Tender Grapes

Imagine a vineyard on a hillside just after the vines have flowered. Nothing on them is worth eating yet. The blossom has set into tiny green grapes, and the harvest is still weeks away. Anything that gets in among the rows now can ruin the whole season, and a fox can do that in one night.

That is the setting for today's line: "Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes." Many sermons have turned these foxes into small sins, the little compromises that eat away at a Christian's life. The poem itself gives no sign of that. The Song of Solomon is a love song between a man and a woman, and it sits in Scripture without apology. Here the foxes are foxes and the vineyard is a vineyard, though since chapter one the Song has also used the vineyard as a picture of the woman herself. There she says, "my mother's children were angry with me; they made me the keeper of the vineyards; but mine own vineyard have I not kept."

Even the Hebrew is hard to be sure of here. The line is short, and the speaker is not named. The Hebrew can be read as vines with tender grapes or as vineyards in blossom, which describes the same stage of growth in two ways. Some think the line began as part of a work song that the poem borrowed. Nobody can tell you for certain who is speaking, or to whom.

What stays clear through all of that is the timing. The season that most needs a guard is the one that has nothing to show for itself yet. Anyone can see the danger when a vineyard hangs heavy with ripe fruit. This is the earlier moment, when a loss would not even look like a loss to someone walking past. Young love is like that. The God who gave this song to His people thinks love is worth protecting, even in the season when nobody else can see it growing.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 65 is Ask for Wisdom (James 1:5).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two