Song of Solomon 4:1-7

Song of Solomon 4:1-7. The Royal Suitor

King Solomon is here the speaker, and in these verses he presses his suit anew by praise of the Shulammite's beauty. The whole song is evidently modelled, as several of the succeeding songs are, on the wasfor description of the bride, which is so prominent a thing at marriage festivals in Syria to this day. To have established this is Wetzstein's great merit, for until his Essay on the Threshing-Boardappeared these descriptions were to a large extent inexplicable. But the discovery that the wasfis an ancient form of song connected by prescription with love and marriage explains its appearance here. In a series of love-songs disposed so as to give scenes of a connected narrative, it was natural and almost inevitable that the wasfshould be imitated. It has been noticed by many that the spontaneity and originality of the other poems disappear in these descriptions. This is due to their being written according to a stereotyped form. That the wasfwas imitated when no regular marriage wasfwas intended, but only a love-song, is proved by the fact that in one of the Mu-allaqât, the seven poems said to have been hung in the Caaba at Mekka in pre-Islamic times, that viz. of Amru ibn Kulthum, in Song of Solomon 4:13-16 inclusive, there is a description of a woman much in the tone of this.