There is a passage in the Song of Songs that has been troubling me lately, as I wrestle with what it means to be in solidarity with those for whom the world is a dangerous place. It occurs in Songs 5:2-9. It begins innocently enough, with a young woman in bed late at night as she drifts off to sleep. Suddenly, her lover knocks on the door, asking to be let in. After just a moment’s hesitation, she goes to open the door. But by then he has already disappeared into the night. Sick with love, she wanders out to find him.

Out in the street, in the middle of the night, she encounters the night watchmen. For just a breath, we have the sense that everything’s going to be okay. She has been found by those sworn to protect the city. But then we hear her describe their encounter:

they beat me, they wounded me,
they took away my mantle,
those sentinels of the wall. (5:7)

It’s a shocking scene—a young woman, beaten and stripped in the streets by the keepers of the law. Just moments before she was playfully flirting with her lover; now she’s an assault survivor.

But even more troubling is that the attackers in this scene are the night watchmen. They are the guards designated to keep the city safe, to protect its citizens from danger. And yet they are the very ones who have assaulted her and taken her clothes.

One wonders what they thought they were protecting.

Protecting Patriarchal Power

On this week’s BibleWorm podcast, my friend Amy Robertson suggested that the night watchmen, in one way or another, were protecting not the woman, but their own power to control women’s bodies. They are not interested in her as a human being but only as a deviation from societal norms about how women should behave.

Perhaps the watchmen have mistaken her for a prostitute, as some scholars have argued. Or perhaps they have seen her as a sexually forward woman who needs to be reminded of her place. Whatever the case, they have felt entitled to control her body, even if it means assaulting her. And they have done so in the name of “law and order.”

It’s a surprising turn in this otherwise delightful little book about the joy of human sexuality. It reminds us that the world is often dangerous for women, even at the hands of men who are sworn to protect them. It challenges us to think about the ways we, too, try to control one another’s bodies. The ways we pretend to be the keepers of order but in function as defenders of the status quo. It beckons us to examine the role of our own city watchmen, who all too often have injured the very innocents they are sworn to protect.

The Power of Sisterhood

Yet other characters in this text offer us a different way. They are the Daughters of Jerusalem, who come to the young woman’s side after her assault and ask her, “What is your beloved more than another beloved?” (5:9). That is—is your man really worth all this?

One of my former students, Laura-Beth Durham, found in these women a source of hope for her own reading of the Song of Songs. While the men in the story have failed the young woman, first by abandoning her and then by assaulting her in the street, the women remain present with her to speak a word of comfort. They stay with her, and they remind their friend of her own inherent worth outside her relationships with men. Beloveds come and go, they seem to say, but you in yourself are valuable.

Laura-Beth lifts up this solidarity among women in defiance of the structures of patriarchal power. And she believes that men, too, can be in solidarity with women, if only we can divest ourselves of the power that accrues to maleness in our culture.

A Song of Solidarity

Yet one might press even further to call for solidarity not only with women but  with all those who find themselves assaulted by the structures of the status quo, whether women or minorities or our LGBTQ+ siblings. All those whose bodies are deemed expendable by the guardians of power.

We can challenge the power structures that control and sanction innocent bodies. We can reject manifestations of “law and order” that leave the blameless lying wounded in the streets. We can stand in solidarity with all whose bodies have been battered and bruised by those trying to  preserve their own power.

Perhaps there may be hope for us yet.