שיר השירים 7

Song of Solomon 7 begins at the feet, which tells you the woman is dancing, and it does not look away. The bridegroom praises his wife from her sandals up to her hair, and where the wedding poem of chapter 4 stopped at her breasts, this one does not stop at all: her thighs are the work of a master jeweler, her navel a goblet of wine, her waist a heap of wheat fenced with lilies, her neck ivory, her eyes the pools of Heshbon, her nose the watchtower of Lebanon, her head Mount Carmel, and her hair a net in which a king is caught. He says he will climb the palm tree, and he means it. Then, in the middle of his sentence about her mouth being like the best wine, she takes the sentence over and finishes it herself, and what she says next is the line the whole Song has been moving toward. I belong to my beloved, and his desire is for me. The word for desire is the one Genesis uses when it tells the woman after the fall that her desire will be for her husband and he will rule over her; here it runs the other way, and there is no ruling in it. She invites him out of the city into the countryside, to sleep among the wildflowers and rise early to see whether the vines have budded, and there, she says, I will give you my love. The mandrakes are in bloom, and at the door she has stored up every delicacy, old and new, for him. It is the most physical chapter in the Bible, and the Bible keeps it, because this is what love was made to be.