Old/New Testament
6 The Young Women of Jerusalem: “O rarest of beautiful women, where has your loved one gone? We will help you find him.”
The Girl: 2 “He has gone down to his garden, to his spice beds, to pasture his flock and to gather the lilies. 3 I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine. He pastures his flock among the lilies!”
King Solomon: 4 “O my beloved, you are as beautiful as the lovely land of Tirzah, yes, beautiful as Jerusalem, and how you capture my heart.[a] 5 Look the other way, for your eyes have overcome me! Your hair, as it falls across your face, is like a flock of goats frisking down the slopes of Gilead. 6 Your teeth are white as freshly washed ewes, perfectly matched and not one missing. 7 Your cheeks are matched loveliness[b] behind your hair. 8 I have sixty other wives, all queens, and eighty concubines, and unnumbered virgins available to me; 9 but you, my dove, my perfect one, are the only one among them all, without an equal! The women of Jerusalem were delighted when they saw you, and even the queens and concubines praise you. 10 ‘Who is this,’ they ask, ‘arising as the dawn, fair as the moon, pure as the sun, so utterly captivating?’”[c]
The Girl: 11 “I went down into the orchard of nuts and out to the valley to see the springtime there, to see whether the grapevines were budding or the pomegranates were blossoming yet. 12 Before I realized it, I was stricken with terrible homesickness and wanted to be back among my own people.”[d]
The Young Women of Jerusalem: 13 “Return, return to us, O maid of Shulam. Come back, come back, that we may see you once again.”
The Girl: “Why should you seek a mere Shulammite?”
King Solomon: “Because you dance so beautifully.”[e]
7 King Solomon: “How beautiful your tripping feet, O queenly maiden. Your rounded thighs are like jewels, the work of the most skilled of craftsmen. 2 Your navel is lovely as a goblet filled with wine. Your waist[f] is like a heap of wheat set about with lilies. 3 Your two breasts are like two fawns, yes, lovely twins.[g] 4 Your neck is stately as an ivory tower, your eyes as limpid pools in Heshbon by the gate of Bath-rabbim. Your nose is shapely[h] like the tower of Lebanon overlooking Damascus.
5 “As Mount Carmel crowns the mountains, so your hair is your crown. The king is held captive in your queenly tresses.
6 “Oh, how delightful you are; how pleasant, O love, for utter delight! 7 You are tall and slim like a palm tree, and your breasts are like its clusters of dates. 8 I said, I will climb up into the palm tree and take hold of its branches. Now may your breasts be like grape clusters, the scent of your breath like apples, 9 and your kisses as exciting as the best of wine, smooth and sweet, causing the lips of those who are asleep to speak.”
The Girl: 10 “I am my beloved’s and I am the one he desires. 11 Come, my beloved, let us go out into the fields and stay in the villages. 12 Let us get up early and go out to the vineyards and see whether the vines have budded, whether the blossoms have opened, and whether the pomegranates are in flower. And there I will give you my love. 13 There the mandrakes give forth their fragrance, and the rarest fruits are at our doors, the new as well as old, for I have stored them up for my beloved.”
8 The Girl: “Oh, if only you were my brother; then I could kiss you no matter who was watching, and no one would laugh at me. 2 I would bring you to my childhood home,[i] and there you would teach me. I would give you spiced wine to drink, sweet pomegranate wine. 3 His left hand would be under my head and his right hand would embrace me. 4 I adjure you, O women of Jerusalem, not to awaken him until he pleases.”
The Young Women of Jerusalem: 5 “Who is this coming up from the desert, leaning on her beloved?”
King Solomon: “Under the apple tree where your mother gave birth to you in her travail, there I awakened your love.”
The Girl: 6 “Seal me in your heart with permanent betrothal, for love is strong as death, and jealousy is as cruel as Sheol. It flashes fire, the very flame of Jehovah. 7 Many waters cannot quench the flame of love, neither can the floods drown it. If a man tried to buy it with everything he owned, he couldn’t do it.”
The Girl’s Brothers: 8 “We have a little sister too young for breasts. What shall we do if someone asks to marry her?”
King Solomon: 9 “If she has no breasts,[j] we will build upon her a battlement of silver, and if she is a door, we will enclose her with cedar boards.”
The Girl: 10 “I am slim, tall,[k] and full-breasted, and I have found favor in my lover’s eyes. 11 Solomon had a vineyard at Baal-hamon, which he rented out to some farmers there, the rent being one thousand pieces of silver from each. 12 But as for my own vineyard, you, O Solomon, shall have my thousand pieces of silver, and I will give two hundred pieces to those who care for it. 13 O my beloved, living in the gardens, how wonderful that your companions may listen to your voice; let me hear it too. 14 Come quickly, my beloved, and be like a gazelle or young deer upon the mountains of spices.”
4 But remember this, that if a father dies and leaves great wealth for his little son, that child is not much better off than a slave until he grows up, even though he actually owns everything his father had. 2 He has to do what his guardians and managers tell him to until he reaches whatever age his father set.
3 And that is the way it was with us before Christ came. We were slaves to Jewish laws and rituals, for we thought they could save us. 4 But when the right time came, the time God decided on, he sent his Son, born of a woman, born as a Jew, 5 to buy freedom for us who were slaves to the law so that he could adopt us as his very own sons. 6 And because we are his sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, so now we can rightly speak of God as our dear Father. 7 Now we are no longer slaves but God’s own sons. And since we are his sons, everything he has belongs to us, for that is the way God planned.
8 Before you Gentiles knew God you were slaves to so-called gods that did not even exist. 9 And now that you have found God (or I should say, now that God has found you), how can it be that you want to go back again and become slaves once more to another poor, weak, useless religion of trying to get to heaven by obeying God’s laws? 10 You are trying to find favor with God by what you do or don’t do on certain days or months or seasons or years. 11 I fear for you. I am afraid that all my hard work for you was worth nothing.
12 Dear brothers, please feel as I do about these things, for I am as free from these chains as you used to be. You did not despise me then when I first preached to you, 13 even though I was sick when I first brought you the Good News of Christ. 14 But even though my sickness was revolting to you, you didn’t reject me and turn me away. No, you took me in and cared for me as though I were an angel from God or even Jesus Christ himself.
15 Where is that happy spirit that we felt together then? For in those days I know you would gladly have taken out your own eyes and given them to replace mine[a] if that would have helped me.
16 And now have I become your enemy because I tell you the truth?
17 Those false teachers who are so anxious to win your favor are not doing it for your good. What they are trying to do is to shut you off from me so that you will pay more attention to them. 18 It is a fine thing when people are nice to you with good motives and sincere hearts, especially if they aren’t doing it just when I am with you! 19 Oh, my children, how you are hurting me! I am once again suffering for you the pains of a mother waiting for her child to be born—longing for the time when you will finally be filled with Christ. 20 How I wish I could be there with you right now and not have to reason with you like this, for at this distance I frankly don’t know what to do.
21 Listen to me, you friends who think you have to obey the Jewish laws to be saved: Why don’t you find out what those laws really mean? 22 For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one from his slave-wife and one from his freeborn wife. 23 There was nothing unusual about the birth of the slave-wife’s baby. But the baby of the freeborn wife was born only after God had especially promised he would come.
24-25 Now this true story is an illustration of God’s two ways of helping people. One way was by giving them his laws to obey. He did this on Mount Sinai, when he gave the Ten Commandments to Moses. Mount Sinai, by the way, is called “Mount Hagar” by the Arabs—and in my illustration, Abraham’s slave-wife Hagar represents Jerusalem, the mother-city of the Jews, the center of that system of trying to please God by trying to obey the Commandments; and the Jews, who try to follow that system, are her slave children. 26 But our mother-city is the heavenly Jerusalem, and she is not a slave to Jewish laws.
27 That is what Isaiah meant when he prophesied, “Now you can rejoice, O childless woman; you can shout with joy though you never before had a child. For I am going to give you many children—more children than the slave-wife has.”
28 You and I, dear brothers, are the children that God promised, just as Isaac was. 29 And so we who are born of the Holy Spirit are persecuted now by those who want us to keep the Jewish laws, just as Isaac, the child of promise, was persecuted by Ishmael, the slave-wife’s son.
30 But the Scriptures say that God told Abraham to send away the slave-wife and her son, for the slave-wife’s son could not inherit Abraham’s home and lands along with the free woman’s son. 31 Dear brothers, we are not slave children, obligated to the Jewish laws, but children of the free woman, acceptable to God because of our faith.
The Living Bible copyright © 1971 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.