What Does Song of Solomon 1:10 Mean?
Your cheeks are fair with rows of ornament, your neck with strings of gold.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Thy cheeks are comely with rows of jewels, thy neck with chains of gold.THE KEY
The Hebrew word for the jeweled rows shares its root with “explore,” turning adornment into a path the eye can trace.
THE MEANING
The beloved’s beauty is seen in the particular lines of her face and the gold against her neck. Her body and its adornment are part of what makes her beautiful now.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie that beauty belongs only to an inward or abstract self dissolves here: the verse delights in the beloved’s actual cheeks and neck.
THE ROOT
תּוֹרִים
tûrîm
GROWS FROM
תור
t-w-r
To explore, search out, or go around; the related noun can mean a row or strand of ornament.
“rows of ornament” in this verse is tûrîm. The word for the ornaments carries the same root as exploring or searching out. The image is not a heap of jewels but ordered lines that the eye can follow along the beloved’s face.
ALSO GROWS
lātûr: To explore or search out
לָתוּר
This verbal form uses the same root; it gives the ornament’s row a sense of a route traced with attention.
weyāturû: And they shall explore
וְיָתֻרוּ
The same root describes searching across a landscape, while here the gaze follows an ordered line across the beloved.
נָאוּ
nāʾû
GROWS FROM
נאה
n-ʾ-h
To be beautiful, fitting, or becoming.
The word holds beauty and fittingness together: the beloved’s appearance is not merely decorated, but becoming. The same family can call praise itself comely, extending the word beyond outward appearance.
ALSO GROWS
nāʾweh: Becoming, comely
נָאוֶה
This form appears in Song 1:5, where the speaker calls herself comely; beauty here belongs to the beloved as she is.
nāʾāwâ: Comely, fitting
נָאוָה
Psalm 33:1 calls praise comely with this word family, showing that what is fitting can also be beautiful.
THE PATTERN
Scripture pictures beloved beauty through adornment arranged upon the one being admired.
You have pierced my heart, my sister, my bride; you have pierced my heart with one of your eyes, with one chain of your neck.I will exult greatly in the LORD; my living soul shall leap in my God; for he has clothed me in garments of deliverance, he has wrapped me in the robe of alignment, as a bridegroom dons a headdress, and as a bride binds on her jewels.And I, John, see the set-apart city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, made ready as a bride arranged for her husband.THE THREAD
Send men, that they may scout out the land of Canaan, which I give to the children of Israel. From every tribe of their fathers you shall send a man, each one a lifted one among them.“Search” translates a verb from תור, the same root family behind the ornament word תּוֹרִים (tûrîm, rows or strands). One verse sends people to trace a land; the other lets the gaze trace the beloved’s adorned features.
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