When I look over the woman’s speech that we have looked at this week, I am reminded again of her utter delight in her lover. There are characteristics of this woman’s love that are worth our reminding ourselves of:
1. Notice her poetic creativity: her lover’s voice bounds like a gazelle through the mountains, she watches him arrive and stare yearningly through the lattice, and she attributes to him poetic images of flowers and blossoms and “the covert of the cliff.”
2. Notice also her confidence: she attributes to him his delight in her in 2:10 — he summons her to the blossoms in order to take delight in love. She both knows how he speaks of her and she recreates it in his lips. She knows she is loved. In effect, her words here become self praising self.
3. Notice also her determination: she awakes to find her lover gone. Never mind, she shoves all inhibitions aside and goes in search of him. She finds only the sentinels out on their patrol. She asks them if perhaps they have seen them. When they say they haven’t, she presses on … and then finds him whom her soul loves.
Let it not be said that ancient Jewish women were the passive partners. Let it be said that genuine love knows couples that take delight in one another and search for one another because they delight in one another’s presence and dread one another’s absence.