Catholic Commentary
The Final Exchange: The Beloved's Call and the Bride's Response
13You who dwell in the gardens, with friends in attendance, let me hear your voice!14Come away, my beloved! Be like a gazelle or a young stag on the mountains of spices!
Song of Solomon 8:13–14 presents the Bridegroom inviting the Beloved to speak while surrounded by attentive companions, and the Bride urgently calling him to come away—ending the book with an eschatological cry of longing rather than consummation. The passage portrays mutual desire as both intimate and publicly witnessed, with the Bride's voice desired by all who listen.
The Song closes not with the lovers' arrival but with the Bride's urgent cry—"Come away!"—making the entire book an eschatological prayer that Christians still pray every time we whisper "Maranatha, come Lord Jesus."
Verse 13: "You who dwell in the gardens, with friends in attendance"
The Bridegroom speaks first. His address — "You who dwell in the gardens" — deliberately echoes earlier garden imagery throughout the Song (4:12–16; 5:1; 6:2), where the garden has functioned as the space of intimacy, flourishing, and mutual delight. That she dwells (Heb. yoshevet) there, rather than merely visiting, signals that the Beloved has made this place of communion her settled habitation. She is not a wanderer but one who has found her home in the space of encounter with the Bridegroom.
The phrase "with friends in attendance" (Heb. ḥaverim maqshivim leqolech — "companions who are listening for your voice") is critically important. The friends are not passive bystanders; they are leaning in, straining to hear. The Bridegroom is reminding the Beloved that her voice is sought — not only by him but by all who surround her. In the broader architecture of the Song, the "daughters of Jerusalem" (the companions) have appeared repeatedly as a kind of chorus, drawn into the love drama without being its center. Here at the book's end, the Bridegroom calls attention to the communal audience of the Bride's voice: her love is not a purely private affair but one that draws others toward longing and listening.
There is also a dramatic undertone: the Bridegroom says this as if to stir her. Your voice is wanted. Speak. The entire verse is an invitation to speak, a summons to respond. The garden, the companions, the attentiveness of all — everything is arranged as a stage awaiting her word.
Verse 14: "Come away, my beloved!"
The Bride's answer is electric in its brevity. The Hebrew bereḥ dodi — "flee, my beloved" or "hasten away, my beloved" — is a verb of urgent, rapid motion. This is not a leisurely stroll; it is an imperative cry. She calls him to come to her like a gazelle or young stag bounding over the mountains, echoing nearly verbatim the language of 2:17: "Until the day breathes and the shadows flee, turn, my beloved, be like a gazelle or a young stag on the cleft mountains."
That the book ends here — not with arrival but with longing — is theologically and literarily deliberate. The consummation is desired, approached, anticipated, but the final word of the Song is an invitation, not a completion. The Bride does not say "you are here." She says "come." This ending mirrors the structure of salvation history itself: the beloved community awaits the return of the Lord, living in the gardens of the Church, surrounded by companions who listen, crying out with eschatological urgency.
The Typological and Spiritual Senses
In the allegorical reading dominant in Catholic tradition — from Origen and Bernard of Clairvaux to the Catechism's affirmation of Scripture's multiple senses — the Bride is simultaneously the soul of the individual believer and the Church as a whole. The garden is the life of grace, the sacramental life of the Church, the interior life of prayer. The companions are the communion of saints and the faithful gathered in worship. The Bridegroom is Christ.
Read this way, verse 13 presents Christ contemplating his Church: she dwells in the garden of grace he cultivated for her, and her companions — all who seek holiness — strain toward her voice (the voice of the Church's teaching, her liturgy, her witness). Verse 14 becomes the Church's Maranatha — the primal Christian prayer, "Come, Lord Jesus" (Rev 22:20), rising from the lips of the Bride at the close of history and at the close of every Eucharist. The very brevity and urgency of the cry make it an emblem of the eschatological tension in which the Church lives: already betrothed, not yet fully united.
Catholic tradition reads these closing verses through a rich convergence of ecclesiology, mystical theology, and eschatology that no merely literary interpretation can exhaust.
Origen (3rd century), in his Commentary on the Song of Songs — the foundational patristic treatment — understood the Bride's final cry as the soul's supreme act of love-driven desire for union with the Word. For Origen, spiritual growth is precisely this: to desire God with ever-greater purity and urgency until the desire itself becomes a form of union. The closing incompleteness of the Song is not a flaw but a pedagogy of holy longing.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux, in his 86 Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, built an entire mystical theology on the Song's imagery. For Bernard, the Church and the soul are inseparably united as Bride: what the soul experiences in contemplation, the Church embodies institutionally and sacramentally. The cry "Come away!" is for Bernard both the prayer of the mystic in contemplation and the liturgical cry of the whole Church.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church §117 affirms the allegorical sense of Scripture as discerning "how the realities and events of the Old Testament can be signs of what Christ accomplished." These final verses, typologically, are the Church's voice — authorized, public, and urgent — calling Christ to return and perfect what the Incarnation and Resurrection have begun.
Pope John Paul II, in his Theology of the Body, drew deeply on spousal imagery to articulate both the dignity of human love and its orientation toward divine communion. The "nuptial meaning of the body" — the body's capacity to express total self-gift — reaches its theological apex in the Church-as-Bride awaiting the Bridegroom. These two verses enact precisely that posture: total availability (dwelling in the garden) and total desire (the urgent imperative "Come!").
The Second Vatican Council (Lumen Gentium §6) speaks of the Church as the Bride of Christ, purifying herself as she awaits her Lord. The Song's ending places that waiting in its proper register: not passive, not anxious, but ardent, confident, and publicly voiced before the communion of the faithful.
These two verses offer contemporary Catholics something deeply countercultural: a model of desire that is holy, urgent, and unashamed. In an age that either suppresses spiritual longing (through distraction and noise) or privatizes it entirely, the Bride's cry "Come away!" is public, embodied, and communal — spoken before friends who are themselves listening.
Concretely, verse 13 invites every Catholic to ask: Am I dwelling in the garden, or merely passing through? The sacramental life — daily prayer, Eucharist, Confession, Lectio Divina — is the garden. To dwell there is a choice made daily against distraction. And those "companions listening for your voice" are real: the people around us in the pew, in our families, in our workplaces, who are silently straining toward something they cannot yet name. Your visible love for Christ has an audience.
Verse 14 is the Church's own prayer at every Mass: the dismissal ("Go in peace") is also, rightly understood, a Maranatha — a sending forth to call the world to the coming Bridegroom. Every Catholic might adopt "Come, Lord Jesus" as a daily, even hourly, interior cry — not as escapism, but as the truest orientation of a heart that knows where history is going and who is coming to meet it.