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The Song of Solomon, Part 10 – The Company of Horses, and the Chariot That Draws the World Home

[Study Aired September 26, 2026]

Introduction

The last study concludes with the Shulamite, deeply feeling somewhat imposter-like, although deeply graced, asking her Lord why He should choose her (Son 1:7). Internally, she vividly recalls her similarity to her sisters in Solomon’s harem — though with a greater sense of righteous conscience — aware that they, as a cortege of young women thrust together often do, discuss and compare their intimacies (paradoxically, a strange phenomenon rarely found among men). Particularly when chosen for intimacy, from among one thousand wives, would have been extremely arid. Typically, their lust for them was not necessarily driven by an eager desire to be intimately acquainted with Solomon. Rather, as young women often do, indiscreetly debate their individual experiences as raunchily did Ahola and Aholabah (Eze 23:20), the knowledge of being desired and chosen evokes far more romantic allure and competitive envy than the notion of an eagerly desired unified spirit, which ultimately and inevitably leads to coition—and spiritual fruitfulness from our Husband and Lord. As with Old Israel with her Husband, a tedious paradox preferably avoided — and the Lord of the Old Covenant, and Solomon, as do all husbands, mostly silently and often bitterly endure (Col 3:19).

The Shepherd who hides His Bride even from herself does not leave her question unanswered for long. She has just asked where He feeds His flock (his teeth in kisses) at noon. His answer arrives, and it arrives strangely — not with directions, but with a mirror held up to the very sisters she has already left behind. He says,

Son 1:8-11 If thou know not, O thou fairest among women, go thy way forth by the footsteps of the flock, and feed thy kids beside the shepherds’ tents. I have compared thee, O my love, to a company of horses in Pharaoh’s chariots. Thy cheeks are comely with rows of jewels, thy neck with chains of gold. We will make thee borders of gold with studs of silver.

If Thou Knowest Not

Notice the shape of the answer before its content. Solomon does not simply tell her where He feeds His flock. He turns her gaze backward first, toward the very tents she has already fled, as though her own certainty about Him cannot be fully secured until she has looked, one more time, at what she left. Not only that, but he laments their disconnectedness from really knowing him, and he doesn’t want her to ever be beguiled by their tired old artifices, to which she four times in the SoS viscerally agrees.

Son 2:7 I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please.

Joh 10:27 My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.

Mat 25:33 And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

Sheep and goats are not a contrast between the saved and the yet-to-be-judged and saved, in any final sense. They are the few who were chosen, set against the ones who temporarily were not — specifically for the first resurrection. Ultimately, the signified goats and “other sheep in other pens”, almost indistinguishable from Babylon, who don’t hear the Shepherd’s voice, will hear Him in the Resurrection to Judgment. Goats equate to the flesh and carnal mind. She remembers that she, too, is a signified goat, occasionally succumbing to the mere fact of being flesh, yet strengthened by the power of her Lord’s signified sacrificial goat in transition to being an emblematic sheep. It stands to reason that only sheep hear the Lamb of God’s voice for their marriage to the Groom (Lev 16:8-10, 21-22).

Joh 10:15-16 As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep. And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd.

Mat 13:30 Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.

Joh 10:26-28 But ye believe not, because ye are not of my sheep, as I said unto you. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.

The goats she is sent to feed are the young of the “first company”: by the world’s standards, gifted, beautiful, quick-witted, endlessly frolicking beside the forty thousand tents of Orthodoxy each Sunday, clever as any kid ever born, and just as immature in what actually matters.

Mat 18:3-4 Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

The kingdom does not ask for a kid’s cleverness. It asks for a lamb’s dumb, trusting humility — and this is precisely the trade her sisters have never made, still clattering their eager little hooves toward shepherds’ tents that will feed them everything except what their souls actually require (Isa 53:7). Incidentally, goats, when being injured or mauled by predators, bleat their heads off, while sheep rarely ever voice their pain, only with pained grunts.

Notice what she is commissioned to do about it. She does not condemn them; though she does so overwhelmingly, to deaf ears, she feeds them, typical of callow youth, without their gratitude. Her commission is not to force-feed, but to observe from outside, beside the shepherds’ tents, not inside them — she is not sent to join the tents she has left, nor is she permitted to abandon the kids simply because their shepherds have failed them. She feeds what she can reach, from outside the fold that raised them, exactly as her own Husband once fed her from outside every fold she was raised inside (Luk 15:3-7; Matt 10:14).

Mat 18:5-6 And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me. But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.

This is why the warning attached to the kids is so severe, and why it lands, without exception, on whoever is entrusted with feeding them — not on the kids themselves for their immaturity, which was never their choice, but on any shepherd, false or otherwise, who mistakes their cleverness for readiness and feeds them accordingly.

Solomon’s frank purpose in challenging her with “if she knew not” was to cause her to feel viscerally, and thus profoundly honour and respect, the choosing he (Christ in us) gives her — the reverent awareness of the magnitude of being His Bride.

A Company of Horses in Pharaoh’s Chariots

Here, the Song turns from pasture to battlefield, and the shift is not accidental. Love, rightly understood in this Song, has never been separable from war — not war against her, but war being waged on her behalf and within her, against everything Eden left standing.

He compares her to a company of horses: uniform, disciplined, white — no longer the red, black, or pale creature Babylon once bred her to be. Scripture’s own catalogue of horses supplies the exact anatomy of what has changed in her.

Rev 6:2, 4, 5, 8 And I saw, and behold a white horse… And there went out another horse that was red… a black horse… a pale horse.

Read locally, within the heavens of a single soul rather than merely across the skyline of nations; each horse names a movement of Christ’s own conquest within her. The authentic white horse is Him overcoming her remaining enemies from within, particularly the counterfeit white horse whom her sisters ride. The red horse is Him taking a false peace from her, forcing a division between her carnal mind and her spirit, which is trying to discern his holy spirit, where she had long preferred a comfortable truce. The black horse is the deliberate famine He allows in her when His Word has been perverted or withheld, so that she learns to hunger correctly. The pale horse is death itself, applied specifically to the flesh, proving what no amount of religious effort could otherwise teach her: that what is born of Adam cannot inherit what belongs to the spirit.

Zec 6:5 And the angel answered and said unto me, These are the four spirits of the heavens, which go forth from standing before the Lord of all the earth.

Four spirits, one dispatching office — and she is no longer merely the territory these horses ride across. She has become one of them, a white horse herself now, ridden by a rider who conquers through her rather than merely upon her. This is Joseph’s own inheritance applied directly to her: second in the chariot, not first, yet unmistakably the one through whom the King’s authority now reaches a kingdom that cannot yet see the King Himself.

Which of these four has been at work in you most recently, and have you welcomed it as conquest or resented it as loss? The famine that strips a false doctrine from you feels, in the hour it arrives, exactly like abandonment. It is not?

The Chariot and the Power It Carries

Horses and chariots are not synonyms in this vocabulary, and the distinction matters more than it may at first appear. The horse is the strength itself, indicative of men’s assumed spiritual strength. The chariot is the instrument that carries that strength into the field where it can actually be used.

Psa 147:10 He delighteth not in the strength of the horse: he taketh not pleasure in the legs of a man. 

Eze 26:7, 10 Behold, I will bring upon Tyrus Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon… with horses, and with chariots… thy walls shall shake at the noise of the horsemen, and of the wheels, and of the chariots.

Tyre’s judgment is not primarily a lesson in ancient geopolitics. It is a diagram of what happens to every fortified tower of self-sufficient religiosity when the same horses and chariots are finally permitted to enter its gates from the north, where Scripture consistently locates the seat of the Lord’s own dwelling from which judgment descends to the south.

Chariots, used rightly, are never a boast. Adonijah’s attempt to multiply chariots and horsemen for himself stands as a warning against the opposite use — fleshly strength assembled to exalt a man’s own name rather than to carry the Lord’s.

Psa 20:7 Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the LORD our God.

Even the chariot that finally rescues can arrive wrapped in fire rather than gold. What appeared to Elisha as a chariot of fire was never decoration. It was the precise shape a trial takes when it is sent to make the Word suddenly, unbearably visible — the horses of fire supplying the warfare against the flesh, the awe of the chariot of fire supplying the furnace in which that warfare becomes something the watching eye can no longer deny it has seen.

The fiery chariot represents the fiery process of God’s judgment that separates us from the old/carnal way of thinking and enables us to see and receive the exalted Christ and His spirit. Our “baptism by fire” refines us so that we can eventually administer righteous judgment ourselves.

A final, quieter detail is worth pressing before this section closes. When Israel finally prevailed over the kings of the north at the waters of Merom, the instruction given was not to keep the enemy’s chariots as trophies.

Jos 11:6, 9  …thou shalt hough their horses [cut; hamstring], and burn their chariots with fire… and Joshua did unto them as the LORD bade him: he houghed their horses, and burnt their chariots with fire.

The horses being hamstrung is not merely defeat — the power is disabled at its source, and the instrument that carried it is reduced to ash rather than repurposed for a nobler rider. This is the standing warning against every attempt to sanctify the flesh’s own machinery by simply pointing it toward godlier ends. Adonijah made the same mistake in reverse, assembling fifty men to run before his own chariot before his father’s throne had even cooled, mistaking the trappings of authority for authority’s substance. The lesson repeats in both directions: fleshly strength is not converted by being aimed correctly. It is hamstrung, and something entirely new runs in its place.

The Incomparable Distinction between Pharaoh’s Horses and the Bride

Son 1:9 I have compared thee, O my love, to a company of horses in Pharaoh’s chariots.

Before this glory was hers, it was a costume she manufactured herself, and Job’s own catalogue of creatures exposes precisely what that manufacture cost her.

Job 39:19-20 Hast thou given the horse strength? hast thou clothed his neck with thunder? Canst thou make him afraid as a grasshopper? the glory of his nostrils is terrible.

Psa 18:8 There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth devoured: coals were kindled by it.

Christ, represented as a horse in Psalm 18:8, smelled the battle before the foundation of the world was laid, and He gave the horse its grandeur and strength, not the reverse. Just as the Father accomplishes all things through His Son, Christ manifests the same glory through His Bride, the Church, in a hierarchial manner. Ultimately, this influence extends through her to her Children of the world, conceived since Eden, numbering as numerous as the sand of the sea. Accordingly, she is poetically seen at first in the genuine grandeur of Pharaoh’s horses of Egypt, equivalent to the carnal glory and riches of Sodom and Old Jerusalem.

Historically, the kingdoms of men are signified by the riches of royal headship, reflecting the nation’s wealth and strength. In ancient Egypt and across the Bronze and Iron Ages, royal chariot horses were not just beasts of burden—they were extensions of the king’s divine power and military propaganda. Pharaohs and rulers of neighboring empires (like the Hittites, Assyrians, and Mycenaean Greeks) spared no expense, transforming their steeds into breathtaking, moving monuments of gold, leather, and plumage.

Based on temple reliefs, tomb paintings, and surviving artifacts — such as the leather harnesses found in Tutankhamen’s tomb — royal chariot horses were typically decorated using several distinctive elements:

• Ostrich Feathers: The most iconic feature of a pharaoh’s horse was a towering crown of dyed ostrich plumes fixed between its ears, waving majestically as it ran and adding dramatic height and theatrical flair.
• Solar Disks and Religious Symbols: Stiff head plates, or frontlets, often featured sacred motifs like the solar disk (representing Ra), the lotus plant, or the uraeus (royal cobra) to signal divine backing and protection in battle.
• Gilded and Coloured Leather: Harnesses were crafted from high-quality layers of dyed leather—often in vibrant shades of red, blue, and green—heavily embossed or overlaid with gold leaf.
• Metal Amulets and Disks: Bridles and cheekpieces were heavily studded with polished bronze or gold disks that caught the sunlight, flashing blindingly as the chariot advanced.
• Decorative Blinkers: Horses wore beautifully carved or painted leather blinkers, often featuring the Eye of Horus to ward off evil and protect the animal from flying debris.
• Exquisite Blankets: For ceremonies, parades, and hunts, the horses were draped in heavily embroidered, lightweight cloths featuring complex geometric patterns or depictions of defeated enemies, symbolizing the king treading over his foes.

However, the operative word is that Solomon “compared” her to the stateliness of Pharaoh’s horses. Although Christ’s throne is symbolized by a chariot with interlocking wheels that do not turn when it goes, He does not possess a chariot—He is the chariot whose will, his spirit, goes wherever He wills without a wheeled mechanism (Eze 1:15-21). Solomon delineates the unparalleled contrast between Pharaoh’s arrogance, grandeur, and ceremonial display—symbolized by numerous horse-drawn chariots signifying his authority and strength—and her, whose strength, authority, and royalty derived solely from her Lord. It is her former archenemy within, the Great Whore, who, like Pharaoh, gloried in spectacle.

Rev 17-18  …I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy… that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come… The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls… and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men.

Her “chariots” were her many vehicles of beguiling, fornicating doctrines that deluded humanity.

Son 1:10-11 Thy cheeks are comely with rows of jewels, thy neck with chains of gold. We will make thee borders of gold with studs of silver.

Cheeks of Jewels, a Neck of Gold, Borders of Silver

Cheeks — H3895 lechiy
1. cheek, jaw, jawbone
Related to a root associated with softness and the place where speech and eating both originate.

Notice which part of her face is praised first. Not the eyes, which see; not the lips, which kiss; but the jaw, the place from which her own words have finally learned to proceed rightly. The jewels praised here adorn the very instrument of her speech — a fitting tribute for a woman whose changed vocabulary has been the whole substance of this Song so far. The wisdom and speech of an unremarkable woman, if indeed they cause kingdoms to rise or fall righteously (particularly within), do something quite baffling to the people — particularly men. Suddenly, her relative uncomeliness becomes beautiful—written in her eyes, where her every bodily member and joint, her entire ensemble, is seen as beguilingly beautiful in passing.

1Pe 3:1-4 Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands… Whose adorning let it not be that outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of gold, or of putting on of apparel; But let it be the hidden man of the heart… the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price.

Mal 3:17 And they shall be mine, saith the LORD of hosts, in that day when I make up my jewels; and I will spare them, as a man spareth his own son that serveth him.

Num 15:38  …that they make them fringes in the borders of their garments… and that they put upon the fringe of the borders a ribband of blue.

Ribband — H6616 pathiyl
1. cord, thread, twisted thread, wire
From H6617, to twist, to braid.

A single strand does not hold a garment together. A twisted cord does — many threads, braided into one strength, which is a hidden picture of the Bride herself, gathered from a thousand scattered sisters into a single, twisted cord of blue, God’s own royal colour, bound now to a single hem.

Gold and silver, promised to her here as ornament, were never mere metal in this vocabulary. Gold signifies the truth of God’s Word in its most refined, incorruptible form — a truth that must first pass through fire before it can be called gold at all.

1Co 3:12 Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble.

Notice what gold is measured against in that verse: not merely lesser metals, but wood, hay, and stubble — material that looks entirely serviceable until the same fire that refines gold arrives to test it, at which point the difference between what is precious and what was only ever flammable becomes impossible to disguise. Gold, in this economy, is never natively gold. It is ore first, indistinguishable from the worthless rock surrounding it, until judgment’s own fire is applied and everything that was never truly gold is burned away, leaving behind only what fire itself could not diminish (1Ki 18:38). Her borders of gold, promised here, are therefore not a decoration bestowed for good behavior. They are the visible record of a woman who has already been through that furnace once and did not come out as ash.

Silver carries its own particular freight, closer to the wound than gold’s more general glory.

Silver — H3701 keseph
1. silver, money
From H3700 kasaph, to long for, to be pale [sick from love — Son 5:8] with longing or desire.

The same root that names the metal names the ache — silver was, from its very etymology, the price paid for something desperately wanted. This is why silver is the currency of atonement: someone’s word; the price of Joseph, sold by his own brothers, the thirty pieces later paid for a greater Joseph, betrayed by His own. What adorns her neck and hems her garment is not decoration for decoration’s sake. It is a redemption price, worn openly, refusing to let her forget what she actually cost.

Closing: Plumage or Scar

Set the two horses side by side one final time, because the study has been building toward exactly this comparison and will not let you leave without making it.

Pharaoh’s horse wore ostrich plumes between its ears, gold disks flashing with every stride, and a blinker carved with the Eye of Horus to ward off what its rider refused to confront. Every inch of that animal announced a king. Not one inch of it had been paid for with anything the king himself had suffered. It was a spectacle purchased with another man’s labor, worn to make strength look divine without strength ever having been tested.

Her silver is not that. Her silver is keseph—the ache made metal, the price of a longing that cost the Payer everything and cost her the humiliation of knowing exactly what she was worth on the market the day He bought her. Pharaoh’s gold said, look at me. Her silver internally says, ” Remember what this took; the pain and suffering tried in the fire was akin to her Husband’s pain of the cross.

Now examine your own ornaments, because this study is a mirror of hers.

There is a version of your faith you have learned to wear like plumage — the fluent paragraph about grace, the visible discipline everyone compliments you on, the testimony polished smooth from retelling until it no longer costs you anything to say it aloud. It flashes. It draws the eye. It can be assembled, every part of it, without you ever having gone back to the ore and asked whether the fire actually touched you or whether you simply painted yourself the color fire leaves behind.

Here is what that costs, precisely, if it is left unexamined: a faith worn as decoration ceases to function as evidence. It becomes Pharaoh’s horse — magnificent, admired, and utterly unable to answer the one question that matters: not how good this looks, but what this actually took from you. Every rehearsed testimony that no longer trembles when you tell it is one more gold disk sewn onto a bridle, catching light it never generated.

Ask it plainly, today, before the plumage has time to arrange itself into an answer you like better: is there a single piece of your (imagined) faith right now that you perform fluently but no longer feel — a scar you have quietly recut as jewelry?

Hag 2:7 And I will shake all nations, and the desire of all nations shall come: and I will fill this house [the Bride] with glory, saith the LORD of hosts.
Hag 2:8 The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, saith the LORD of hosts. 
Hag 2:9 The glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the former, [“The first shall be last, and the last, first” principle] saith the LORD of hosts: and in this place will I give peace, [The Heavenly Jerusalem] saith the LORD of hosts.

The repair is not complicated, though it is not comfortable. Find the one conviction you can recite without a flicker of cost, like Solomon looking and looking upon the Shulamite for understanding, and don’t stop mulling it until you have sat with what it actually took — His silver, not your gold — long enough for the ache to return to it. Wear that one openly instead this week, unpolished, and let it cost you something in front of at least one other person before you let yourself speak it smoothly again.

A horse dressed for spectacle and a horse dressed for war can stand in the same stable and look almost identical for a moment. Only one of them has ever smelled the battle. The other is waiting to be found out.

End of Part 10

Next: Son 1:12-14