How old is the proclamation: “Here comes the bridegroom”?

Long before the German composer, Felix Mendelssohn, composed the “Wedding March” in 1842 for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Richard Wagner’s wrote the chorus “Here Comes the Bride” in 1850, it was customary to greet the husband-to-be with the words “Here comes the bridegroom”.

At least according to Noël Antoine Pluche's The History of the Heavens, written in 1740

They all watched the time when the bride-groom was ready to go, and fetch his bride from her parents house, and to carry her to his own, with all the persons who were to attend and to be admitted into the banqueting room with him. So soon as he appeared, the two chorus's of young people taking their lamps, cried aloud: here is the feast, here comes the bridegroom. … so in like manner, a wedding day was proclaimed, by adorning with flowers and foliage the doors of both the bride and bridegroom, and…

The Greek god, Hymen, meaning the “one who joins”, was the god of marriages. And the hymenaeus (also spelled hymenaios) was sang in the procession from the bride's home to that of the groom's. It was auspicious that Hymen attended the wedding, so the guests invoked his name for if he was absent during the ceremony, the marriage would be unhappy.

• Can anyone shed further light on the origin of Here comes the bride and Here comes the bridegroom?

In ancient Israel, the bride to be and her family and friends gathered together under a canopy to shield them from the heat of the day and waited for the groom to arrive. At some point, someone with keen eyesight would see the groom coming from afar and call out "the bridegroom comes".

Matthew 25:6

At midnight, there was a cry, ‘Behold, the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!’

This is a parable, of course, but follows Jewish wedding practices. The wedding was held at the home of the bride's parents. The bridegroom would come there and, of course, be announced because his arrival meant the wedding would begin.

Originally the to-be-married man (whom we call the bridgroom or simply the groom) was the bride's guma or brideguma, "guma" being a now-obsolete Anglo-Saxon word for "man, person, earthly being", cognate with the Latin "homo" (as in Homo sapiens). But "guma" became confused with "groom", a word of uncertain origin, meaning "servant or attendant" (and later, someone who cared for horses), so we now say "bridegroom". "Bride" is of uncertain origin, but early on meant a woman about to be, or newly, married.