Song of Songs 3


Song of Songs 3 is the third chapter of the Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. This book is one of the Five Megillot, a collection of short books, together with Book of Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Esther, within the Ketuvim, the third and the last part of the Hebrew Bible. Jewish tradition views Solomon as the author of this book, and this attribution influences the acceptance of this book as a canonical text, although this is at present largely disputed. This chapter contains a female song about her search for her lover at night and the poem describing King Solomon's procession.

Text

The original text is written in Hebrew language. This chapter is divided into 11 verses.

Textual witnesses

Some early manuscripts containing the text of this chapter in Hebrew are of the Masoretic Text, which includes the Aleppo Codex, and Codex Leningradensis. Some fragments containing parts of this chapter were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls: 4Q106, 4Q107, and 4Q108.
There is also a translation into Koine Greek known as the Septuagint, made in the last few centuries BCE. Extant ancient manuscripts of the Septuagint version include Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus, and Codex Alexandrinus.

Structure

groups this chapter into:
The first part of this chapter is a tightly constructed song by the female protagonist describing how she looks for her lover at night in the city streets, until she finds him and brings him into her mother's house. The setting of this poem progresses from the woman's bed to the public areas of the city and finally to the privacy of her mother's bedroom. It closes with the second appeal to the 'daughters of Jerusalem'.

Verse 1

The names of God are apparently substituted with similar sounding phrases depicting 'female gazelles' for hosts, and 'does of the field'/'wild does/female deer' for God Almighty.

Male: Marriage scene (3:6-11)

This section starts a poetic exposition of love and marriage which form the core of the book. Hess applies these six verses to the man, whereas Fox prefers the daughter of Jerusalem as the speakers, and the New King James Version assigns them to "the Shulamite".
Solomon is the focus of this section, as his name is mentioned three times, and the suffix 'his' refers to him once in verse 7, another in verse 9 and four times in the second part of verse 11. The last word of this part is 'his heart', referring directly to the essential aspect of King Solomon and the most relevant to the whole love poem. The mention of Solomon's mother in verse 11 is in line with the focus on mothers in the book, both the woman's and the man's.