Song of Solomon 8:6-7 → Genesis 2:24

At its climax the Song names what the love it has celebrated for seven chapters actually is: "Set me as a seal over your heart... For love is as strong as death (kî-ʿazzâ ḵammāweṯ ʾahăḇâ), its jealousy as unrelenting as Sheol... Mighty waters cannot quench love (ʾahăḇâ); rivers cannot sweep it away" (8:6-7). The original meaning is the bond of human marital love between bride and bridegroom — its strength, its exclusive jealousy (qinʾâ), its inextinguishable flame (šalheḇeṯyâ), its un-purchasable worth ("if a man were to give all the wealth of his house for love, his offer would be utterly scorned"). The connection to Genesis 2:24 is genuine but operates at the level of template, not vocabulary: the Song never restates the leave-cleave-one-flesh formula, and it shares none of Gen 2:24's signature lexemes (ʿāzaḇ "leave," dāḇaq "cleave," bāśār ʾeḥāḏ "one flesh"). What it does is develop the content of the one-flesh union the narrator instituted in Eden — supplying from the inside what that union feels like and is worth: a clinging so strong death cannot break it and floods cannot drown it. This is why the Reference Type is Echo and not Allusion: there is no verbal marker reactivating Genesis (contrast Malachi 2:15's exact echo of ʾeḥāḏ), only the unmistakable presupposition of the same creation-marriage bond. And it is a real Echo rather than a merely diffuse association, because the Song is not generic love-poetry but the canon's sustained celebration of the one-man-one-woman marital union — the very institution Gen 2:24 defines. The method is Longitudinal Theme (the canon-wide marriage-and-bride motif that Gen 2:24 originates and that Hosea, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Malachi, and the Song all develop) working by Analogy (the human marriage-bond modeling, in both Jewish and Christian reading, the love between Yahweh and Israel / Christ and the church) — not typology, because Genesis is the earlier text and the Song escalates nothing in it; the shadow-to-substance turn on Gen 2:24 belongs to Paul's Eph 5:31-32 reading, not to this wisdom development. And the theme lands in Christ as desirable: a love "strong as death" that "many waters cannot quench" is precisely the love that went through death and was not quenched — the Bridegroom who loved the church and gave Himself up for her (Eph 5:25), whose love many waters of wrath could not extinguish and whom no price could purchase, for He paid it. Beholding the Song's strong, jealous, unquenchable love, we are not merely instructed about marriage; we are drawn to want the One whose love for His bride is its true and unspendable substance.