Here’s a small experiment. Ask ten Christians you know, off the top of their head, to summarise what’s in Song of Solomon. Most will manage a vague gesture — “it’s, uh, about love, right? Kind of poetic?” — and stop there. It’s eight chapters, sitting right in the middle of your Old Testament, canonised alongside Isaiah and the Psalms, and it might be the least-read, least-preached book most Christians own a copy of. Which is strange, because it’s also the book my own book takes its title from, and once you actually read it, you realise it’s not a shy inclusion in the canon. It’s a deliberate, sustained argument.
It isn’t hiding — it’s just rarely opened
Song of Solomon isn’t allegory smuggled in under the cover of romantic language, whatever explanation you might have absorbed growing up to make it feel more theologically respectable. It’s two married people — sometimes betrothed, depending on how you read the timeline — speaking to each other with longing, specificity, and open desire, across eight full chapters, with no narrator stepping in to caution them or redirect the conversation toward something more spiritually safe. Read it plainly and the book doesn’t apologise for what it is. It was placed in the canon exactly as written.
That placement is itself a theological statement. God didn’t need this book to communicate a doctrine He couldn’t communicate elsewhere — the rest of Scripture manages its theology of covenant, holiness, and love without it. Song of Solomon exists to canonise something specific: desire itself, married and mutual, as worth writing down and preserving as holy text.
The verse that describes what mutual actually means
Song of Solomon 2:16 has the woman declaring, “My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies.” Notice the order and the symmetry — hers first, then his, then a shared image of him at rest in her presence. This isn’t possession in a controlling sense. It’s mutual belonging, stated plainly, by the woman, in her own voice, with no hedging and no deference required before she’s allowed to say it. In a culture, then and often now, where a woman’s desire gets treated as something to be managed rather than voiced, Scripture hands her the opening line.
I think about how many women I’ve counselled who genuinely believed wanting their husband, plainly and without prompting, was somehow immodest — a thing to allow rather than a thing to initiate. Song of Solomon 2:16 was written by a woman who had clearly never received that memo, and it made it into your Bible exactly as she said it.
The verse that tells you how seriously to take all of it
Song of Solomon 8:6-7 shifts register entirely, from tender to almost fierce: “Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all his substance for love, it would utterly be contemned.” This is not a light poem about pleasant feelings. This is love described with the vocabulary of death, fire, and flood — forces nobody negotiates with, forces that simply overwhelm. Scripture is telling you, in its most intense language, to take marital desire exactly that seriously. Not as a pleasant extra once the “real” spiritual work of the marriage is done, but as something with its own weight, its own danger if neglected, and its own worth defending.
Why most of us never got taught this book properly
I think the avoidance is less about the content and more about what the content demands of us. A book this direct about desire forces a choice: either take it at face value and let it recalibrate your theology of marital intimacy, or explain it away as something safer than it plainly is. Allegorising the whole book — reading it only as a picture of Christ and the church, with no room left for what it says about an actual husband and wife — has historically been the more comfortable option, because it lets us admire the poetry without letting it touch how we actually think about our own marriages.
Both readings can coexist, honestly. Song of Solomon has long been read as pointing toward Christ’s love for the church, and that reading has real value. But it was never meant to erase the plain, human, married love the words are actually describing on their surface. You don’t have to choose between the two to take either seriously.
The line I want you to keep
Song of Solomon isn’t a theological accident or an embarrassment your Bible has to explain away. It’s eight chapters that God chose to preserve, on purpose, to tell you that desire between a married couple is strong as death, worth guarding like fire, and worth actually reading — not skimming past on your way to Isaiah.
The book takes its title from this exact text, and there’s a lot more of it waiting for you there.
Sacred, but Fully Known launches October 3rd. Subscribe below for more of this, every week.
— Funke
Sacred, but Fully Known: A Faith-Rooted Guide to Intimacy in Marriage launches October 3rd, 2026. Subscribe above to follow the story, and to be first in line on launch day.
