Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Today we finished our 13th book of the Bible. We just keep moving past these milestones,

you guys. Congratulations. We read through the whole book of Song of Solomon or Song of

Songs, depending which version of the Bible you're reading. This book is incredibly

layered and there's a lot of uncertainty about several aspects of it. For instance, we

don't know if Solomon wrote it or if it was written about Solomon or if it was just

written during the time of Solomon. If it was written about Solomon, it would have

to be about his relationship with his first wife because the book describes a monogamous

relationship and he eventually had a thousand women in his harem, 700 wives and 300 concubines,

and we'll see how well that goes for him. And here's another confusing thing. People

have argued for centuries over whether it's a story about human love or if it's an allegory

about God's love for his people. Personally, I tend to think it's both. Much like how

David can write a song about his own personal misery that is also a prophecy of the coming

Messiah. But that's just my opinion. Most commentators believe the ancient Jews regarded

it as love poetry that belonged in the wisdom literature of Scripture. And in fact, from

what I understand, young Hebrew boys were even forbidden to read it because it was too

risky. For the sake of today's conversation, we'll look at it like the ancient Jews

did, literally. But it's also helpful to consider that there does seem to be lots of content

that can serve as an illustration for us. If you hold to the romantic interpretation

of the book, you can see that it follows the progression of the ancient Jewish relationship

from courtship to wedding feast to wedding, then marriage. Much of the book is a conversation

and there are four primary speakers, the Sheppardis, her entourage, the Sheppard and King

...