Tell Me, Please — Song of Songs 1:7
“Tell me, you whom my soul loves,
Where do you pasture your flock?
Where do you make it lie down at noon?
For why should I be like one who veils herself
Beside the flocks of your companions?”
(Song of Songs 1:7, translated from the Japanese New Japanese Bible 2017)
(My walk through the Song of Songs keeps wandering along without a clear path. Just when I think, “I’ve caught hold of the pronouns!” they slip right through my fingers again.
Maybe this is part of what makes the Song of Songs so difficult.
So I gather myself and once again turn toward the direction of the voice.)
At the beginning of verse 7:
הַגִּידָה לִּי
(haggidah li)
“Tell me, please.”
Then she addresses him like this:
שֶׁאָהֲבָה נַפְשִׁי
(she’ahavah nafshi)
“You whom my soul loves.”
👉 Still, she does not call him by name.
Then comes אֵיכָה (eikhah), “where?” twice.
אֵיכָה תִרְעֶה
(eikhah tir‘eh)
“Where do you pasture your flock?”
אֵיכָה תַּרְבִּיץ בַּצָּהֳרָיִם
(eikhah tarbits batsohorayim)
“Where do you make it lie down at noon?”
And now something curious is added to the picture of the man we have been following.
In verse 2, he was “he.”
In verse 3, “you,” “your love,” “your perfumes,” “your name.”
In verse 4, “the king.”
In verse 5, I thought a name had finally appeared—“Solomon”—only to find that it was
“the curtains of Solomon.”
And now, verse 7:
“Where do you pasture your flock?”
This is where I stop today.
I thought he was a king, and now he’s tending sheep.
What?
Is the man I thought was the king the same person as the “you” who pastures the flock?
Or are they different people?
Who is this man, anyway?
Every time I think the figure of “him” is beginning to come into focus, his outline shifts
again.
Then, toward the end of verse 7:
חֲבֵרֶיךָ
(ḥaverekha)
“your companions.”
More people again.
I can’t help laughing.
A king—or a man who tends sheep?
Let me look again at where “I,” the woman speaking, is standing from verses 1 through 7.
Verses 2–4
She speaks of him in both the third and second person, and then says:
“The king has brought me into his chambers.”
Here, I am where he is—on the side of the royal court.
Chambers, perfumes, name...
Words associated with an indoor, courtly setting gather around the scene.
I have been brought into where he is.
Verses 5–6
The scene changes.
The tents of Kedar.Skin darkened by the sun.Vineyards she was made to keep by her
mother’s sons.
I am no longer in the inner chamber.
I am outside, in the open.
And she says,
“My own vineyard I have not kept.”
She stands outside as a woman who was made to tend the vineyards and could not keep her own.
Her feet have moved from the royal court to the open country.
Verse 7
Still standing out there, I call to him:
“Where do you pasture your flock?”
When I call from the open country, the man I call to also appears there—as one who tends sheep.
In verse 4, he brought me into the inner chamber.
In verse 7, from where I now stand, he is called into the open country as a shepherd.
Perhaps his image has shifted from king to shepherd not because he moved.
Perhaps it is because I moved—from the inner chamber to the open country.
Where I stand when I call to him begins to shape the outline in which he appears.
Seen from the royal court: a king.
Called to from the open country: a shepherd.
Perhaps the source of this double image is not him...
but me.
For now,
“I thought he was a king, and now he’s tending sheep.”
I’ll stop here for a while.
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