What Does Song of Solomon 8:14 Mean?
Run, my beloved, and be like a gazelle or a young stag upon the mountains of spices.
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
Make haste, my beloved, and be thou like to a roe or to a young hart upon the mountains of spices.THE KEY
The Hebrew imperative carries the motion of flight: love’s final image is the beloved moving like a gazelle across mountains of fragrance.
THE MEANING
Your longing has motion here: you call the beloved toward swift movement, shaped like a gazelle crossing spice-scented heights. The image holds intimacy and distance together: the beloved is yours in address, yet the verse ends by sending him onward.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse loosens the belief that love is proved by holding someone still: its final image sends the beloved swiftly across open heights.
THE ROOT
בְּרַח
beraḥ
GROWS FROM
ברח
Flee, escape, move swiftly away.
“run” in this verse is beraḥ. Alongside the urgency of “make haste,” the Hebrew verb carries the motion of flight. The gazelle gives that movement beauty and direction: the beloved’s swiftness is pictured as a passage across fragrant heights.
ALSO GROWS
bāraḥ: Flee or escape.
בָּרַח
This is the verbal seed behind the imperative, showing that haste here carries the feel of swift departure.
hibriaḥ: Drive away or cause to flee.
הִבְרִיחַ
This causative form keeps the same motion of flight, underscoring how completely the root is organized around moving away.
דּוֹדִי
dōdî
GROWS FROM
דוד
Beloved, intimate one; also a close male kinsman.
Dōdî, “my beloved,” comes from dod, a word that can also name a close male kinsman. Desire and closeness are compressed into the address, so the invitation to move away still sounds deeply intimate.
ALSO GROWS
dod: Beloved or close male kinsman.
דּוֹד
The word holds affection and kinship together in the speaker’s address.
Dāwīd: A name associated with “beloved.”
דָּוִד
The same beloved-nature carried in David’s name is present in this intimate address.
THE PATTERN
Scripture gives longing a body, letting desire appear as creaturely movement and appetite.
Until the day breathes, and the shadows run away, turn, my beloved, and be like a gazelle, or a fawn of the hinds, upon the mountains of Bether.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.To the chief Musician, Maschil, for the sons of Korah. As the hart pants upon the channels of waters, so my living soul pants toward you, O God.THE THREAD
Until the day breathes, and the shadows run away, turn, my beloved, and be like a gazelle, or a fawn of the hinds, upon the mountains of Bether.This earlier lyric uses the same appeal, beloved, gazelle, mountains, before 8:14 repeats it as the song’s final line. The closing shifts the terrain to spice mountains, so the poem ends with the same longing made fragrant and still in motion.
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