–931 BC Solomon
Ascribed to Solomon by the text's own superscription.
Critical: 450 BC–200 BC Anonymous
Language and vocabulary, including Persian and possibly Greek influence, point to a much later composition.

Elsewhere in the world

Events overlapping the period this book is dated to (970 BC–200 BC).

1200 BC–400 BC Olmec civilisation Mesoamerica
The earliest major Mesoamerican civilisation, known for colossal stone heads and an early calendar.
1200 BC–600 BC Zoroaster teaches in Persia Persia
Founder of Zoroastrianism, whose dating is disputed by as much as six centuries. His teaching on a cosmic struggle between good and evil later touched Jewish and Christian thought.
1070 BC–350 AD The kingdom of Kush Africa
A Nubian power on the upper Nile that ruled Egypt itself as its twenty-fifth dynasty.
1050 BC–800 BC The Phoenician alphabet spreads Levant
A compact consonantal alphabet that became the ancestor of Greek, Latin and Hebrew scripts.
776 BC First recorded Olympiad Greece
The traditional starting point of Greek historical chronology.
753 BC Traditional founding of Rome Rome
The legendary date of Rome's founding, later used as the anchor of the Roman calendar.
745 BC–609 BC Neo-Assyrian empire at its height Mesopotamia
Assyria dominated the Near East, deporting conquered populations as policy, including the northern kingdom of Israel.
620 BC–560 BC Coinage invented in Lydia Anatolia
Stamped electrum coins of guaranteed weight, an idea that spread across the ancient world within a century.

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