Song of Solomon 8:6-7

Near the end of the Song, the woman asks for something stranger than a vow. A seal was a stone pressed into wax to mark what belonged to whom, worn at the chest or on the hand. Set me as a seal upon your heart — pressed in so deep I cannot be scraped off. Then the reason, and it is enormous: love is strong as death. Death takes everyone; the Song says love can match it, grip for grip. Our loves have not — but one love has. The jealousy named next is as hard as Sheol, which never gives anyone back — love refusing to share what is wholly its own. And then fire. The word for that flame ends in -yah, the shortened name of the LORD — intensity to some ears, the divine name to others, its one appearance in the Song. Either way, a love no flood quenches and no fortune buys is not ours to generate. So love takes the shape of covenant, not effort: a covenant is something done to us and for us before it is anything we keep, which is why it holds when our keeping doesn't. We keep offering all we have to get another person to seal us; hang our worth on being chosen and we will worship that person and resent them at once. The seal we need was pressed in before we were lovable. The fire that should have fallen on an unfaithful bride fell on the Bridegroom instead — which is why we get engraved hands and not scorched ones (Isaiah 49:16).

Herbert stages what the Song insists on and we find hardest: a love that cannot be earned, only accepted. His guilty guest keeps drawing back; Love serves him anyway. The Song's lovers are real, not a cipher — yet the poem outruns them when it hides God's name in the burning, and Paul could call marriage a sign of Christ and the church (Ephesians 5:31-32). The Song can only say love matches death; at Easter love outlasts it, and nothing can separate us from it now (Romans 8:38-39) — the Song's ceiling, the gospel's floor. So we do not buy the meal. We sit, and eat.