Can't Buy Me Love
In the wake of their first hit, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” the Beatles were performing two, and sometimes three, concerts per day at the Olympia Theater in Paris. During this eighteen-day period, Paul McCartney arranged for an upright piano to be delivered to their suite at the luxurious George V Hotel so the Beatles could continue to work during their “down” time on new music. The first song they came up with was “One And One Is Two” which was given away and never recorded by the group. But the second song was the classic – “Can’t Buy Me Love”, which shattered all types of records with its release in March of 1964. It was the first time ever, an artist had three number one hits in a row on Billboard’s Hot 100 (the other two being, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You”).
Two years later, American journalists asked Paul McCartney about the meaning of the song. Paul gave the obvious answer, “The idea behind it was that all these material possessions are all very well but they won’t buy me what I really want.” Unfortunately, three thousand years before McCartney penned these words, they weren’t so obvious to Israel’s wealthiest king. Shunned by his lover, Solomon penned the words of her rejection:
“If a man would give for love all the wealth of his house, it would be utterly despised” (Song of Songs 8:7b).
When Solomon began to pursue the Shulamite maiden, he had sixty wives, eighty concubines, and “virgins without number” (Song of Songs 6:8). But this one, he said, was unique. In the next verse he describes her as the “perfect one…the only one”, and that even “the queens and the concubines praised her.” She was said to be as “beautiful as the moon, bright as the sun, awe-inspiring as the stars in procession.” He lavishly pours out his gifts before her, and declares the attributes of her physical beauty. But unfortunately for him, she was also the one who couldn’t be bought with his fame and fortune. There was more to the Shulamite maiden than physical beauty.
What was it that caused this woman to reject Solomon’s fame and fortune for the affection of a mere peasant boy? In chapter 8, verse6, the Shulamite maiden tells the true love of her life:
“Set me like a cylinder seal over your heart,
Like a signet on your arm.
For love is as strong as death,
Passion as unrelenting as Sheol.
Its flames burst forth,
It is a blazing flame.”
Some have translated the last line as, “a flame of Yah (a shortened form of YHWH). If so, then this woman recognized that the God-given passion within her heart for the peasant, was more important than all the riches and fame the king could offer.
It’s a wonderful romance with a great lesson, but there’s much more to it than that. It has been suggested that this maiden is none other than Abishag – the beautiful young damsel given to David on his death bed (1 Kings 1:1-4). A chapter later she appears again, this time as an object that tears two brothers apart. Adonijah asks King Solomon for Abishag’s hand in marriage. In a rage, Solomon accuses his brother of attempting to usurp the throne, has Adonijah killed, and banishes Abiathar, the priest, to his hometown of Anathoth. Was Adonijah scheming to overthrow Solomon, or was the king overreacting in a jealous rage? The answer might tell us why he banished Abiathar to Anathoth that will lead three hundred years later to the coming of Jeremiah.
There’s a lot more detail that we’ll look at Sunday, but in the meantime it’s interesting to consider: Could it be that the passion of Israel's most beautiful woman for a peasant boy, led to the end of the house of David?