Verse 2
Sol 6:2 2 My beloved has gone down into the garden, To the beds of sweet herbs, To feed in the gardens And gather lilies.
He is certainly, she means to say, there to be found where he delights most to tarry. He will have gone down - viz. from the palace (Sol 6:11; cf. 1Ki 20:43 and Est 7:7) - into his garden, to the fragrant beds, there to feed in his garden and gather lilies (cf. Old Germ. “to collect rôsen”); he is fond of gardens and flowers. Shulamith expresses this in her shepherd-dialect, as when Jesus says of His Father (Joh 15:1), “He is the husbandman.” Flowerbeds are the feeding place (vid., regarding לרעות under Sol 2:16) of her beloved. Solomon certainly took great delight in gardens and parks, Ecc 2:5. But this historical fact is here idealized; the natural flora which Solomon delighted in with intelligent interest presents itself as a figure of a higher Loveliness which was therein as it were typically manifest (cf. Rev 7:17, where the “Lamb,” “feeding,” and “fountains of water,” are applied as anagogics, i.e., heavenward-pointing types). Otherwise it is not to be comprehended why it is lilies that are named. Even if it were supposed to be implied that lilies were Solomon's favourite flowers, we must assume that his taste was determined by something more than by form and colour. The words of Shulamith give us to understand that the inclination and the favourite resort of her friend corresponded to his nature, which is altogether thoughtfulness and depth of feeling (cf. under Psa 92:5, the reference to Dante: the beautiful women who gather flowers representing the paradisaical life); lilies, the emblems of unapproachable grandeur, purity inspiring reverence, high elevation above that which is common, bloom there wherever the lily-like one wanders, whom the lily of the valley calls her own. With the words:
Verse 3
Sol 6:3 3 I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine, Who feeds among the lilies,
Shulamith farther proceeds, followed by the daughters of Jerusalem, to seek her friend lost through her own fault. She always says, not אישׁי, but דּודי and רעי; for love, although a passion common to mind and body, is in this Song of Songs viewed as much as possible apart from its basis in the animal nature. Also, that the description hovers between that of the clothed and the unclothed, gives to it an ideality favourable to the mystical interpretation. Nakedness is ערוה. But at the cross nakedness appears transported from the sphere of sense to that of the supersensuous.
