Rabbi Nathan offered a striking interpretation of the erotic poetry of Song of Songs that transformed it into a lesson about the sanctity of marriage. When the verse says "a locked garden" (Song of Songs 4:12), Nathan saw not a literal garden but a symbol for married women, whose intimacy is reserved exclusively for their husbands. The "fountain locked" and "sealed up spring" in the same verse? Those refer to betrothed women, women who are promised but not yet wed, whose bodies and hearts are already consecrated to the relationship that awaits them.
This reading from the Mekhilta, one of the oldest rabbinic commentaries on Exodus, shows how the rabbis read the entire Hebrew Bible as interconnected. A love poem becomes legal theology. A garden becomes a statement about sexual ethics. The metaphor runs deep: just as a locked garden cannot be entered by strangers, so too must the boundaries of marriage remain inviolable.
An alternative reading pushes even further: "a locked garden, a fountain locked" alludes to the two types of permitted cohabitation within a marriage. The rabbis were unafraid to address these matters directly, believing that the holiness of physical intimacy was itself a reflection of the divine order. For Rabbi Nathan, every word of Scripture, even the most sensual, carried a halakhic message waiting to be unlocked.