Song of Songs

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For other uses, see Song of Songs (disambiguation). Several terms redirect here: for other uses, see Canticle (disambiguation), Canticle of Canticles (TV series), Song of Solomon (disambiguation). For the Chinese poetry, see Classic of Poetry
Song of Songs (Cantique des Cantiques) by Gustave Moreau, 1893

The Song of Songs, also Song of Solomon or Canticles (Hebrew: שִׁיר הַשִּׁירִים Šîr Hašîrîm, Greek and Ancient Greek: Ἆισμα Ἀισμάτων, romanized: Âsma Āsmátōn; Latin: Canticum Canticōrum), is one of the megillot (scrolls) found in the last section of the Tanakh, known as the Ketuvim (or "Writings"), and a book of the Old Testament.[1]

The Song of Songs is unique within the Hebrew Bible: it shows no interest in Law or Covenant or the God of Israel, nor does it teach or explore wisdom like Proverbs or Ecclesiastes (although it does have some affinities to wisdom literature, as the ascription to Solomon indicates); instead, it celebrates sexual love, giving "the voices of two lovers, praising each other, yearning for each other, proffering invitations to enjoy".[2][3] The two are in harmony, each desiring the other and rejoicing in sexual intimacy; the women of Jerusalem form a chorus to the lovers, functioning as an audience whose participation in the lovers' erotic encounters facilitates the participation of the reader.[4]

In modern Judaism the Song is read on the Sabbath during the Passover, which marks the beginning of the grain harvest as well as commemorating the Exodus from Egypt.[5] Jewish tradition reads it as an allegory of the relationship between God and Israel, Christianity as an allegory of Christ and his "bride", the Church.[5][6]

Structure[edit]

Joshua 1:1 as recorded in the Aleppo Codex
Tanakh (Judaism)
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EstherEster
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There is widespread consensus that, although the book has no plot, it does have what can be called a framework, as indicated by the links between its beginning and end.[7] Beyond this, however, there appears to be little agreement: attempts to find a chiastic structure have not been compelling, and attempts to analyse it into units have used differing methods and arrived at differing results.[8] The following schema, from Kugler & al.[9] must therefore be taken as indicative, rather than determinative:

  • Introduction (1:1–6)
  • Dialogue between the lovers (1:7–2:7)
  • The woman recalls a visit from her lover (2:8–17)
  • The woman addresses the daughters of Zion (3:1–5)
  • Sighting a royal wedding procession (3:6–11)
  • The man describes his lover's beauty (4:1–5:1)
  • The woman addresses the daughters of Jerusalem (5:2–6:4)
  • The man describes his lover, who visits him (6:5–12)
  • Observers describe the woman's beauty (6:13–8:4)
  • Appendix (8:5–14)

Summary[edit]

The introduction calls the poem "the song of songs", a construction commonly used in Scriptural Hebrew to show something as the greatest and most beautiful of its class (as in Holy of Holies).[10] The poem proper begins with the woman's expression of desire for her lover and her self-description to the "daughters of Jerusalem": she insists on her sun-born blackness, likening it to the "tents of Kedar" (nomads) and the "curtains of Solomon". A dialogue between the lovers follows: the woman asks the man to meet; he replies with a lightly teasing tone. The two compete in offering flattering compliments ("my beloved is to me as a cluster of henna blossoms in the vineyards of En Gedi", "an apple tree among the trees of the wood", "a lily among brambles", while the bed they share is like a forest canopy). The section closes with the woman telling the daughters of Jerusalem not to stir up love such as hers until it is ready.[11]

The woman recalls a visit from her lover in the springtime. She uses imagery from a shepherd's life, and she says of her lover that "he pastures his flock among the lilies".[11]

The woman again addresses the daughters of Jerusalem, describing her fervent and ultimately successful search for her lover through the night-time streets of the city. When she finds him she takes him almost by force into the chamber in which her mother conceived her. She reveals that this is a dream, seen on her "bed at night" and ends by again warning the daughters of Jerusalem "not to stir up love until it is ready".[11]

The next section reports a royal wedding procession. Solomon is mentioned by name, and the daughters of Jerusalem are invited to come out and see the spectacle.[11]

The man describes his beloved: Her hair is like a flock of goats, her teeth like shorn ewes, and so on from face to breasts. Place-names feature heavily: her neck is like the Tower of David, her smell like the scent of Lebanon. He hastens to summon his beloved, saying that he is ravished by even a single glance. The section becomes a "garden poem", in which he describes her as a "locked garden" (usually taken to mean that she is chaste). The woman invites the man to enter the garden and taste the fruits. The man accepts the invitation, and a third party tells them to eat, drink, "and be drunk with love".[11]

The woman tells the daughters of Jerusalem of another dream. She was in her chamber when her lover knocked. She was slow to open, and when she did, he was gone. She searched through the streets again, but this time she failed to find him and the watchmen, who had helped her before, now beat her. She asks the daughters of Jerusalem to help her find him, and describes his physical good looks. Eventually, she admits her lover is in his garden, safe from harm, and committed to her as she is to him.[11]

The man describes his beloved; the woman describes a rendezvous they have shared. (The last part is unclear and possibly corrupted.)[11]

The people praise the beauty of the woman. The images are the same as those used elsewhere in the poem, but with an unusually dense use of place-names, e.g., pools of Hebron, gate of Bath-rabbim, tower of Damascus, etc. The man states his intention to enjoy the fruits of the woman's garden. The woman invites him to a tryst in the fields. She once more warns the daughters of Jerusalem against waking love until it is ready.

The woman compares love to death and sheol: love is as relentless and jealous as these two, and cannot be quenched by any force. She summons her lover, using the language used before: he should come "like a gazelle or a young stag upon the mountain of spices".[11]

Composition[edit]

Illustration for the first verse, a minstrel playing before Solomon (15th century Rothschild Mahzor)

The Song offers no clue to its author or to the date, place, or circumstances of its composition.[12] The superscription states that it is "Solomon's", but even if this is meant to identify the author, it cannot be read as strictly as a similar modern statement.[13] The most reliable evidence for its date is its language: Aramaic gradually replaced Hebrew after the end of the Babylonian exile in the late 6th century BCE, and the evidence of vocabulary, morphology, idiom and syntax clearly points to a late date, centuries after King Solomon to whom it is traditionally attributed.[14] It has parallels with Mesopotamian and Egyptian love poetry from the first half of the 1st millennium, and with the pastoral idylls of Theocritus, a Greek poet who wrote in the first half of the 3rd century BCE;[15][16][17] as a result of these conflicting signs, speculation ranges from the 10th to the 2nd centuries BCE,[12] with the language supporting a date around the 3rd century.[18]

Debate continues on the unity or disunity of the Song. Those who see it as an anthology or collection point to the abrupt shifts of scene, speaker, subject matter and mood, and the lack of obvious structure or narrative. Those who hold it to be a single poem point out that it has no internal signs of composite origins, and view the repetitions and similarities among its parts as evidence of unity. Some claim to find a conscious artistic design underlying it, but there is no agreement among them on what this might be. The question therefore remains unresolved.[19]

The setting in which the poem arose is also debated.[20] The poem seems to be rooted in some kind of festive performance.[20] A minority of academics posit a ritual origin in the celebration of the sacred marriage of the god Tammuz and the goddess Ishtar.[21][22] A popular theory of the 19th century suggests that the Song was originally recited as a drama by different singers representing the different characters, however recent scholarship has abandoned this theory.[22]

Canonisation and interpretation[edit]

Judaism[edit]

A page of rashi's interpretation of the megillot, National Library of Israel

The Song was accepted into the Jewish canon of scripture in the 2nd century CE, after a period of controversy in the 1st century. It was accepted as canonical because of its supposed authorship by Solomon and based on an allegorical reading where the subject-matter was taken to be not sexual desire but God's love for Israel.[23] For instance, the famed first and second century Rabbi Akiva forbade the use of the Song of Songs in popular celebrations. He reportedly said, "He who sings the Song of Songs in wine taverns, treating it as if it were a vulgar song, forfeits his share in the world to come".[24] However, Rabbi Akiva famously defended the canonicity of the Song of Songs, reportedly saying when the question came up of whether it should be considered a defiling work, "God forbid! [...] For all of eternity in its entirety is not as worthy as the day on which Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the Writings are holy, but Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies."[25]

It is one of the overtly mystical Biblical texts for the Kabbalah, which gave esoteric interpretation on all the Hebrew Bible. Following the dissemination of the Zohar in the 13th century, Jewish mysticism took on a metaphorically anthropomorphic erotic element, and Song of Songs is an example of this. In Zoharic Kabbalah, God is represented by a system of ten sephirot emanations, each symbolizing a different attribute of God, comprising both male and female. The Shechina (indwelling Divine presence) was identified with the feminine sephira Malchut, the vessel of Kingship. This symbolizes the Jewish people, and in the body, the female form, identified with the woman in Song of Songs. Her beloved was identified with the male sephira Tiferet, the "Holy One Blessed be He", central principle in the beneficent Heavenly flow of Divine emotion. In the body, this represents the male torso, uniting through the sephira Yesod of the male sign of the covenant organ of procreation.

Through beneficent deeds and Jewish observance, the Jewish people restore cosmic harmony in the Divine realm, healing the exile of the Shechina with God's transcendence, revealing the essential Unity of God. This elevation of the World is aroused from Above on the Sabbath, a foretaste of the redeemed purpose of Creation. The text thus became a description, depending on the aspect, of the creation of the world, the passage of Shabbat, the covenant with Israel, and the coming of the Messianic age. "Lecha Dodi", a 16th-century liturgical song with strong Kabbalistic symbolism, contains many passages, including its opening two words, taken directly from Song of Songs.

In modern Judaism, certain verses from the Song are read on Shabbat eve or at Passover, which marks the beginning of the grain harvest as well as commemorating the Exodus from Egypt, to symbolize the love between the Jewish People and their God. Jewish tradition reads it as an allegory of the relationship between God and Israel.[5]

Christianity[edit]

The Shulamite by Albert Joseph Moore (1864)

The literal subject of the Song of Songs is love and sexual longing between a man and a woman, and it has little (or nothing) to say about the relationship of God and man; in order to find such a meaning it was necessary to resort to allegory, treating the love that the Song celebrates as an analogy for the love between God and Church.[26] The Christian church's interpretation of the Song as evidence of God's love for his people, both collectively and individually, began with Origen. Over the centuries the emphases of interpretation shifted, first reading the Song as a depiction of the love between Christ and Church, the 11th century adding a moral element, and the 12th century understanding of the Bride as the Virgin Mary, with each new reading absorbing rather than simply replacing earlier ones, so that the commentary became ever more complex.[27] These theological themes are not in the poem, but derive from a theological reading; nevertheless, what is notable about this approach is the way it leads to conclusions not found in the overtly theological books of the Bible.[28] Those books reveal an abiding imbalance in the relationship between God and man, ranging from slight to enormous; but reading Songs as a theological metaphor produces quite a different outcome, one in which the two partners are equals, bound in a committed relationship.[28]

In modern times the poem has attracted the attention of feminist biblical critics, with Phyllis Trible's foundational "Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation" treating it as an exemplary text and the Feminist Companion to the Bible series edited by Athalya Brenner and Carole Fontaine devoting to it two volumes (1993, 2000).[29][30]

Musical settings[edit]

Egon Tschirch: Song of Solomon (picture cycle 1923)

Excerpts from the book have inspired composers to vocal and instrumental compositions, including:

In popular culture[edit]

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ Garrett 1993, p. 348.
  2. ^ Garrett 1993, p. 366.
  3. ^ Alter 2011, p. 232.
  4. ^ Exum 2011, p. 248.
  5. ^ a b c Sweeney 2011, p. unpaginated.
  6. ^ Norris 2003, p. 1.
  7. ^ Assis 2009, pp. 11, 16.
  8. ^ Assis 2009, pp. 16–18.
  9. ^ Kugler & Hartin 2009, p. 220.
  10. ^ Keel 1994, p. 38.
  11. ^ a b c d e f g h Kugler & Hartin 2009, pp. 220–22.
  12. ^ a b Exum 2012, p. 247.
  13. ^ Keel 1994, p. 39.
  14. ^ Bloch & Bloch 1995, p. 23.
  15. ^ Bloch & Bloch 1995, p. 25.
  16. ^ Exum 2012, p. 248.
  17. ^ Keel 1994, p. 5.
  18. ^ Hunt 2008, p. 5.
  19. ^ Exum 2005, p. 3334.
  20. ^ a b Loprieno 2005, p. 126.
  21. ^ Price 2005, p. 251.
  22. ^ a b Stern 2004, p. 1565.
  23. ^ Loprieno 2005, p. 107.
  24. ^ Phipps 1979, p. 85.
  25. ^ Schiffman 1998, pp. 119–20.
  26. ^ Norris.
  27. ^ Matter.
  28. ^ a b Kugler & Hartin.
  29. ^ Pardes 2017, p. 134.
  30. ^ Brenner & Fontaine 2000, p. passim.
  31. ^ Herz, Gerhard (1972). Bach: Cantata No. 140. WW Norton & Co.
  32. ^ Allan, J. (February 22, 2008), "Live – John Zorn Abron Arts Centre", Amplifier Magazine (review)
  33. ^ Smith, S (November 27, 2008), "An Unlikely Pairing on Common Ground", The New York Times.
  34. ^ "Cantata Profana Performs Gustav Mahler's Das Lied Von Der Erde – Concert Program" (PDF). YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. YIVO. Retrieved 12 May 2018.
  35. ^ "Shir hashirim".
  36. ^ "Uri Tsafon".
  37. ^ Bordwell, David (July 1992). The Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer. ISBN 978-0-520-04450-0.
  38. ^ ben David, Solomon, "Song", KJV, The Bible, Bible gateway, 2:15.
  39. ^ The Song of Songs: A Love Poem Illustrated, New Classic Books, 2009, ISBN 978-1600200021.
  40. ^ "THE SONG Movie – The Story – Coming Soon to Digital HD + DVD". Thesongmovie.com. Retrieved 20 January 2018.
  41. ^ Librivox. "LibriVox". Librivox.org. Retrieved 20 January 2018.

References[edit]

External links[edit]

Jewish translations and commentary
Christian translations and commentary
Song of Songs
Preceded by
Job 		Hebrew Bible Succeeded by
Ruth
Preceded by
Ecclesiastes 		Protestant
Old Testament 		Succeeded by
Isaiah
Roman Catholic
Old Testament 		Succeeded by
Book of Wisdom
E. Orthodox
Old Testament
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