This argument is a crowd favorite in digital street dawah and online call-in shows. It focuses entirely on a single word in the Hebrew text of the Song of Solomon (also known as the Song of Songs). In chapter 5, the Shulamite woman is describing her lover to the daughters of Jerusalem, listing his physical features from head to toe, and concludes by saying, "His mouth is most sweet, yes, he is altogether lovely."
The Islamic argument relies entirely on phonetic coincidence. The Hebrew word translated as "altogether lovely" is Machamaddim (). Apologists claim that if you strip away the plural suffix (-im), it reveals the name Muhammad.
However, Machamad is a standard Hebrew descriptive noun meaning "desirable" or "precious," derived from the root Ch-M-D (). The plural suffix -im is a standard Hebrew grammatical device known as the pluralis excellentiae (plural of excellence), meaning "the embodiment of loveliness." If it were a proper noun, adding a plural suffix is a linguistic impossibility—you cannot translate a personal name as "the Muhammads."
In fact, the Tenth Commandment in Exodus 20:17 uses this exact same root to mean "covet" (tachmod). If the root itself is a prophecy, then the Decalogue commands: "You shall not Muhammad your neighbor's wife."
We don't have to guess how this word functions in the Hebrew Bible because it appears 12 other times in the Old Testament to describe ordinary, desirable things. The absolute bulletproof death-blow to this argument is found in Ezekiel 24:16, where God speaks to the prophet Ezekiel:
"Son of man, behold, I am about to take away from you the desire of your eyes ( — Machmad Eynika) with a stroke."
Two verses later, Ezekiel writes: "And at evening my wife died." If Machamad is a proper noun that literally means the Prophet of Islam, then God told Ezekiel, "I am taking away the Muhammad of your eyes," and then Ezekiel’s wife died. This demonstrates with absolute certainty that the word is a normal, descriptive noun used here to describe a beloved wife.
In 1 Kings 20:6, pagan Syrian soldiers raid Jewish homes and plunder "whatever is pleasant () in your eyes." In Hosea 9:16, God judges an apostate tribe by promising to "slay the beloved () fruit of their womb."
If this word is a proper noun identifying the Prophet of Islam, then the Old Testament explicitly states that his name applies to Ezekiel's wife, that he was physically plundered by Syrians in the 9th century BC, and that God routinely slays him in infancy.
The Song of Solomon is an intensely intimate, erotic love poem celebrating the marital romance between King Solomon and his bride. Throughout the poem, this lover is described as having wavy black hair, eyes like doves washed in milk, and cheeks like beds of spices.
If an apologist insists on overriding Hebrew grammar to make Machamaddim a literal proper name, they must accept the baggage of the context: they are arguing that their prophet is textually identified as a physical, first-century BC Jewish groom, running around the hills of Jerusalem, deeply in love with a Shulamite woman, and being praised for his physical, romantic attributes by the daughters of Jerusalem.
To pull the Prophet of Islam out of the Song of Solomon, an apologist has to completely butcher basic Hebrew vocabulary, ignore how the exact same word is used to describe Ezekiel’s wife, and somehow morph a highly sensual, ancient Israelite wedding song into a grand global prophecy. It takes a breathtaking amount of theological desperation to flip through the Bible, land on an erotic poem about King Solomon's love life, and proudly exclaim, "Look, there's my prophet!" If finding a phonetic match in a love song is all it takes to validate a messenger, then anyone named "Darling" or "Precious" can legally lay claim to half the poetry written in human history.