What Does Song of Solomon 7:9 Mean?
And your palate is like the best wine, that goes down straight for my beloved, making the lips of sleepers murmur.
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
And the roof of thy mouth like the best wine for my beloved, that goeth down sweetly, causing the lips of those that are asleep to speak.THE KEY
The beloved’s sweetness reaches past waking awareness: even sleeping lips are drawn into speech.
THE MEANING
The beloved’s mouth is like the finest wine, passing smoothly toward the beloved and stirring sleeping lips to speak. Even in sleep, desire reaches expression before the sleeper is awake.
THE ROOT
יְשֵׁנִים
yeshēnîm
GROWS FROM
י־ש־ן
y-sh-n
To sleep; to be asleep.
“those that are asleep” in this verse is yeshēnîm. The Hebrew names the sleepers with the same root used when the speaker says “I sleep” in Song of Solomon 5:2. Here sleep does not seal off a person from response: the beloved’s sweetness reaches into it and stirs speech.
ALSO GROWS
yāshēn: sleeping; asleep
יָשֵׁן
This form names the state the lips are in when the beloved’s wine stirs them.
shēnāh: sleep
שֵׁנָה
The sleepers carry the word for sleep into a living body, whose lips can still answer.
שִׂפְתֵי
siftê
GROWS FROM
ש־פ־ה
sh-p-h
Lip; edge or boundary; language.
The same Hebrew word family names lips and edges or shores. Lips are a boundary where what is within crosses into speech, and here that boundary moves even while the sleeper is asleep.
ALSO GROWS
sāphāh: lip; language
שָׂפָה
The lips in this verse are the place where the beloved’s sweetness becomes audible.
sefat-hayyām: the edge of the sea; seashore
שְׂפַת־הַיָּם
The shared word for lip and shore pictures speech as crossing from an inner place to an outer one.
לְמֵישָׁרִים
lə-mēshārîm
GROWS FROM
י־ש־ר
y-sh-r
To be straight, level, or upright.
“goes down straight” in this verse is lə-mēshārîm. The Hebrew phrase rendered “goeth down sweetly” carries the word-family of straightness and levelness. The wine’s pleasure is also pictured as an unhindered passage toward the beloved, reaching even the lips of sleepers.
ALSO GROWS
yāshār: straight; level; upright
יָשָׁר
This root sense adds the image of a course without obstruction to the wine’s smooth passage.
yōsher: straightness; uprightness
יֹשֶׁר
The word-family gives “sweetly” a further shade of evenness and direct movement.
mēshārîm: level places; straightness
מֵישָׁרִים
This form appears in the verse’s phrase for how the wine goes down.
THE PATTERN
What is received as sweetness can cross the boundary of the mouth and become speech.
Pleasant words are like a dripping honeycomb, sweet to the living soul and healing to the bones.You offspring of vipers, how can you, being evil, speak good things? For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.Let your word always be in favor, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you must answer each one.THE THREAD
I sleep, but my heart wakes; it is the voice of my beloved, knocking, saying, Open to me, my sister, my companion, my dove, my whole one. For my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drips of the night.Both verses use the Hebrew root י־ש־ן (y-sh-n), meaning “sleep.” In 5:2 the speaker sleeps while the heart wakes to the beloved’s voice; here the beloved’s wine stirs sleeping lips into speech.
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