Dr. Keith Essex · The Master's Seminary · 91 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Keith Essex, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
This session settles how to read the Song and then meets the Preacher. Dr. Essex surveys the widest interpretive spectrum of any canonical book, explains why he reads the Song as a unified lyric love poem rather than allegory, drama, or anthology, and shows how its shape centers on the opened garden. Then Ecclesiastes: the word that means breath on a cold day, the tolling bell of death, and the double refrain of fearing God and enjoying life. Listen for why the woman's initiative undoes the allegory, and why the futility is only seeming.
The shelf has grown: Garrett's new Word Biblical Commentary volume expands his earlier work by a couple of hundred pages into the best evangelical exegetical treatment now available, sharing the volume with House on Lamentations, the first major evangelical commentary on that book. Longman's NICOT is a few years old; Carr's Tyndale volume remains the trendsetter that brought the non-allegorical reading into an evangelical series and stands behind much popular treatment since, including the MacArthur Study Bible notes, and Essex stars it as the place to begin. Gledhill in the Bible Speaks Today models a preaching approach, delicate and forthright, and Provan's NIVAC gives the three-character reading its contemporary evangelical voice. And the standing counsel: do not buy commentaries until you are ready to study and preach the book.
Interpreters agree on one thing: the diversity of opinion on the Song is as wide as for any book in the canon; propose almost anything and some major commentator in church history agrees with you. Three genre proposals compete. The classic answer makes the Song wisdom literature alongside Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes, counsel on intimacy whether marital or spiritual, the position Garrett's earlier volume retains. Delitzsch brought into evangelicalism the reading of the Song as drama, a staged story in acts; but drama was unknown in ancient Israel, the pious of the second-temple era recoiled when Greek theater arrived, and orthodox Judaism to this day counts acted fiction unworthy of Scripture, so a canonical drama is hard to credit, and the view is only a couple of centuries old. The reading Essex joins, with the majority of recent evangelical commentators, is lyric love poetry: the Song set against its ancient Near Eastern background, where Egyptian love songs survive from the twelfth century BC and the Song towers over them, exactly as 1 Kings 4 leads one to expect from the man whose God-given gifts in proverb and song surpassed all the east.
Historically the majority position is the allegory: the man is God and the woman Israel in the Jewish reading, Christ and the church in the Christian, dominant through the Middle Ages, and softened by the Reformation era into typology, a real man and woman whose love matters canonically as a type of Christ and the church, on the pattern of Adam in Romans 5 or the sacrifices in Hebrews. The tradition has its giants: Hudson Taylor's one biblical work, Union and Communion, reads the Song entirely as the believer's communion with Christ, and the hymnal still sings its imagery, the fairest of ten thousand, the rose of Sharon. Essex remembers a 1960s pastor preaching the Song on Sunday evenings without ever mentioning a kiss: he preached Christ. The pendulum has now swung to the opposite wall, the Song as seminar material for marriage conferences, which, Essex remarks, says more about the present generation than about the Song.
The historical readings divide over the cast. The two-character reading follows Solomon and the Shulammite, his wooing and marriage to a first and true love, whether written in youth, in which case, since Rehoboam's age puts Solomon's first marriage at about seventeen or eighteen, this is a teenager's book, or written later as the older king's reflection on what love truly was. The three-character shepherd hypothesis, held by a godly minority across church history and by Provan today, reads a woman brought into Solomon's court who remains true to her shepherd lover, tell me, you whom my soul loves, where do you pasture your flock?, until she returns home to him at the last: Solomon learns from her what all his wives never taught him, what true love is, though the books of Kings record no repentance to match. The liberal alternatives fail on their own terms: nothing ties the Song to fertility cult, its Passover use was in the home after the meal, not at the altar; and the funeral-song theory built on love is as strong as death offers only the world's comfort, you will live on in our hearts, which, Essex notes, lasts exactly as long as the mourners do, a thought that conveniently prepares the class for Ecclesiastes.
Longman reads the book as an anthology, roughly fourteen love songs collected, Solomon's greatest hits; Carr, Garrett, and Gledhill read a literary unity, and Essex agrees on the strength of the title itself: the Song of Songs announces one preeminent song, not a songbook. What kind of unity then? The chronological reading finds a story, courtship to wedding to the working out of married life, the wooing, the gluing, and the growing, as the study Bibles have it. Essex prefers a literary unity: Robert Alden's chiastic arrangement, offered as one possible map, shows the book framed by an inclusio, draw me after you, let us run, at the opening and hurry, my beloved, on the mountains of spices at the close, with the exchanges of admiration moving toward and away from the center.
The first word of the Song and the last are the woman's, and she speaks far more than the man: the book is written from her perspective, her desire, her extolling of her beloved, with the man responding in kind. That observation quietly dismantles the allegory: if the Song pictured the believer and God, the initiative should run the other way, for we love because he first loved us; instead the woman desires, seeks, and glories, exactly as a wife in love. At the chiasm's center stands the wedding night, the locked garden opened, I have come into my garden, the poetry of physical intimacy on which chronological and literary readings agree, with the songs of mutual honor leading to it and flowing from it. And that yields the application Essex draws for husbands: love begins, grows, and blossoms as appreciation is verbally expressed.
The Song stands in Scripture because sin debased the relationship of man and woman, and here creation's design is sung again: the celebration of marital love, emotional and physical, the one-flesh joy of Genesis 2 enjoyed before God. Longman makes wisdom the canonical purpose; Essex would say instruction comes by application, but the book itself is first a celebration. As for preaching: not fifty messages, and Essex tells on a friend whose entire sermon on the little foxes of 2:15 taught couples to catch small problems before they ruin the vineyard, memorable, marriage-tested, and exegetically doubtful. Preach it in one message, enjoy your marriage, celebrate one another as gifts from God, or a short series at most; and he offers the cautionary comedy of the church Valentine party at which he and his wife were assigned to read the Song aloud to each other, an evening of blushing and laughter after which they were never asked again.
The Hebrew title is Qoheleth, the one who convenes an assembly and speaks to it, the Preacher, whence the Greek Ecclesiastes, the word to the assembly. The opening verse claims the words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem, and the book dates from within Solomon's kingship. The traditional reading takes it as Solomon's repentance, though the book never says so; what it says is that he gave himself wholly to wisdom and to pleasure, that neither satisfied, and that he arrived by the end of chapter 2 at the refrain that will keep returning: there is nothing better for a man than to eat and drink and find good in his labor, and even the ability to see good in one's work is from the hand of God, a gift.
In the Masoretic order Ecclesiastes stands between the Song of Songs and Lamentations, and the placement teaches. The Song celebrated created love in a world debased by the fall; Ecclesiastes now gives the wisdom for living in that fallen world, the earth subjected to vanity; and Lamentations, ahead, shows what came when Israel did not fear God and keep his commandments: the temple in ashes and a nation asking why.
The keyword, rendered vanity, is hebel: breath, vapor, that which appears and vanishes like breath on a cold day, and some commentators would simply translate, vapor of vapors, says the Preacher, all is vapor. It opens the Preacher's message at 1:2 and closes it at 12:8, and sounds thirty-eight times through the book, flanked by its companion phrases: striving after wind, the grasping of what cannot be held; no advantage; no profit, the ledger of life audited and found empty. For every under-the-sun accounting has the same bottom line, and the Preacher's end of the day is death, tolling like a bell through the book: what advantage does a man have in all his work which he does under the sun, and the phrase under the sun itself recurs twenty-nine times. Even memory fails: there is no remembrance of earlier things, and your descendants will remember you as well as you remember your own ancestors of a century past, a deflating thought the wise man takes to heart.
The Preacher's message runs from 1:2 to 12:8, framed by the prologue of 1:1 and the epilogue of 12:9 to 14, where the final voice certifies the Preacher: a wise man who also taught the people knowledge, who pondered, searched out, and arranged many proverbs, marks that fit Solomon exactly, who sought delightful words and wrote words of truth correctly. And the epilogue draws the conclusion when all has been heard: fear God and keep his commandments. Nor is that only the frame's verdict: in the midst of the message the Preacher himself commands it, guard your steps as you go to the house of God, draw near to listen rather than offer the sacrifice of fools, let your words be few, for God is in heaven and you are on the earth: fear God.
Labor, toil, and work sound some thirty-four times, and the Preacher presses the question why: every reason for work points to another reason, and only when the chain reaches God's eternal purposes does the toil gain value, as Essex illustrates with a seminarian's why-chain that ends at heaven. The Preacher even confesses, so I hated life, for the work done under the sun was grievous to me, a verse, Essex grants, that lands differently during finals week. Yet woven through the same book runs the command to rejoice: there is nothing better than to rejoice and do good in one's lifetime, to eat and drink and see good in all one's labor, it is the gift of God; and at the end, rejoice, young man, in your childhood, and if a man lives many years, let him rejoice in them all, remembering that the days of darkness will be many, that old age will take teeth and eyes and ears, and that for it all God will bring you into judgment. This is no Pollyanna wisdom: rejoice in youth and in age, knowing harder days are coming and God is the judge of both.
Ecclesiastes speaks constantly of the heart, the inner man as thinking mind: I set my heart to seek and explore by wisdom; my heart observed a wealth of wisdom and knowledge; remove vexation from your heart, for childhood and the prime of life are fleeting. It speaks constantly of man, the sons of man, for it is a deliberately man-centered book demonstrating that man-centeredness loses everything: man must fear God. Murphy's tally makes the point statistically: roughly a fifth of the book's words are carried by a short list, vanity, toil, work, wise, good, time, sun, see, fool, eat, profit, wind, death, just, wicked, portion, memory, vexation, and merely reading the list aloud sounds like Ecclesiastes. The purpose Essex states for the whole: in spite of the seeming futility involved in man's existence, the wise man should fear God and enjoy life as the good gift from God.
Why is such a book in the canon? Because Genesis 3 is true. Until the fall, God's word over man was blessing and labor yielded abundance with delight; at the fall the ground was cursed, and work became toil, thorns and sweat until dust returns to dust, an experience every failed vegetable garden confirms, as Essex's lone, worm-devoured tomato harvest testifies. Paul reaches for Ecclesiastes' own word in Romans 8: the creation was subjected to futility, the Septuagint's term for hebel, not of its own will but by God who subjected it, in hope, groaning until the revealing of the sons of God. Everything under the sun points toward death and corruption, the sturdiest redwood decays, and looking at the world alone, as Schaeffer said, despair is the honest conclusion. The futility is therefore real, but seeming: the reader lives between Genesis 3 and the end of the story, work has value inside God's eternal plan, and the wise man pins no hopes on a vaporous world, fears God, and enjoys his life on earth as God's own gift.
The Ecclesiastes shelf: Garrett's NAC volume covers Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song together; Longman's NICOT will figure in the authorship discussion ahead; Eaton's Tyndale volume was among the first substantial evangelical works engaging the modern debate over authorship and purpose; Kaiser's study, now out of print, reasserted the positive view of both; Kidner's little The Message of Ecclesiastes remains the classic exposition; and Provan's NIVAC pairs the book with his Song of Songs. The two large interpretive issues, who wrote it, and what it is finally saying, open the next session.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all twenty-three are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. Which commentary does Essex star as the place to begin on the Song?
2. What is remarkable about the interpretive history of the Song?
3. Why does Essex reject the reading of the Song as drama?
4. What ancient evidence supports reading the Song as lyric love poetry?
5. How did the Reformation era modify the allegorical reading?
6. What is the shepherd hypothesis?
7. On the early-composition view, why is the Song a teenager's book?
8. Why does the funeral-song theory fail as an account of the Song?
9. What does Essex conclude from the title, the Song of Songs?
10. What stands at the center of Alden's chiastic arrangement?
11. How does the woman's initiative bear on the allegorical reading?
12. Why is the Song in the canon, per Essex?
13. What is Essex's counsel on preaching the Song?
14. What does Qoheleth mean?
15. What does the placement of Ecclesiastes between the Song and Lamentations teach?
16. What does hebel literally picture?
17. What certifies the Preacher as Solomon in the epilogue?
18. Where does fear God appear besides the epilogue?
19. When does toil gain value, on the Preacher's accounting?
20. What frame surrounds the command, rejoice, young man, in your childhood?
21. What does Murphy's word-count reveal?
22. How does Romans 8 take up Ecclesiastes?
23. Why does Essex insist the futility is only seeming?
All twenty-three correct. Lecture 26 is complete.
The Song was read for centuries as Christ and the church, and is now read mostly as marriage material. What is gained and lost in each reading, and how does knowing the woman speaks first and most change how you hear the book?
Essex says love begins, grows, and blossoms as appreciation is verbally expressed. Who in your life receives your genuine appreciation only in your head, and what would saying it cost you?
Ecclesiastes deflates the hope of being remembered: your descendants will know you as well as you know your ancestors of a century past. What are you currently doing mainly to be remembered, and what would you do differently if only God's memory counted?
The Preacher commands both realism about the days of darkness and rejoicing in every season. Which comes harder to you, honest realism or commanded joy, and what does that reveal?
The futility is real but seeming, because the reader lives between Genesis 3 and the promised freedom. Where does your daily work most feel like vapor, and what would it mean to do that same work as a gift received from God's hand?
Ecclesiastes 2:24
Read the Song of Songs in one sitting, noting who speaks and where the center falls, then Ecclesiastes 1 and 2 and 12 for the frame of the Preacher's message. Read Genesis 3:17 to 19 beside Romans 8:18 to 25 and trace the one word that links them. Next session: who wrote Ecclesiastes, what the Preacher is finally saying, and the book of Lamentations.