What Does Song of Solomon 8:11 Mean?
Solomon has a vineyard in Baal-hamon; he gives the vineyard to keepers, each one bringing for its fruit a thousand pieces of silver.
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
Solomon had a vineyard at Baal-hamon; he let out the vineyard unto keepers; every one for the fruit thereof was to bring a thousand pieces of silver.THE KEY
The Hebrew word for keepers echoes the speaker’s earlier admission that she did not keep her own vineyard, turning a measured return into the poem’s question of personal care.
THE MEANING
A cultivated place passes into others’ hands, and its fruit carries a concrete return: each keeper brings a thousand pieces of silver. Care and accounting stand together; what grows under tending becomes something that can be measured and shared.
THE ROOT
נֹטְרִים
nōṭərîm
GROWS FROM
נטר
to guard, keep, or watch over
The Hebrew word for keepers uses the same root as the speaker’s earlier words for keeping her own vineyard. That echo carries this measured account of a vineyard into the poem’s more personal question of what is guarded and whose fruit is gathered.
ALSO GROWS
nōṭērāh: A woman assigned to keep or guard
נֹטֵרָה
The speaker is called a keeper of vineyards in 1:6, showing the same root can name the person entrusted with watching over them.
nāṭartî: The speaker’s statement that she did not keep her own vineyard
נָטָרְתִּי
The same verb describes the care the keepers provide here, linking Solomon’s vineyard with the speaker’s own.
נָתַן
nātan
GROWS FROM
נתן
to give, set, or place
“gives” in this verse is nātan. The action beneath the phrase let out is נָתַן (nātan, give or place), which holds the vineyard’s transfer into the keepers’ hands in view. The verse pairs that handoff with a specified return, keeping transfer and yield in one frame.
ALSO GROWS
netinah: The act of giving
נְתִינָה
This noun belongs to the same נתן (n-t-n) family, bringing the giving within the vineyard’s handoff into view.
nātûn: Something handed over or set in place
נָתוּן
This form from נתן (n-t-n) shows the other side of the transfer: what is placed into someone else’s care.
THE PATTERN
A cultivated place entrusted to care becomes legible through the fruit it yields and the return it brings.
And the LORD God took Adam and set him down in the garden of Eden, to serve it and to guard it.What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it? Why, when I waited for it to bring forth grapes, did it bring forth stinking grapes?And when the season of the fruits drew near, he sent his servants to those who work the soil, to take hold of his fruits.THE THREAD
Do not look at me, because I am dark, because the sun has glared at me. My mother's sons burned against me. They made me the keeper of the vineyards, but my own vineyard I have not guarded.The keeper-word נֹטְרִים (nōṭərîm, keepers) comes from נטר (n-ṭ-r, guard or keep), the same root in the speaker’s נָטָרְתִּי (nāṭartî, I kept) in 1:6. There she says she did not keep her own vineyard; the shared root makes the keepers here resonate with the poem’s contrast between tending others’ vineyards and one’s own.
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