Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest is my beloved among the young men. I delight to sit in his shade, and his fruit is sweet to my taste. – Song of Songs 2:3

Today’s Scripture Reading (October 22, 2019): Song of Songs 2

Do you want to play a game? How about I describe a movie, and you guess what the film might be. I will provide the answers at the end of this post, so just hide the bottom of your screen if you want to play along. Let’s start with this. “A young girl is mysteriously transported to a strange land where she kills the first person that she meets. She then teams up with three other strangers so that she can kill once more.” Have you seen that movie?

Want to try a second one? What about this? “A confused teenage boy tries to fend off his mother's disturbing sexual advances.” Do you know the movie? Maybe one more film? Here is the description. “A group of people of various ages is invited to preview a new amusement park before it officially opens, but their visit is hampered by bad weather and faulty ride management.” Okay, if you haven’t already guessed the answers or scrolled down to find the answers, you can do so now. It’s okay; I’ll wait.

Did you get them right? What makes descriptions like this fun is that, while they are right and correctly sum up a plot of the movie, the descriptions are also misleading. The descriptions sum up the action, but not the intent of the film.

I sometimes wonder what the apple ever did to get our attention. Biblically, the fruit is occasionally good, and sometimes bad, but the apple as we know it was almost totally unknown in biblical times. And yet, if you ask someone what kind of fruit Adam and Eve ate in the garden, a majority of people probably think it was an apple. (Actually, the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden is unnamed and undefined.) Here, the woman describes her man as being like “an apple tree among the trees of the forest.” It is a place where she can find shade and enjoy the sweetness of the fruit. Her lover brings with him a sense of security. The problem is that, at least for literal thinkers like me, I imagine an actual apple tree, maybe like the one that stands in my back yard. But that is unlikely. It is more likely that the tree she has in her mind is either a pomegranate, orange, or maybe even an apricot tree. But if that is true, why not say that instead of using the apple tree in the description.

And I don’t have an answer to that question. And it probably isn’t important, except to me. But we understand what the woman means, even if the details are wrong. And the comparison of her lover to an apple tree is kind of the opposite problem than what is presented by the movie descriptions at the beginning of this post. With the movie descriptions, the details are right, but they are not a good description of the real story. Here, the details might be wrong, but we understand exactly what she means.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Song of Songs 3

Answers to the movies.

1.      The Wizard of Oz

2.      Back to the Future

3.      Jurassic Park