Song of Solomon 8:6-7

For eight chapters the Song has sung — of vineyards and spices, of longing and finding — and here, near the end, it stops to say what love is. A bride asks to be worn: <em>Set me as a seal upon your heart</em>. A seal was a signet pressed into wax, an owner's mark carried against the skin — she is asking not to be admired but to be kept, held where a thing cannot slip loose. Then the claims come in a rush. Love is <em>strong as death</em> — not stronger, but as relentless; death takes hold of everyone and never loosens its grip, and real love clings with exactly that refusal to let go. Then the line that changes everything: its flashes are <em>the very flame of the LORD</em> — the way the ESV and most translators render a single Hebrew compound, <em>shalhevetyah</em>, hearing in its ending <em>Yah</em>, the short form of YHWH, the covenant name (some read it instead as sheer intensity, 'a raging flame'). Taken the way the Song has most often been heard, something startling happens: in a book that never once names God across eight chapters of love, the divine name flares up here, at the very height of it, inside the fire. And that tells us where a love like this comes from. A love strong as death, that no ocean can drown, is not something our affection produces on its own; it is covenant love — God's own steadfast refusal to let go — and the only flame that burns like it is one lit from his. That is why the waters fail: <em>Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it</em>. To the ancient world the sea was chaos, the force that swallowed everything. It cannot swallow this small flame. We did not light it, and we could not keep it burning; it burns because it is his. Nor can it be bought; offer the whole wealth of your house and you are only despised, because covenant love was never for sale. The Song will not pretend our love is already this. It says love <em>is</em> this — and leaves us with the ache of how faintly we manage it, a candle beside a flame no flood could drown, and an invitation to be set alight from the one source that burns that way.

Matheson wrote that line in the hardest hour of his life, and he got the pronouns right where we get them wrong: not <em>my</em> love that will not let go, but the <em>Love</em> that will not let go of me. That is covenant love — the only kind fierce as fire and unquenchable by any ocean — and the Song reaches for it though it cannot quite hold it: a love strong as death that walked into death and would not loosen its grip. We are the seal he set upon his own heart, and no flood has ever put that fire out.