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One Flesh: What does it Mean?
Set me as a seal upon your heart,
As a seal upon your arm;
For love is as strong as death,
Jealousy as cruel as the grave;
Its flames are flames of fire,
A most vehement flame.
Many waters cannot quench love,
Nor can the floods drown it.
If a man would give for love
All the wealth of his house,
It would be utterly despised.
The above scripture was spoken by the bride in Song of Solomon. (We know this because the Hebrew words are addressed to a man.) It describes the way our one flesh chemistry makes us feel. There are five characteristics:
Our feelings are as strong as death.
When denied, those feelings can be as cruel as the grave.
They are like flames of fire.
Many waters cannot quench them.
They are so wonderful that a man would utterly despise and give up all the wealth of his house for them.
We will look at each of these in detail.
…For love is as strong as death…
Romantic and sexual love is powerful …and it needs to be. If it wasn't, I suspect we would have far fewer families. Most of us are willing to make some sacrifices for others, but the sacrifices involved in marriage are extreme. Which of us would be willing to make a commitment to a person other than a spouse in which we say, "I will devote myself to you and only you for the rest of my life. I will stick with you in sickness and in health, in poverty and in wealth, and you will be my top priority (with the exception of God). I will take care of you and any children that come from our union. Though this will involve hundreds of thousands of dollars and multiple thousands of hours of service, I will gladly do it for your sake."
In my most selfless moments, I can't imagine making a statement like that to anyone but my wife. …And that isn't all bad. If we look at the book of Proverbs, we find that making a commitment similar to this is usually an unwise thing to do:
Do not be one of those who shakes hands in a pledge,
One of those who is surety for debts;
If you have nothing with which to pay,
Why should he take away your bed from under you?
To shake hands in a pledge and to become surety for debts means to promise to take on someone's loans if they fall into a situation where they can't repay them. Solomon makes it clear that this sort of responsibility is normally a bad idea (see also Proverbs 6:1-5). Yet when we marry a spouse, that is exactly the sort of responsibility we take on; our spouse's misfortunes become our misfortunes, any debt they fall into becomes our debt, and if they are foolish, they can bankrupt us. The two become one not just physically, but also socially and economically.
Why would any of us accept these sorts of risks? We do so because a godly sexual relationship is unlike any other sort of relationship, and within it, the risks make sense. Families are some of the most important life training schools, psychiatric centers, and preventive medicine practices on the planet. The benefits they give more than justify the radical commitment they require.
Not surprisingly, our wise and loving Creator has given us powerful emotions to motivate us to form them. Paul speaks of this motivation in the following verse:
Nevertheless, because of sexual immorality, let each man have his own wife, and let each woman have her own husband.
The phrase "because of sexual immorality," in this context, means "because our romantic and sexual emotions are so strong" (1 Corinthians 7:9). If they aren't properly handled, they can pull us in the wrong direction, so most men should seek a wife, and most women should seek a husband. Through marriage, we are able to fulfill our romantic and sexual emotions in the ways God created them to be fulfilled.
The bride in Song of Solomon used the phrase "as strong as death" to describe these emotions, and what I have been asserting in this book is that a good portion of how they affect us is tied to sex, not marriage. Our feelings are as strong as death whether we are with a spouse, a harlot, pornography, …. The nature of the relationship is different in each case, but the chemistry behind it – the hormones and emotions involved – are physically the same. Just as a godly husband and wife will find that sex powerfully draws them into their marriage, the person involved in sinful sex will find that it powerfully draws them into a sinful lifestyle.
…Jealousy as cruel as the grave
Its flames are flames of fire,
A most vehement flame.
I should point out that the Bible sometimes uses hyperbole (exaggeration to make a point) when speaking about romantic/sexual love …and if ever a subject was worthy of a little hyperbole, this sort of love certainly is! It isn't literally as strong as death. If it was, the chances of changing once our one flesh chemistry has shaped us would be about the same as the chances of rising from the dead. The point is not that our one flesh chemistry binds us so strongly that it is impossible to move on; it is that moving on is difficult. A bond is formed that is not easily broken.
With the phrase "jealousy as cruel as the grave," however, I suspect that this may actually be a case not of hyperbole but of understatement. Allow me to explain: I interpret Song of Solomon to be a historical book which describes the relationship between Solomon and one of his many wives. I know that this isn't as romantic as seeing the book to be the story of two lovers who only have each other, but I believe the approach I take is the most straightforward one. Solomon wrote the book (Song of Solomon 1:1), the husband in the book appears to have been a king (Song of Solomon 1:4, 17, 7:5), the king had a harem (Song of Solomon 6:8-9), and Solomon is clearly a part of the story (Song of Solomon 3:6-11, 8:11-12). It makes sense that he is writing about himself and one of his wives.[8]
In that context, the statement that "jealousy is as cruel as the grave" is made by one wife among many. She had a great deal of justification for being jealous – so much justification that her words seem understated.
The ugly problem with this, of course, is that polygamy undermines the beautiful love story described in the book. Some will feel that I have taken the only part of the Bible that gives us a detailed picture of sexual love and ruined it. This is not totally true, however. With historical books of the Bible, we use the clear teachings of other parts of the Bible to see lessons in the history. In Song of Solomon, we see lessons based on the following scripture:
Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice with the wife of your youth. As a loving deer and a graceful doe, let her breasts satisfy you at all times; and always be enraptured with her love.
To the extent that Solomon and his wife were enraptured with each other's love, we can learn from them. In fact, I believe that this is a key to interpreting the book. God put Solomon and this wife together so they could fully experience Proverbs 5:18-19, and He then used this to call Solomon to repent of his habit of moving from one wife to another. Solomon didn't obey that message, but this doesn't mean we can't learn from the enraptured love that set the stage for God to speak to him.
Assuming the wife in the book was his most recent, she was wife or concubine number one-hundred and forty (sixty plus eighty in the following scripture):
And eighty concubines,
And virgins without number.
My dove, my perfect one,
Is the only one,
The only one of her mother,
The favorite of the one who bore her.
The daughters saw her
And called her blessed,
The queens and the concubines,
And they praised her.
The wife in Song of Solomon stood out among his sixty queens and eighty concubines. She was unique, so beautiful that when the other queens and concubines saw her they praised her. If her competition was willing to admit her desirability, you know she had to be amazing.
Yet this fairest among women (Song of Solomon 1:8, 5:9, 6:1) knew that her beauty wouldn't be enough to hold Solomon forever. His one flesh chemistry had shaped his inner life based on the nature of his relationships with all of his wives. It had formed around the joys of collecting a harem, and after marrying this fairest among women, the Bible tells us he married another six-hundred-and-forty queens and two-hundred-and-twenty concubines (1 Kings 11:3).
Love is as strong as death, even when it is turned in a sinful direction. In Solomon's case, it had shaped him so strongly that even the most beautiful woman in the country didn't inspire him to stop at one-hundred and forty wives and concubines! He felt driven by a quest for new faces and bodies. (This helps explain why a Christian man may continue to pursue a virtual harem even after he marries an amazing and beautiful wife. Emotions that are as strong as death don't change easily.)
We need to look more closely at the phrase "jealousy is as cruel as the grave." If we do the math on a thousand wives and concubines, it is obvious that Solomon couldn't carry on a meaningful sexual relationship with all of them. If he did a simple rotation between them, it would be years before he saw the same wife twice. It seems more likely, however, that his approach would be to spend a honeymoon of a few weeks with each wife and then to move on to the next. He might see a previous wife occasionally after her honeymoon, but his relationship with her would be limited.
I believe Song of Solomon describes the several-weeks long honeymoon between Solomon and the fairest among women, and the last chapter in the book (Song of Solomon 8) shows the honeymoon coming to an end. This was the time in which his wife would be considering how much she would see of him in the future, and in that context, her statement that jealousy is as cruel as the grave contains an incredible tragedy. Solomon was about to make her watch him marry hundreds of other women!
I suspect she had entered the harem thinking that she would be able to handle Solomon's polygamy, but that was before she knew what a sexual relationship with him would do to her. Once she had joined with him, her view of the harem changed. She knew that when he moved on, jealousy was going to burn within her heart like flames of fire. She was going to struggle with anger, bitterness, and a sense of betrayal. It was going to be as cruel as the grave. (As I said earlier, I suspect that this is an understatement. It probably would have been easier for her if Solomon had gone to the grave!)
The culture in which she lived told her that this was just the way kings were; she should deal with it and be happy that she would have riches and comfort for the rest of her life. But she knew that this culture, and her husband's eager support of it, were wrong. The fire burning within her was designed by God for an exclusive relationship; it wasn't some random emotion that she could dismiss. Solomon had no right to become connected with her in the beautiful way he had and to then forsake her.
Since God ended up judging Solomon for the sins that grew out of his polygamy (1 Kings 11:4-11), I believe that Song of Solomon is nothing less than the story of how God raised up a beautiful woman to call for him to turn from the evil choices that would eventually hurt him so badly. Song of Solomon 8:6-7 spells out the message that gave Solomon the chance to repent before polygamy more fully misled his heart. His wife, by honestly speaking what she felt, lit a light over his error and exposed his sins.
The phrase "a most vehement flame" in the Hebrew is literally "the flame of the Lord."[9] Solomon's wife is saying that her feelings were not the result of some selfishness on her part. Instead, God had put this fire into her. She shouldn't be expected to endure watching her husband move on to one woman after another, even if the entire social order said she should. The flame of the Lord within her should be protected and cherished.
Many waters cannot quench love,
Nor can the floods drown it…
The flame of God in the heart of Solomon's wife was not going to be quenched. Solomon couldn't bribe her away from it with a life of luxury. He couldn't dissolve it by making her an honored queen. It meant little to her that he immortalized her forever by writing a book of the Bible about her. She didn't want fortune or fame; she wanted him. Nothing else could satisfy.
Solomon was disobeying the Old Testament Law, which told kings not to multiply wives (Deuteronomy 17:15-17). The same Law, though it permitted not only polygamy but also a form of marriage-slavery, didn't allow the husband to diminish a slave-wife's care or marriage rights (sexual relationship) if he married another woman:
If he takes another wife, he shall not diminish her food, her clothing, and her marriage rights. And if he does not do these three for her, then she shall go out free, without paying money.
If that was the law for a slave-wife, how much more should Solomon have not diminished the marriage rights of a full wife. There was no way he could obey this law with a large harem.
We need to ask why Solomon didn't heed this obvious truth, especially when his wife reminded him of it with what may have been the most sensual correction in the history of the world. After all, his wife ravished his heart (Song of Solomon 4:9). She was as awesome as an army with banners (Song of Solomon 6:10). She loved Solomon and passionately desired to make love with him (Song of Solomon 2:3-6, 3:1-4, 4:16, 5:9-16, 8:1-3). Shouldn't that be enough for any man?
Unfortunately, Solomon's one flesh chemistry had taken the nature of his relationships with one hundred and thirty-nine other women and fused it into his personality. He had become married to a string of constant variety and newness. This pulled at him with incredible strength.
In today's terms, Solomon was a sex addict. He was compulsive about finding new women to inspire him. If he were to forsake that in order to provide even the smallest level of marriage rights to his existing wives, his jealousy for the life he had come to know would have burned in his heart, and many waters could not quench that desire. This drove him to ignore God's law and common sense as he inflicted suffering on his wives.
All the wealth of his house,
It would be utterly despised.
God has designed sexual love to be amazing. This is a big part of what makes people willing to join their lives together in marriage. Even if this costs them financially, love is so fulfilling that they despise all the wealth of their house for the privilege of being with one another. The bride in Song of Solomon knew this, and she was ready to do it.
Solomon was willing to do it also, but his one flesh chemistry had shaped him to sacrifice in a different direction. He knew what the consequences of failing to listen to his wife's plea might be. He might lose his wealth and his kingdom. He might inflict on his descendants, and on all of Israel, a series of judgments that would destroy much of what he had worked hard and long to accomplish. Yet all of this wealth became utterly despised for the sake of the flavor of love he had embraced!
And that brings us back to the subject we have been looking at in this book: sexual sin in God's church. Why is it that half of the men and many women in Christian churches are looking at pornography? They are risking their relationship with God, their marriages, their wealth, and their children's future. They are bowing before an industry that destroys families and drives many of its customers into desperate addiction. Why would so many Christians do that?
They do it because their one flesh chemistry, even when it is being sinfully misused, produces a "love" within them that pulls them to utterly despise all the wealth of their house. They risk losing incredible treasures, because their emotions deceive them into believing it is worth the gamble.
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