What Does Song of Solomon 7:2 Mean?
Your navel is a round bowl that never lacks mixed wine. Your belly is a heap of wheat hedged with lilies.
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 navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor: thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies.THE KEY
The beloved’s center becomes a full vessel and her belly a harvest ringed with flowers: desire sees the body as abundance.
THE MEANING
The verse speaks of the beloved’s body as both intimate and abundant: a vessel that lacks no drink and a belly like a harvest enclosed in flowers. Sensual desire meets nourishment and beauty here; the body is named as a source of pleasure and praise.
THE ROOT
בִּטְנֵךְ
bitnekh
GROWS FROM
בטן
Belly or inner abdomen; the same noun can also mean womb.
English “belly” can sound like surface anatomy, but the Hebrew noun can also name the womb. That wider sense lets the harvest image carry a resonance of hidden, generative fullness.
ALSO GROWS
beten: Belly or abdomen, as in this verse.
בֶּטֶן
The beloved’s body is praised through its intimate center, not only its outward shape.
beten: Womb; Genesis 25:23 uses the same noun in “two nations are in thy womb.”
בֶּטֶן
The shared word brings the inner, life-carrying body into the image of a harvest without making the verse a literal pregnancy reference.
אַגָּן
agan
GROWS FROM
אגן
A basin or bowl, a vessel that holds what is poured into it.
“bowl” in this verse is agan. The Hebrew vessel-word emphasizes capacity as well as shape. Paired with the phrase about lacking no drink, it makes fullness central to the image.
ALSO GROWS
agan: A bowl or basin, as in this verse.
אַגָּן
The navel is pictured as a receptacle, so the metaphor emphasizes what the vessel holds.
agganot: Basins, the plural form of the same noun; Exodus 24:6.
אֲגָנֹת
The same vessel-word names containers, reinforcing the image of a body’s center as a place of fullness.
THE PATTERN
Scripture treats embodied intimacy as a place of delight and mutual giving.
Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle, that graze among the lilies.Let her be a loving hind, and a favored mountain goat; let her breasts drench you at all times, and always reel in her love.Let the husband give to the wife what is owed in goodwill, and likewise the wife to the husband.THE THREAD
Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle, that graze among the lilies.Both verses use the Hebrew word for lilies, making the flowers a recurring image in the poem’s praise of the beloved’s body. In each, the lilies gather sensual beauty and nourishment into the same picture.
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