VER. 13.-A bundle of myrrh is my beloved unto me : he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.

Still continuing her deep sense of the King's wonderful and undeserved condescension, which now emboldens her for the first time to call him her beloved, dudi, my David, my love, active or passive, my loving, loved one. It is well known how eminently this appellation belongs to Christ, and what a bright type of this true King, the temporal king David was. To Christ, or concerning him, under this name, are most of the psalms directed717, To David ; as this song is under another name -To Solomon.' Nor needs it be any surprise to us, that this GREAT ONE should be represented under different names, when we remember in what different characters of connexion He stands to his church. I might here, if I could allow myself to fall in with the common method of accounting for sacred mysteries by the assistance of heathen mimickry, bring in the acknowledged Pagan practice of giving different names to the different attributes and operations of the same deity, either from the scripture testimonies of Baal, and Chemosh, and Moloch, &c. or from the still grosser corruptions of later antiquity, with their god of war Mars, of wisdom Apollo, of exhilaration Bacchus, &c. But I have no need of this, Our divine oracles, when studied with attention, and under the assurance of their inspiration, do, in and from themselves, clear up their own descriptions of Christ to Cc 2

us,

us. As a deliverer from the bondage of sin, he exhibits himself by a Moses; as a Saviour to bring us into rest, by a Joshua; as a Shepherd to feed us, and lovingly take care of us, by a David, who was once a shepherd; and, as a King, to give us peace from our enemies, by a Solomon. These two last are his standard characters in this song: And it is worth the observing, especially to give us an insight into the nature of its construction, that where he is called Dudi, the beloved, the expressions run in a lowly, rural, I shall even say, pastoral style; and when Solomon, or the King, we meet with grandeur and magnificence suitable to such a character. A bundle of myrrh is dudi un

to me,' Naturalists will tell us what myrrh is: It was an appointed ingredient in the anointing oil': It was given with some view or other as a present to Joseph, and to Christ3: It was used as a perfume *— I have perfumed my bed with 'myrrh' It seems to have had a virtue of exhilarating the spirits - Myrrh, whereby they have ' made thee glad :' Yea, as far down as the Persian times, we find it used for the purification of women. From these qualities of this ancient perfume, mentioned in scripture, we can be at no loss to discover the meaning of applying it here to the Beloved, to preserve from corruption, to exhilarate,

to purify, &c. But there is a difficulty, and even an appearance of indelicacy, in what follows, as we read it, He shall lie all night betwixt my 'breasts.' In the common mode of explication, this carries an offensive sound; and commentators are at pains to vindicate it by a just enough observation, that the Hebrew verb, ilin, does not signify to lie all night:' and though it did, it may refer to the myrrh, and not to the beloved. But in the spiritual, and which I call the only sense, there is no occasion for any fear of this kind; and the expression may be applied with equal safety to the beloved or to the myrrh, for they are both one'.

That rock was Christ.'

take

my

There is no note of si

militude here, as, like. A bundle of myrrh is 'dudi unto me,' he or it shall ilin, lodge, reside, up his quarters, as we would say, between breasts.' The Hebrew word for breasts is , shadi, from shad, to pour out, so means the pourers out; and in that sense is applied, but not confined, to the teats of animals. The very same three letters,, make a name of God, which we pronounce in the fictitious dual form, Shaddai, and call it, not very properly, Almighty; and we have it with the final twice, for something in opposition to the true God, which the LXX. render daMovia, and our translators, devils; but literally the word signifies, the pourers out, afforders of nou

μονια,

rish

I Cor. x. 4.

3 Deut. xxxii. 17. and Psalm cvi: 37.

'rishment,' which the idolaters primarily, not secondarily, as they ought to have done, attributed to the material heavens, under a variegated representation of multimammias, images with many paps;' and which therefore Jehovah, the true God, reclaims by the same word to himself. This is the radical idea of the phrase here,

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my breasts;' and what the church, the speaker, means by it, is worth the enquiring after. The phrase seems to indicate something peculiar to the church, as such, from an expression in this same song, which I must anticipate, We have a little sister, and she has no breasts'.' By this little sister interpreters have no scruple to understand the Gentiles in their unconverted state, as a young girl before her breasts are fashioned and made firm'. So, what can it be similar to the breasts of a woman, which are two, that the church has, and the Gentiles want? Does not this bring to our minds the idea of the two sacraments, especially under the character of pourers out; the one pouring out water for purification, the other pouring out wine for nourishment: an allusion which seems to be warranted by what we read in Isaiah lxvi. 7—11. That ye may suck and be satisfied with the breasts of her consolations.' There is no harm, I suppose, in adducing Isaiah to illustrate Solomon. And if this explication hold, we see what the church's breasts are, and whence the blessings of the

'the breasts' (part of Jacob's benediction to his favourite Joseph') do only flow; not from any inherent virtue or fund of nourishment in themselves, which would be falling back to the perversion of the old apostates, (which Moses so warmly exclaims against Deut. xxxii. 17.), and literally sacrificing to, worshipping, breasts, not God. But from the tzerur ha mur, the myrrh bundle, with all its beneficial effluences and energetic qualities, inherent in, and communicated by, the beloved, residing, lodging, dwelling in them, and emitting, exhaling, dispensing, his power and virtue, &c. unto them 3.

VER. 14. My beloved is unto me a cluster of camphire among the vineyards of Engedi.

Another rapturous acknowledgement, and in the same allusive style, of more favours and blessings from her beloved. Camphire, we are told, is a great preservative, and exquisitely odoriferous: but whether this be what we now call camphire, is a question. The word is 7, hakepher, which here, and in ch. iv. 13. the LXX. render zʊg, and the Latin, cyparissus, as on the margin of our Bibles, cypress. The radical idea is to cover;' and the first place in which we meet with it is Gen. vi. 14. as something to cover Noah's ark with, within and without, which our translators, following the Greek and

2 St Matth. xviii. 20.

1 Gen. xlix. 25.

3 St Luke viii. 46.