What Does Song of Solomon 4:13 Mean?
Your sent-forth shoots are an orchard of pomegranates, with choice fruits; henna with spikenard,
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 plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard,THE KEY
The beloved’s “plants” are shoots sent outward, so the body appears as a living garden where release becomes growth.
THE MEANING
Your sensuality is pictured as a living garden: shoots extend, fruit gathers, and fragrance fills the scene. Desire has texture, taste, and growth. The verse speaks of the body as a place where life is already unfolding.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie that desire is barren or separate from life’s generative abundance loosens here: the beloved’s sensuality appears as fruit, growth, and fragrance.
THE ROOT
שְׁלָחַיִךְ
shelachayikh
GROWS FROM
שָׁלַח
shalach
To send forth, release, or let go.
“sent-forth shoots” in this verse is shelachayikh. The word rendered “plants” means “your shoots” and comes from שָׁלַח (shalach), “send forth, release.” The shoots carry release within their image: life extends outward in fruit and fragrance.
ALSO GROWS
shalach: Send, send forth, release, let go.
שָׁלַח
The shoots named in the verse are what the living source sends outward; the plant image carries release within its word.
Shiloach: Sent; the Hebrew name behind Siloam.
שִׁלֹחַ
The same send-forth root appears in Siloam’s Hebrew name; John links the sent pool’s water with a man’s return to sight.
THE PATTERN
Life unfolds outward from a living source into fruit.
And God said, "Let the earth sprout green growth, the seed-bearing plant, and the fruit tree making fruit after its kind, whose seed is in it, upon the earth." And it was so.And he becomes like a tree planted by the channels of the waters, that gives its fruit in its season; its leaf does not wither; whatever he does, he breaks through.I am the vine, and you are the branches. The one who remains in me, and I in him, this one bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.THE THREAD
And he said to him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam, the Sent. So he went and washed, and came seeing.The shoots in this verse grow from שָׁלַח (shalach), “send forth, release”; Siloam reflects שִׁלֹחַ (Shiloach), “sent.” The shared root connects the garden’s outward growth with water sent to restore sight.
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