Song of Songs 2:15 is a puzzle to most commentators. Cheryl Exum does a good job with it. Like many commentators, she notes evidence that foxes were symbolic of sexual potency and also ancient fables and proverbs that indicate foxes were threats to vineyards. Verse 15 is the woman’s reply to the lover’s request in v. 14 to hear the woman’s voice. She replies in the plural, taking the place of all women, complaining about how men are “foxes” who want to taste the grapes of the vineyards without, and then dashing away. A common enough complaint, here offered in a somewhat playful fashion.
Exum goes on: “Once the significance of catching the foxes, generally overlooked by critics, is taken into account, it becomes easier to imagine how the vineyards and foxes also fit the situation . . . . Verse 15 is only the first part of the woman’s reply to her lover, and it means, in effect: young men can roam freely in search of romance, like foxes romping through the vineyards. They want our favors, and we want theirs, but we are not so free as they are to dally. The important thing for us is not to enjoy the random fox but to catch a fox for our very own (each of us, her own fox). These free and easy young men need to be caught, seized hold of and brought home (here the imperative ‘catch’ or ‘seize’ is indefinite; who does the catching is not specified). This is the goal that the woman achieves in 3:4, when she siezes her lover . . . and refuses to let him go until she has brought him to her mother’s house.”
On this reading, 2:15 moves straight into 2:16, the declaration of mutual possession, a declaration only possible once the woman has caught and secured her fox and offered her own vineyard to him.
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