“How beautiful your are, my love, oh how beautiful. Your lips are like a scarlet ribbon; your mouth is lovely. Your temples behind your veil are like the halves of a pomegranate.” You are altogether beautiful, my darling, there is no flaw in you.”
This post is by no means complete but I pray God blesses your reading.
“Your temples behind your veil are like the halves of a pomegranate.”
I believe it to be very important to get these verses right. The same adoration of her beauty is repeated once in 4:3 and again in 6:7.
Context of the sweet compliment.
Its the wedding night. Solomon giving sweet voice to what he see’s as beautiful about his wife after Solomon was crowned king on her wedding day. I suppose they are alone. They are close and not separated and about to get really close much closer for the 3 rd time. So the bride is continually getting happier and happier and they are getting more and more intimate, culminating in the strictest union thus far in 5:1. She stays humble through all these compliments. The love of God in her heart 8:6 compels her forward in holiness. Her temples are holy. Her temples are beautiful. Both body and soul are set apart for God. We are His. Her temples are set apart for holy use only.
Hopefully by the end of this post you will understand.
1. What Solomon is complimenting?
2. How is this a compliment? or What is it about her temples that make them adorable? or what makes them beautiful? I love that!! What makes them beautiful? I love to behold beauty. Especially beauty God has made. The beauty of a woman seems to far exceed any other physical beauty for God crafted her that way 7:1.
3. What are the similarities between her temples and two halves of a pomegranate?
1. What is Solomon complimenting?
Solomon is complimenting her beautiful temples. Her physical temples where beautiful! In 4:1 Solomon is looking at her and she is beautiful and not just beautiful but oh so beautiful and then goes on to explain different parts of her and their beauty. She has doves eyes, glorious hair, proportionate, clean and functional teeth, perfect temples, neck and breasts and concludes she is “altogether lovely, there is no flaw in her.” 4:7
Solomon is complimenting her beauty. Her external beauty. God created, God was the “skilled craftsman” 7:1 of her temples. When Solomon viewed her temples they were beautiful. Creation reflects the Glory of God. Man and Woman were created by God for their good and God’s Glory. How do we see the Glory of God in the beauty of her temples? Solomon is delighted in the beauty of her temples. Song 4:1 “How beautiful you are, my darling! Oh, how beautiful!”
What he see’s is pleasing to his mind because of the equal proportions being held. It like beholding equal proportion and equal proportions. Proportion, harmony, symmetry.
All beauty consists in similarness, or identity of relation. In Identity of relation consists all likeness, and all identity between two consists in identity of relation.
The relation between the parts of the extremities (of each temple) is the same. This is part of their beauty, the distance is the same. Perfectly matched.
Our proportions are only shadow of proportion.
2. How is this a compliment?
4:1 ” How beautiful your are, my love, oh how beautiful.”
4:1 states that Solomon is expressing his love to his bride by letting her know what he see’s as beautiful about her immediately after the wedding 3:6-3:11. And in 4:9-5:1 Solomon calls her “my bride” 5x. I can’t imagine a man marrying a woman and on the wedding night not admiring the beauty of his wife. Assuming he hasn’t been with anyone before, the virgin man would be absolutely wowed!! Over and over again, seeing beauty after beauty and being able to admire it all without sinning for she is hers. Not flattery but a genuine adoration of what is excellent about his wife. Her temples were worthy of such expressions because they were beautiful and she was “the most beautiful woman” 1:7 Therefore she could not be the most beautiful woman if her temples were deformed. There was no deformity in her, she was flawless 4:7. There were no flaws in her temples behind the veil or behind her locks.
3. What are the similarities or implications of using an illustration of two halves of a pomegranate?
Beauty. Solomon is looking at her temples and they are beautiful 4:1-3. What beauty is there in beholding two halves of a pomegranate?
Excellency or the beauty of the two halves consists in the similarness of one half to the other. And not merely equality and proportion but in any kind of similarness. Looking at two halves of a pomegranate serve the purpose of a good illustration of communicating similar thoughts and ideas that Solomon gets when he views and is pleased with the sight of her temples.
2. Similar shape. Exact, cut in halve.
3. Similar color
4. Similar texture
Usefulness of having such beautiful temples. For your good and God’s Glory. So that you could enjoy God and Glorify Him the Maker of our temples and thighs Song 7:1
Application
1. Praise God!! He made women beautiful. Their temples are beautiful to behold. Delightful to behold. Pleasing to the mind to behold.
2. Adore the beauty of your wife often. Solomon praise his wife 34 out of 50 verses.
First some definitions
Proportion= Pleasant to the mind and tis an equality, or likeness of ratios, so that it is the equality that makes the proportion.
Excellency= harmony, symmetry or proportion. Excellency may be distributed into Greatness and Beauty. The former is the Degree of Being; the latter is Beings’ Consent to Being.
Beauty=that view of which is immediately pleasant to the mind. When a form or quality appears lovely, pleasing and delightful in itself then it is called beautiful.
1. The beauty of her temples themselves 4:3
2. The beauty of her temples being consistent with the whole face 4:7
3. The beauty of her temples being consistent with the whole face and body.
4. The beauty of her temples being consistent with the whole face, body and all of creation.
5. The beauty of her temples being most beautiful because her temples, whole face, body and all of creation are consistent with God’s Holy Character. Hallowed be Thy Name.
The end purpose for which God created her temples for is on display clearest in the face of “the most beautiful of woman” Song 1:7 The beauty of her temples is being point out for Solomon says in 4:1 “How beautiful you are my darling, my darling oh how beautiful” then he goes on to explain specific things about her that are beautiful. First her eyes, then hair, then teeth and lips. Now attention is drawn to her temples.
Imagine Eve, no flaw in her!! Oh, so beautiful, both inside and out!! Adam had to have been blown away!! Man was alone! Its was not good for man to be alone! God game him woman!!! The most beautiful woman. (and don’t say she was the only woman, if you were to compare the body of Eve to any other woman I doubt it would come close. There was a glory about the bodies of Adam and Eve that was lost at the fall then they covered themselves. Their moral beauty was lost along with the glory of the external body. Eves temples were perfectly equal and pleasing to the eye. Eve became evil and her temples and body and everyone else afterwards is born flawed to one degree or another. Death entered the body immediately it stared dying. A dead corpse is not beautiful.
To know by tasting the Love of God. Taste and see that the Lord is Good. It must be tasted first by the soul in order to see that the Lord is good or loves the soul. By my own experience I can vouch that Solomon’s Song of Songs helps me understanding the Love of the LORD” His Flame better than any other Song by tasting, experiencing, and feeling It/Him in order to know It/Him better.
Consistency within itself and the whole is where beauty consists. Beauty does not have inconsistencies.
Beauty has Equality not inequality. Her temples where of equal proportions therefore beautiful.
There is also harmony within beauty.
What is in harmony one with the other? Both are in harmony with each other
Therefore it is very pleasing to behold temples like this because they are very beautiful.
Both are compliments by Solomon about a specific beauty. Here it is her temples.
Both come after the bride has learned how to keep a stricter union with the one she loves.
Now the girls might be thinking. If a guy said this to me, I don’t know if is joking or what does he mean? Confusion, yet there has to be something here that I am missing.
One of the highest excellencies is love. As nothing else has a proper being but spirits, and as bodies are but the shadow of being, therefore, the consent of bodies to one another, and the harmony that is among them, is but the shadow of excellency.
The reason why equality thus pleases the mind, and inequality is unpleasing, is because disproportion, or inconsistency, is contrary to being. For being, if we examine narrowly, is nothing else but proportion. When one being is inconsistent with another being, then being is contradicted. But contradiction to being is intolerable to perceiving being, and the consent to being most pleasing.
The reason why equality thus pleases the mind, and inequality is unpleasing, is because disproportion, or inconsistency, is contrary to being. For being, if we examine narrowly, is nothing else but proportion. When one being is inconsistent with another being, then being is contradicted. But contradiction to being is intolerable to perceiving being, and the consent to being most pleasing. Edwards
“Your temples behind your veil are like the halves of a pomegranate.”
“Your cheeks are like rosy pomegranates behind your veil.”
“thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate within thy locks.”
“Behind your veil, your temple is like a slice of pomegranate.” ( I don’t like this version because it is singular. “temple” Which suggests the whole forehead. But the text is plural. “temples”
“thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate within thy locks.”
Her temples were but one piece of the excellent ratio that the beauty of a face consists.
There is an infinite beauty within the degree of ability within her mind. I know not exactly how to explain this but oneness of mind with God is infinite. We will grow in the knowledge of God forever. Our minds in the most glorious state in heaven are capable of infinite knowledge only in the aspect that we will be growing in the knowledge of God forever, therefore there will be no end to our growing knowledge. Her temples include the function of the mind. Or the forefront of her thinking. What a blessing!! You can know that your growth in the knowledge of God will never end. You will be forever shown God’s Beauty over and over again to the capacity of your mind and heart and it will get better and more beautiful to all eternity!! Imagine looking at a Beautiful flower and then seeing one more beautiful then another more beautiful than the last and it goes on forever, therefore in a similar fashion her spiritual temples are infinitely beautiful due to their union with infinite God in Christ!
If the happiness of the creature be considered as it will be, in the whole of the creature’s eternal duration, with all the infinity of its progress, and infinite increase of nearness and union to God; in this view, the creature must be looked upon as united to God in an infinite strictness.
