Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 62:1 (Spring 2000)
Article: The Song Of David’s Son: Interpreting The Song Of Solomon In The Light Of The Davidic Covenant
Author: Iain D. Campbell

The Song Of David’s Son:
Interpreting The Song Of Solomon
In The Light Of The Davidic Covenant

Iain D. Campbell

Evangelical scholarship on the interpretation of the Song of Solomon has not advanced much beyond E. J. Young’s position that the Song is a “tacit parable,” which is “moral and didactic in its purpose.”1 For such an evangelical master of Old Testament studies to declare that there is no warrant for a typological interpretation of the Song2 was to set a boundary beyond which few have dared to venture.

Some of the most recent evangelical work on the Song has echoed the position adopted by Young. For example, Tremper Longman III has written that the book is “a book celebrating human sexuality”3 and Tom Gledhill, in the IVP series The Bible Speaks Today, suggests that the Song is a love poem celebrating the love between Everyman and Everywoman, and warns against a typological approach which only blossoms “into the uncontrolled extravaganza of extreme allegories.”4 David A. Hubbard, in the IVP New Bible Dictionary, has similarly argued that the exegetical basis for an allegorical or typical interpretation of the Song is “questionable.”5 More recently, Paul R. House has argued, while raising important issues of canonical significance in his discussion of the Song, that its testimony is “to the one God who created men and women for loving, permanent relationships with one another.”6 These approaches find common ground in advocating an interpretation of the Song which precludes typology. At one level, there is little to distinguish this approach from the more extreme liberal interpretations of the Song, which regard it as “pure sexual passion without the least trace of religious sentiment, all the more beautiful for that.”7

WTJ 62:1 (Spring 2000) p. 18

Yet even after Young had published his Introduction, with its disavowal of any typological interpretation of the Song, Professor Fred Leahy of Northern Ireland raised questions which have not satisfactorily been answered. In an article on “The Song of Solomon in Pastoral Teaching” he acknowledges that the preacher must settle the interpretative question before the Song can be preached, thus highlighting that the path from Song to sermon is fraught with difficulties. He also acknowledges that the Song does indeed reflect God’s provision for our human relationships, and that as far as the dignity of human love is concerned, “the great lessons taught by the Song … are not stressed as they should be.”8 But Leahy was concerned that Young’s influential position did not go far enough, and that the Song ought to be exegeted not simply on its own terms, but also within the wider Scriptural context. This very point has been emphasized in House’s Old Testament Theology with his insistence that “more than any other Old Testament book, Song of Solomon needs to be interpreted in light of the whole of the Old Testament canon.”9

Leahy himself favored an allegorical approach introduced by Professor Duncan Weir and based upon the respective meanings of the names “Solomon” and “Shulammite,” both related to the Hebrew root for peace, the former reflecting an active voice, the latter a passive. “Solomon” is thus taken to mean “peace-gi...