Song of Songs may be one of the hardest books in the Old Testament to preach well, not because its main subject is obscure but because its subject is so obvious. The preacher stands before a congregation with poetry about kisses, bodily beauty, breasts, fragrance, longing, gardens, embracing, sexual awakening, and mutual desire, while carrying a long Christian history in which much of that language was transformed into allegory about Christ and the church. Two opposite mistakes therefore become tempting. One can spiritualise the poetry until the lovers virtually disappear, or one can treat the Song as little more than a biblical marriage and sex manual whose theological importance barely extends beyond the bedroom.

A better route begins by allowing the Song to be what it actually is: extraordinarily crafted poetry about embodied human love. From there, its place within wisdom, creation, Genesis 2–3, the wider Old Testament, and ultimately Christian Scripture can be explored without turning every erotic image into a theological code. The movement should therefore be poetry and exegesis → wisdom about human love → creation and Old Testament biblical theology → canonical fulfilment and analogy → pastoral proclamation. Recent work by Robert D. Miller II strengthens the first stage considerably by showing that the preacher must attend not only to what the imagery signifies but also to how the Song creates beauty and desire through sound, scent, taste, rhythm, movement, metaphor, and imaginative experience. Roland Murphy’s earlier FOTL treatment adds another important safeguard by reminding us that many passages belong to recognisable forms of love poetry, so sermon structure should arise from the actual poems rather than from an elaborate reconstructed romantic plot.

Begin by preaching what the Song actually celebrates: embodied human love

The first responsibility is to resist embarrassment. Song of Songs does not apologise for physical attraction, and the preacher should not behave as though Scripture has accidentally become too explicit. The woman wants kisses; the lovers admire one another’s bodies; fragrance, fruit, wine, gardens, touching, longing, and sexual consummation belong openly to the poem’s world. Murphy, Exum, Berlin, Longman, Hess, Estes, Miller, and much of contemporary scholarship are therefore right to insist that the primary referent is human erotic love rather than a secret account of God and Israel or Christ and the church.

This does not make the Song less theological. On the contrary, it places theology at a more fundamental level: God’s created world includes bodies capable of beauty, attraction, pleasure, longing, and mutual delight. Scripture can celebrate these realities rather than treating sexuality only under the headings of temptation, prohibition, adultery, or procreation. A congregation that hears the Song carefully should emerge with a richer doctrine of creation and embodiment, not simply with a few additional rules for married couples.

The preacher should nevertheless avoid turning the pulpit into graphic commentary. The Song itself demonstrates how erotic truth can be communicated poetically, beautifully, and indirectly. Gardens, fountains, fruit, fragrance, wine, gazelles, trees, mountains, and architecture allow the poetry to be frank without becoming coarse. Good preaching can imitate that modesty: neither euphemistically denying what the text is saying nor explaining every image with clinical explicitness.

Read each passage as poetry before turning it into propositions

One of the easiest ways to ruin a sermon on Song of Songs is to paraphrase the poetry too quickly. A line such as “your hair is like a flock of goats” becomes absurd if the preacher asks only what physical feature each item represents. Likewise, perfume, pomegranates, gazelles, Lebanon, towers, vineyards, milk, honey, lilies, and flowing water cannot be reduced to a dictionary of sexual symbols. The Song communicates through imaginative accumulation, and the preacher must learn to inhabit that imaginative world before extracting a theological point.

Robert Miller’s aesthetic commentary is especially valuable here. His major contribution is the insistence that poetry does not merely carry content in decorative packaging; sound, rhythm, syntax, sensory association, and metaphor contribute to the meaning itself. A fragrance is not significant merely because we have correctly identified the plant from which it comes. Its rarity, intensity, exotic associations, imagined scent, and placement among other fragrances all help create the experience of abundance and desire that the poem wants to produce.

This has direct homiletical consequences. A sermon should not spend fifteen minutes decoding the imagery and leave the congregation with less sense of beauty than they had when the passage was first read. The preacher should occasionally slow down, read the language aloud, help hearers imagine the movement or fragrance, explain why an apparently strange comparison would evoke vitality, luxury, strength, abundance, or delight, and then allow the image to retain some of its mystery. The best sermon does not replace poetry with prose; it helps the congregation become better readers of the poetry.

Do not force the Song into a detailed romantic storyline

Preachers naturally prefer narrative because narrative supplies movement, conflict, resolution, and application. Song of Songs repeatedly tempts interpreters to reconstruct exactly such a story: Solomon courts the woman, a shepherd competes with Solomon, the lovers become engaged, marry at a particular point, encounter marital conflict, reconcile, and eventually reach some final resolution. Some modern evangelical interpretations adopt versions of this framework with considerable confidence. The difficulty is that the Song itself frequently refuses to cooperate.

Murphy’s earlier FOTL treatment is particularly useful here because he identifies different forms within the love poetry: yearning songs, songs of admiration, self-description, wasfs, invitations, descriptions of experience, boasts, and other forms. Shifts between them can explain abrupt changes of speaker, setting, or mood without requiring us to invent events that occur between the lines. His comparisons with Egyptian love poetry likewise demonstrate that kings, shepherds, brother-sister language, gardens, gazelles, public kissing, love sickness, and extravagant body descriptions often belong to an established poetic repertoire rather than functioning as clues in a hidden historical drama.

At the same time, the preacher should not atomise the book into thirty unrelated fragments. Exum has shown particularly well that recurring language, mirrored scenes, the daughters of Jerusalem, the adjurations, gardens, mountains, gazelles, searching and finding, and evolving statements of mutual belonging create real final-form coherence. Miller similarly allows for originally separate materials while recognising a secondary unity. The safest preaching strategy is therefore to follow the final book’s recurring motifs and emotional movements without pretending that every transition forms part of a recoverable chronological biography.

Let repetition preach: love is experienced through presence, absence, seeking, and finding

Exum’s reading becomes especially helpful when constructing sermons because she notices how the Song repeatedly stages desire through motion. The beloved approaches and withdraws; the woman searches, finds, holds, loses, and searches again; the man appears like a gazelle and is again summoned to move; bodily description alternates with absence; desire is repeatedly satisfied without ever becoming permanently exhausted. Even after the apparently climactic union of 4:16–5:1, another episode of missed encounter follows almost immediately.

This prevents the preacher from presenting love as though successful marriage abolishes longing. The Song depicts intimacy as dynamic rather than static. Loving another person means that the other remains genuinely other, capable of being sought, discovered, admired again, and never finally reduced to possession. This also helps explain why 8:14 can close the book with another movement of separation or summons rather than the neat stillness expected at the end of a conventional romance.

Pastorally, this can become a much deeper sermon than “keep romance alive in your marriage.” The Song teaches that intimate love depends upon continued attention to another person rather than assuming that covenant commitment makes attentiveness unnecessary. The beloved is repeatedly seen afresh, praised afresh, sought afresh, and spoken to rather than merely possessed. Marriage can provide the covenantal security within which love flourishes, but love itself continues to require perception, communication, desire, and freely renewed response.

Attend to the woman’s voice before preaching a generic theology of marriage

The woman is not a passive recipient of male desire. She begins the Song wanting her lover’s kisses, searches for him, summons him, describes his body, invites him into the countryside, speaks openly of giving her love, asserts possession of her own vineyard, articulates the climactic meditation on love in 8:6–7, and has the final word in 8:14. Exum and other literary interpreters have rightly emphasised how prominent and active the female voice is within the Song.

This matters homiletically because sermons on marriage can too easily import a complete gender theology from elsewhere and then use the Song merely as illustration. Whatever conclusions one reaches from the larger canon about marital roles, the Song itself should first be allowed to display what it actually emphasises: reciprocal admiration, reciprocal desire, mutual belonging, verbal praise, female initiative, male vulnerability, bodily delight, and the freedom of each lover to speak. Song 7:11 is especially significant because the man’s desire is directed toward the woman, creating an intriguing reversal of the language associated with Genesis 3:16.

The preacher should therefore avoid reducing the Song to advice addressed primarily to husbands about how to enjoy their wives or primarily to wives about becoming desirable. Both lovers look, speak, praise, long, and respond. The body of the other is neither merchandise nor entitlement but something received through mutual delight. That mutuality is one of the most important theological features of the book’s portrayal of human love.

Move into Genesis 1–3, but speak of transformation rather than pretending Eden has simply returned

The most fruitful Old Testament bridge begins with creation. The abundance of gardens, water, fruit, plants, animals, fertility, bodies, and desire naturally places the Song in conversation with Genesis 1–3. Ellen Davis and others have developed this connection with particular force, noting the absence of shame, the garden setting, mutual delight, and the striking relation between Genesis 3:16 and Song 7:11. The latter depicts the man’s desire directed toward the woman within a poem whose wider world repeatedly celebrates reciprocity rather than domination.

Yet it is better to speak of imaginative transformation than of a simple return to Eden. The lovers still inhabit a world east of Genesis 3. The woman can encounter violence from the city watchmen, desire can involve painful absence, jealousy can burn fiercely, social restrictions matter, and death remains the final rival named in 8:6. The Song is not pretending that the fall has disappeared.

This tension gives the preacher a richer biblical theology. Fruit no longer leads toward death but becomes the language of delight; nakedness need not produce shame; desire need not issue in domination; the earth can again appear abundant rather than cursed; man and woman can encounter each other in mutual admiration. The Song imagines how much of creation’s goodness remains recoverable within a fallen world, while its climactic confrontation between love and death simultaneously reminds us that Eden has not yet fully returned.

Place the Song within wisdom before moving directly to covenant or Christ

Murphy’s earlier FOTL volume provides a helpful reminder that the Song belongs naturally within the orbit of wisdom even though it does not look like Proverbs. Wisdom is interested in learning how to inhabit God’s world well, and few human realities require more wisdom than attraction, desire, intimacy, commitment, jealousy, timing, and the recognition of beauty. Proverbs itself knows that the way of a man with a woman is wonderfully difficult to explain, warns about destructive sexuality, and positively encourages delight in one’s spouse. Song of Songs supplies the sustained poetic counterpart.

The recurring admonition not to awaken or arouse love until it desires should therefore be preached as wisdom rather than merely turned into a slogan about premarital abstinence. Love is powerful enough that timing matters. Desire cannot simply be manufactured, purchased, commanded, or switched off once activated. The Song teaches reverence before erotic power rather than either fear of sexuality or naïve confidence that desire is automatically harmless.

Song 8:7 makes the same point from another angle. A wealthy person cannot simply exchange the contents of a house for love without encountering contempt. This theme sits especially well inside wisdom literature because it relativises precisely the kinds of things associated with Solomon—wealth, royal power, status, acquisition, and multiplication of possessions. Genuine love is received and reciprocated rather than bought, and therefore the richest king may possess less of what matters than two lovers who freely give themselves to one another.

Let sacred echoes remain echoes before turning them into allegory

The Song contains language that understandably encouraged theological readings. Gardens recall Eden; vineyards can evoke Israel; shepherd imagery can recall texts about God and his flock; Lebanon, cedar, pomegranates, architectural language, incense, myrrh, frankincense, gold, and other materials can remind readers of sanctuary imagery; statements of mutual possession can sound remarkably like covenant formulae. Miller is particularly interesting because he notices such resonances while refusing to say that the human figures therefore simply “stand for” theological realities.

This is an important discipline for preaching. The preacher may say that the biblical imagination surrounding these images enriches the Song’s world, but should distinguish resonance from identification. “My beloved is mine and I am his” can remind Christian readers of covenant language without proving that the male lover is Yahweh. A garden can participate in a larger biblical symbolism of creation, sanctuary, abundance, and presence without every tree becoming a theological cipher.

Fishbane is especially helpful at this point because his layered Jewish interpretation distinguishes the plain human sense from later covenantal, devotional, and mystical rereadings. Such readings are part of the genuine history of Scripture’s reception and need not be dismissed as foolish simply because they operate beyond historical peshat. The preacher should make the same distinction explicit: first hear the human love poem; then ask how canonical communities found its language capable of carrying further meanings.

Move to Christ by canonical analogy, not by claiming that every lover secretly represents him

There is no need to turn the Song back into patristic allegory in order to preach Christ. The New Testament itself supplies an appropriate bridge by using marriage as a major analogy for Christ and his people. Jesus can speak of himself as bridegroom; Ephesians 5 places human marriage and the Christ-church relationship in mutual theological illumination; Revelation culminates in marriage imagery for the final communion of God and his people. These texts show that embodied human covenantal love can analogically illuminate divine-human love without requiring Song of Songs to have been written as a prediction of Christ.

This sequence matters. We first learn from the Song what beautiful, embodied, mutual, faithful human love can be; only then do we recognise why marriage provides such potent language for the gospel. If human intimacy were unimportant or merely embarrassing, it would make a poor analogy for the communion of Christ and the church. The canonical movement therefore intensifies rather than cancels the Song’s human meaning.

Christological preaching can also move through the doctrines of incarnation and resurrection. O’Donnell usefully points out that Christian discomfort with bodies sits badly beside a faith centred upon the Word becoming flesh and bodily resurrection. The Song’s celebration of bodily beauty therefore belongs within a larger Christian affirmation that God creates, assumes, redeems, and will resurrect human bodies. This is a more secure route to Christ than claiming that the woman’s breasts represent the Testaments or that the lover’s fragrance encodes a particular doctrine.

Do not make marriage the final Christian fulfilment of the Song

A congregation contains married people, single people, widows and widowers, those who long to marry, those who do not, those whose marriages are joyful, those whose marriages are painful, and people carrying wounds associated with sexuality. A sermon series that repeatedly concludes, “therefore improve your marriage,” can unintentionally imply that the Song is Scripture only for couples and that sexual fulfilment is a necessary component of mature Christian life. That conclusion would sit uneasily beside Jesus and Paul, whose lives clearly deny that marriage is necessary for complete humanity.

The Song can instead teach the whole church about creaturely goodness, beauty, embodied existence, desire, restraint, faithful love, mutuality, dignity, speech, vulnerability, and the limits of ownership. Married Christians encounter these realities in a particular covenantal form, but the theological anthropology belongs to everyone. The New Testament then relativises even marriage itself by placing human marriage within an age that is passing and directing ultimate hope toward resurrection and communion with God.

Preaching should also acknowledge that the Song’s celebration of desire is not permission to ignore consent, power, exploitation, or violence. The poetry repeatedly values invitation and response rather than coercion, and the female lover possesses remarkable agency. The disturbing watchmen episode likewise prevents the preacher from pretending that sexuality exists outside social danger. The Song’s positive vision is strongest when it is preached as an alternative to commodification, domination, pornography, coercion, and the reduction of another person to an object.

Let Song 8:6–7 become the theological summit without making it say more than it does

The Song’s climactic reflection on love deserves a major sermon of its own. Love is placed beside death and Sheol, jealousy or passion burns like fire, mighty waters cannot quench it, floods cannot drown it, and wealth cannot purchase it. The entire book’s experience of longing, beauty, searching, delight, possession, and absence is suddenly compressed into a meditation on a force that cannot be mastered by money or extinguished by chaos.

Miller introduces an especially useful caution: the poem says love is as strong as death, not straightforwardly stronger than death. If the ancient imagery of Mot, Sheol, cosmic waters, and related forces is allowed to sound, human love stands heroically against mortality without yet overcoming it. This makes the passage more, not less, theologically significant. The Song brings human love to the boundary that it cannot cross by itself.

The debated “flame of Yah” reading then becomes particularly suggestive. If the divine name is indeed present, the poem’s strongest statement about human love locates its fire in relation to God without turning the preceding poetry into allegory. From a Christian canonical perspective, this creates a natural but still carefully distinguished movement toward the resurrection, where death is finally defeated rather than merely matched. Human love can witness to something greater than itself precisely because the Song has first allowed it to be gloriously and finitely human.

Preserve some poetry in the sermon instead of translating everything into advice

Miller’s aesthetic approach leads to perhaps the most practical new homiletical lesson: the preacher should sometimes allow the congregation to experience the passage before explaining it. Read the poetry well. Help people imagine spring ending winter, hear the lover moving like a gazelle, smell the perfumes, sense the abundance of fruit and water, or feel why an image of overwhelming beauty exceeds ordinary description. Explanation should deepen the experience rather than replacing it.

This means sermons on the Song need not always follow a conventional structure of three abstract propositions. A sermon can trace an image, a refrain, a movement from absence to presence, or a cluster of senses. It can show how “my beloved is mine and I am his” develops through later formulations, or how gardens change from places of beauty into spaces of mutual intimacy. Poetic Scripture deserves preaching that sometimes moves poetically.

The preacher should also be cautious about humour. Congregations may laugh nervously because they are unused to hearing sexual poetry read publicly, and occasional gentle acknowledgement can reduce discomfort. But repeated jokes about breasts, kissing, or sexual images quickly cheapen precisely what the Song treats beautifully. Reverence and delight are better tones than either embarrassment or adolescent amusement.

A Possible Sermon Series

A six-sermon series can follow the Song’s major poetic and theological movements without committing the preacher to a speculative chronological plot. Song 1:1–2:7 can introduce desire, embodied beauty, mutual praise, and the wisdom of not manipulating love before its proper time. Song 2:8–3:5 can explore approach, invitation, absence, searching, and the power of longing, showing that desire involves waiting as well as fulfilment.

Song 3:6–5:1 can concentrate on praise, beauty, the world of the wasf, garden imagery, and sexual union, while carefully preserving poetic modesty and placing embodied delight inside the goodness of creation. Song 5:2–6:3 can examine missed encounter, searching, remembered beauty, and the way love can continue to desire another in absence rather than simply possessing the other. These chapters also provide an opportunity to address the unsettling violence of the watchmen without explaining it away.

Song 6:4–8:4 can focus on renewed admiration, mutual desire, the woman’s agency, the development of the belonging refrains, and the Genesis 3:16 reversal in 7:11. The final sermon, Song 8:5–14, can gather the book around love, death, jealousy, flame, unquenchable waters, the impossibility of buying love, self-possession, and the deliberately open final summons. Such a series respects the final book’s literary movements without pretending that each sermon represents a consecutive episode in a recoverable biography.

Which commentaries best help build the bridge?

J. Cheryl Exum — Song of Songs (Old Testament Library)

Exum should be among the first commentaries opened when preparing a sermon because she teaches the preacher to see the final Song rather than merely solve individual verses. Her great contribution is the dynamic of desire: presence and absence, searching and finding, speech and response, memory and imagination, approach and withdrawal. These patterns are not peripheral literary decorations but part of what the Song says about love. They provide sermon movement organically, often more effectively than a reconstructed historical plot.

Her attention to the woman’s voice is equally important for preaching. Exum forces the reader to notice how frequently the woman acts rather than merely being acted upon, and how much of the book’s desire is articulated from her perspective. This protects sermons from unconsciously converting the Song into male-centred instruction about female attractiveness. Exum offers relatively little explicit Christian theological synthesis, but that restraint is precisely why she is so useful at the first stage of sermon preparation: she keeps the preacher honest about what the poem itself is doing before canonical conclusions are drawn.

Adele Berlin — Song of Songs (Hermeneia)

Berlin is particularly valuable for the exegetical foundation of the sermon. Her attention to Hebrew diction, metaphor, ambiguity, double entendre, speaker identification, body descriptions, paired language, literary allusion, and the broader ancient literary environment helps prevent confident sermons from being built on uncertain translations. She also refuses to force every ambiguity into a single reconstructed storyline, a discipline especially important when the pulpit naturally rewards certainty.

For preaching, Berlin’s greatest gift may be her sensitivity to how sophisticated the poetry is. She demonstrates that an image need not be reduced to one referent and that ambiguity can be productive rather than defective. Her work is less explicitly theological than Davis, Webb, Provan, or O’Donnell, so she will rarely supply the last stage of sermon construction. Yet she is one of the strongest safeguards against using theological enthusiasm to compensate for weak exegesis.

Robert D. Miller II — Finding Beauty in the Bible: An Aesthetic Commentary on the Song of Songs

Miller is the most significant new addition for the actual craft of preaching. He repeatedly asks not merely what a passage communicates but how it evokes sensation, emotion, beauty, desire, surprise, abundance, or movement. His attention to sound, syntax, rhythm, fragrance, taste, visual association, metaphor, geography, and literary cognates gives the preacher resources for helping congregations experience the Song rather than simply receive information about it.

The commentary is especially useful when preparing passages dominated by body imagery, perfumes, gardens, landscapes, or repeated sounds. Miller helps explain why comparisons that look ridiculous when visualised literally can function powerfully as poetic praise. Some aesthetic claims are necessarily more suggestive than demonstrable, and the book deliberately stops short of extensive Christian theological interpretation. I would therefore use Miller after establishing the Hebrew with Berlin, Murphy, or another technical commentator, but before drafting the sermon, because he asks exactly the question preachers need at that stage: how can the meaning be communicated without killing the beauty that carries it?

Roland E. Murphy — The Song of Songs (Hermeneia)

Murphy remains one of the best controls for sermon preparation because his judgment is consistently disciplined. He takes seriously the Song’s human erotic subject matter, comparative ancient love poetry, textual difficulties, literary forms, and long history of interpretation without allowing any one theory to explain everything. When a preacher encounters an ingenious claim in another commentary, Murphy is often an excellent place to test whether the evidence actually supports it.

His theological restraint is also instructive. Murphy does not assume that recognising human sexual love as the primary sense means the Song has no significance beyond historical erotic poetry, but he carefully distinguishes primary intention from later canonical or theological rereading. That distinction is one of the most important skills for preaching this book. The preacher can legitimately move beyond Murphy in biblical theology, but should know when that movement has occurred rather than presenting later Christian synthesis as though it were simply lexical exegesis.

Roland E. Murphy — Canticles in Wisdom Literature (Forms of the Old Testament Literature)

The earlier Murphy volume contributes something different and should not be treated merely as an inferior version of Hermeneia. Its narrow focus on structure, genre, setting, and intention highlights the different forms of love poetry from which the final Song is constructed. For sermon preparation, that can be enormously useful because it warns against turning an admiration song, a wasf, a yearning poem, or an invitation into one more scene in a speculative historical drama.

Murphy’s Egyptian parallels also help the preacher explain unfamiliar imagery without spiritualising it. Gazelles, gardens, fragrances, love sickness, brother-sister terminology, embraces, and royal or pastoral role-playing can belong naturally to ancient romantic discourse. The volume does not provide enough full exegetical or theological discussion to serve as the preacher’s main commentary, but it is an excellent specialist companion when determining what kind of poem one is actually preaching.

Ellen F. Davis — Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs

Davis becomes most useful once the preacher has established the literary sense. Her great contribution is to place the Song within Genesis, creation, land, garden, temple, and the wider biblical imagination without being satisfied with the conclusion that this is simply an ancient erotic anthology. Her reading of Song 7:11 beside Genesis 3:16 and her sustained attention to Edenic imagery give the preacher a particularly fruitful route from exegesis into Old Testament biblical theology.

At points Davis presses intertextual relationships further than I would want to preach as certain. Garden, vineyard, Israel, temple, human love, and divine love can begin to converge so strongly that resonance risks becoming identification. That makes her especially powerful when paired with Exum or Murphy. Used in this way, Davis does exactly what a biblical-theology commentary should do: she expands the preacher’s horizon while requiring continued judgment about how strongly each canonical connection should be stated.

Michael Fishbane — Song of Songs

Fishbane is indispensable when the preacher wants to understand why generations of Jewish readers found the Song capable of speaking about covenant, God, devotion, and mystical longing. His layered use of peshat, derash, remez, and sod is an excellent hermeneutical education because it distinguishes kinds of meaning rather than collapsing them together. The human love poem remains real while later communities discover further resonances within scriptural language.

This is particularly helpful for Christian preachers wrestling with the long allegorical heritage of the Song. Fishbane demonstrates that one need not choose between contempt for premodern interpretation and uncritical restoration of allegory. The preacher can acknowledge the theological imagination of reception history while still distinguishing it from the historical-literary sense. That distinction becomes a model for responsible Christian canonical interpretation as well.

Barry G. Webb — Five Festal Garments

Webb is one of the most useful guides for the actual bridge into biblical theology because he resists both interpretive extremes. The Song genuinely celebrates human erotic love, but this does not mean the canonical text is religiously empty. Webb treats the goodness of human love as something to be understood within the created and canonical world of Scripture rather than something that must be allegorically replaced before theology can begin.

His brevity is an advantage for sermon preparation because the central theological movement remains visible. He helps the preacher move from the poem’s human subject matter to its place among Israel’s Scriptures and then into Christian canonical reflection without losing the literal lovers along the way. Webb will not answer detailed Hebrew questions, but once those questions have been handled elsewhere, he is one of the clearest guides to the theological direction of travel.

Iain Provan — Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs (NIV Application Commentary)

Provan is especially valuable in moving from biblical theology into contemporary pastoral application. He takes the Song’s celebration of human desire seriously while asking what it means for Christian thinking about bodies, marriage, sexual culture, fidelity, and creation. The NIVAC structure explicitly forces the interpreter to distinguish original meaning, bridging contexts, and contemporary significance, which makes it naturally useful for preaching.

Some of Provan’s narrative reconstruction can be more confident than the literary evidence allows, so I would not let that framework determine sermon divisions. Nevertheless, his theological and pastoral instincts are frequently useful, especially when the preacher needs to move beyond ancient poetry without reducing the sermon to generic relationship advice. He is particularly good as a later-stage resource after Exum, Berlin, Murphy, or Miller have done the exegetical work.

Douglas Sean O’Donnell — Song of Solomon (ESV Expository Commentary)

O’Donnell is the most explicitly homiletical of the recent volumes considered here and directly addresses the challenge of moving erotic Hebrew poetry into public Christian proclamation. He strongly favours reading the Song as human erotic love rather than detailed allegory and argues that Christian readers should not be embarrassed by the biblical affirmation of bodily desire. His discussion of the dignity of the body, including connections with incarnation and resurrection, provides a particularly accessible theological bridge for evangelical preaching.

His major strength is practical courage. He recognises that preachers need help interpreting symbolism, retaining modesty, and speaking publicly about material that Scripture itself presents without shame. I would be more cautious than O’Donnell about some aspects of his marital and narrative reconstruction and would distinguish more carefully between direct exegesis and later Christological analogy. Even so, he is extremely useful at the final preaching stage because he addresses the precise problem many more technical commentators leave untouched: how to turn responsible exegesis of erotic poetry into a reverent Christian sermon.

Bringing the bridge together

A disciplined sermon process for Song of Songs can therefore be expressed in six movements. First, determine what kind of poem is being read, who is probably speaking, what the images evoke, and how the language works aesthetically before asking for doctrinal propositions. Second, locate the passage within the final Song by tracing repeated imagery, adjurations, searching scenes, statements of belonging, gardens, body descriptions, or other motifs rather than relying on a detailed reconstructed plot.

Third, ask what wisdom about human love the passage communicates: beauty, desire, mutuality, restraint, timing, speech, longing, bodily goodness, self-possession, fidelity, or the impossibility of purchasing love. Fourth, move outward through the Old Testament, especially Genesis 1–3 and the wisdom tradition, while treating possible covenant, temple, land, or divine-love resonances as genuine possibilities whose strength must be assessed rather than assumed.

Fifth, move into Christian canonical theology through analogy and fulfilment rather than allegorical substitution. The incarnation and resurrection affirm the goodness and destiny of the body; New Testament bridegroom and marriage imagery allows human covenantal love to illuminate Christ and his people; resurrection finally answers the confrontation between love and death that human sexuality itself cannot overcome. Sixth, return to the congregation with application broad enough for the whole church: married and unmarried, young and old, joyful and wounded, helping everyone perceive the goodness of embodied life while refusing commodification, domination, shame, coercion, or the claim that romantic fulfilment is humanity’s final hope.

The preacher who follows that sequence will neither apologise for the Song nor exaggerate it. Human love will be allowed to remain wonderfully human; poetry will be allowed to remain poetry; theological resonances will be allowed to grow organically rather than being imposed; and Christ will appear not because every kiss was secretly about him, but because the whole created world in which men and women love, desire, marry, suffer, age, and die finally finds its redemption in him.

Perhaps the deepest homiletical lesson supplied by the recent Miller volume is that the Song does not merely give the church information about love. It trains the imagination to notice beauty, attend to another person, delight without possessing, and experience creation as a world capable of bearing astonishing abundance. Preaching Song of Songs successfully therefore involves more than saying true things about marriage or sexuality. It involves helping a congregation learn to see again.