This week’s issue-rich lesson employs the erotic poetry of the Song of Songs to introduce a range of Christian stands on the nature of sexual love.

Sunday’s section affirms the validity and value of bodies as well as souls, a scriptural view that older Christian traditions are struggling to recover as they shed a centuries-old theology influenced by Platonic idealism. Ancient churchmen, under Plato’s influence, devalued matter, including human bodies, whereas immaterial soul/spirit was exalted. Victorious Christian living consisted largely in acquiring freedom from body-based emotions and cravings.

Monday’s section launches a discussion of endearment terms in the Song of Songs (hereafter referred to as The Song), starting with friend, which occurs twice. However, here it connotes "darling, favorite, lover" rather than "friend."

Let’s continue the survey. Most frequent is my beloved or my lover (Hebrew dōdiy—I count thirty-six occurrences). My beautiful one (yaphathiy) occurs sixteen times. My sister (’āchothiy) has five occurrences. The corresponding term brother occurs once. Bride (calā, "veiled one") six occurrences. Dove (yōnā—yes, the prophet Jonah was named "Dove"!) completes the list. These terms serve to intensify the sense of intimacy, giving readers that almost-voyeuristic feeling that they are eavesdropping.

Tuesday’s section introduces the term mutuality, employed in current theology of marriage discourse to call for married individuals to retain autonomy over their persons, so that all joint marital activity, including sex, is based on the mutually free choice of both partners. Mutualists find Scripture support in 1 Corinthians 7:3–5.

The counterview, called "hierarchy of genders" or "dominant male, submissive female" grants the husband headship over his wife. Hierarchists base their view on Ephesians 5:22–33, omitting verse 21. Mutuality has been adopted not only by the author of this lesson but also in the most recent Adventist book on marriage.1

Wednesday’s section uses Genesis 39 and Proverbs 5 to caution against intimacy with the strange (zārā) and foreign (nokrīyā) woman. Both Hebrew terms express ethnic and/or social different-ness, probably co-noting a woman, whether local or foreign, whose behavior towards men is predatory. The man in both passages is clearly expected to guard himself against such initiatives.

The unmarried woman’s responsibility to preserve her virginity against a predatory male is the next focal point of today’s section, drawing on metaphors in The Song such as a wall, a locked door, a sealed fountain.

Wednesday’s lesson then focuses on The Song’s thrice-repeated (2:7; 3:5; 8:5), intense appeal to the daughters of Jerusalem. The following features invite comment.

"Swearing by the gazelles…" draws on the coincidence that the Hebrew word sebā’ōth means both "gazelles" and "starry hosts" when used in the divine title "Lord of hosts." Gazelles in ancient Near Eastern poetry and painting sometimes symbolized sexual potency. This gives a surprising twist to the image evoked by the traditional Adventist "Dorcas lady" (see Acts 9:36)!

The heart of the oath is expressed by a twofold repetition of the verb ’oor, best translated "don’t stir into action, and don’t prod love…!" This verb elsewhere expresses "nudge" a sleeper in Zechariah 4:1, "poke" a fire in Hosea 7:4, and "prod" a crocodile in Job 41:2. The implication in this verse that sexual desire is a consuming passion is spelled out in The Song’s conclusion, 8:6:

for strong as death is love, unrelenting as sheol is passion, its flames are flames of fire…

According to 8:7, love cannot be extinguished once properly ablaze.

How long, then, should Jerusalem’s daughters refrain from "prodding" love? The final phrase of verse 7 answers: "until [love] wishes it." In other words, love awakens in its own time.

This frank acknowledgement of the potency of human sexuality raises a crucial lifestyle issue for today’s young adult Christians in industrialized countries—how to cope with sexuality during the increasing number of years that separate puberty from marriage. In the biblical world, so far as historians have been able to determine, marriage typically followed the onset of puberty by, say, five years.

Today’s young adults, by contrast, typically face a ten- to fifteen-year gap between puberty, which seems to arrive at a younger age than before, and marriage, which in the United States and Australia typically occurs during the mid- to late-twenties. If Jerusalem’s daughters—and sons—needed stern admonition to rein in their awakening sexuality and maintain premarital sexual abstinence for those five years, how do their modern-day Christian counterparts cope while waiting two or three times that long?

Societal pressure into premarital sexual activity is increased by factors not present in the biblical world, including widespread availability of effective contraception. One major study published eight years ago indicated that half of the women in the United States, and three-quarters of the men, became sexually active by age eighteen.2 In such an atmosphere is it likely that young Christian adults are able to live up to the ideal of sexual abstinence for such a long time?

How should the Church address this situation? Responses to date range from silence, to increased stress on premarital sexual abstinence, to suggesting the return of betrothal as a church-recognized category for sexually active couples in an exclusive relationship who do not feel ready for marriage, but want to be connected to their church "in good and regular standing."3

Thursday’s section begins on a theological high note, pointing to marriage as an analogy of the unity within the Godhead. Such a healthy embrace of Trinitarian belief, unavailable to Adventist pioneers, became increasingly available during the twentieth century. The lesson then brings the reader crashing to earth by calling for a reading of Leviticus 20:7–21, which prescribes the death penalty for several sexual deviations/perversions, and social ostracism for others.

Real life cannot be read from law codes, however, even biblical ones. Although ostracism may remain an appropriate church response for victim-creating exploitive sexual perversions, the death penalty is out, and perhaps it was never in, because the Old Testament does not record a single case of judicial execution of an adulterer.

Yahweh’s concerns for Israel’s sexual struggles is expressed more benignly in Leviticus 18:6–30, where Yahweh declares, at the end of a list of sexual offenses, "don’t do them!" (verses 24–30). Eventual expulsion from the Promised Land would be the consequence of Israel adopting the sexual perversions of the land’s previous inhabitants.

In some of the passages from Paul’s letters cited in today’s section, the apostle seems perilously close to unraveling the body/soul unity that the lesson author so carefully knitted together at the beginning of this week. See especially Romans 8:10; 1 Corinthians 6:16–17; Galatians 5:24; Colossians 3:3–4. Is Paul trying to tell Christians that the saving reality of Christ is dynamic as well as static, process as well as status?

God’s family includes both damaged members and strong. "We who are strong ought to bear the failings of the weak" (Rom. 15:1). This, rather than "shall be put to death," seems to be Scripture’s starting point for God’s people who openly and honestly struggle to align their sexual conduct with high Christian principles.

Notes and References

1. Bryan Craig, Searching for Intimacy in Marriage (Silver Spring, Md.: Ministerial Association of Seventh-day Adventists, 2004), 102–5.
2. Marian Wright Edelman’s introduction to The State of America’s Children: A Report from the Children’s Defense Fund (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 96, cited in Rosemary Radford Ruether, Christianity and the Making of the Modern Family (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 185, 278.
3. An early alert to the Church’s need for such a category was provided in John Shelby Spong, Living in Sin? (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1988), 177–87. The best-articulated theology of betrothal known to me is Adrian Thatcher, Marriage after Modernity (Sheffield, Eng. Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), chapters 4 and 6.

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