1. Song of Solomon 6:12 (ESV)
  2. Exposition

How does woman's desire set her among the chariots of her prince?

Song of Solomon 6:12 (ESV)

12 Before I was aware, my desire set me among the chariots of my kinsman, a prince.

The meaning of Song of Solomon 6:12 is not clear and this verse is described by most commentators as the hardest to interpret in the whole Song.

Literally the Hebrew reads, I did not know | my soul | set me | chariots of Amminadib.
My soul may be both the object of the first clause and the subject of the second clause, so that the first phrase reads as I do not know my soul. This refers to a state in which someone does not know clearly what they are doing: I was beside myself.
Taking Amminadib as a personal name does not help make sense of the verse and it can rather be translated as the chariot of a noble.
So the whole sentence would then read something like, I do not know my soul, it set me in a chariot with a noble.

This describes the young woman’s emotional state after going down to the garden of nuts and discovering that the vines and pomegranates were indeed still in bloom. Her fears that she had lost the man forever were false; he still loved her, in spite of her earlier coldness. When she heard the man’s words (Song of Solomon 6:4–10) and discovered that he still found her uniquely attractive, she was enraptured as if she had been caught up in a royal chariot with her Prince Charming.1