A Few Observations On The Song of Solomon

Heaven forbid that any man in Israel ever disputed that the Song of Songs is holy. For the whole world is not worth the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the Writings are holy and the Song of Songs is holy of holies. 

-- Rabbi Akiba, Mishnah Yadayim 3:5

The Song of Solomon as envisioned by Terry Waldrop. Used by kind permission of the artist. Click the image for Mr. Waldrop's blog. Views expressed in my blog, however, are not necessary views that the artist should be saddled with! I really appreciate both his homage to Picasso as well as his sensitive reading of the Song's natural imagery, presenting it in understatement perhaps to emphasize the traditional allegorical interpretations of the poem.One of my favorite classes to teach is the one on Song of Solomon, a book that for some reason is in the Bible and for some reason is rarely preached on these days.

To begin with, the Song of Solomon was probably not written by Solomon, a point that causes some Christians enormous anxiety.  It shouldn't: the phenomenon known as pseudepigraphia (false attribution or false authorship) was a common ancient literary device that was supposed to condition the reader's response to a work.  

By saying a Psalm was written by David after his adultery with Bathsheba (Psalm 51) you gave a strong story-based context for reading the poem, never mind that everything in the poem says that it metaphorizes the sin of Judah and the destruction of Jerusalem (400 years after David) in almost every line.  It controls and redirects and (hopefully) makes the reading more rich.

Anyway, the Song's Hebrew language characteristics have been dated anywhere from the 9th century B.C.E. (the time of Solomon) to a more plausible date after the Exile.  The presence of loan words and rabbinic Hebrew argue for a late date that precludes it being written by Solomon, but again, this is hardly a strike against it. 

The Song used to be read in church: Bernard of Clairvaux's sermons in the 12th century on the Song were wildly popular and influential.  They followed the rabbinic and classical Christian exegesis, taking the Song as allegorical of God's love.  In the rabbinic tradition, the lover in the poem was God and the Beloved was Israel.  In the Christian tradition, amplified and refined by Bernard, the Church or the Soul was the beloved, and the lover was Christ.  Each detail of the poem was painstakingly worked out as an allegory of some feature of the encounter with the Lover.

But before it was read in this way, the poem was quite simply an erotic poem, filled with sensual imagery of a kind that surprises and often delights student-readers: it's not the disconnected individualistic sexual imagery of modern day fucking-around.  It's rooted in both the land and in the local community.   While it is wrong to say (as Christian books about it constantly do say) that "it's a celebration of married love" (details in the poem indicate the couple is not married), it would be right to suggest that the poem captures the psychology of marriage, the desire to be, and the necessity of bringing sexual energy into a productive relationship to protect it from the shame that it causes when it's left unregulated.

It would be a wonderful and fun post to write to tease out all the imagery.  But it can be condensed neatly.

The poem imagines the dialogue between two young peasants in love.  She tends grapes.  He tends goats.  They find in their pastoral life the imagery they need to compliment each other, to express their desires for one another.   Their "strategies" are of several kinds.

They appeal to natural sensory imagery a great deal, especially the senses of smell and taste.  The opening lines say that the lover's name is like "perfume, poured out."  Not only does that suggest that it is pleasant, but it conveys that strong sense of memory and attention that scent commands.   (If you're in love and at a party talking to somebody and you hear the name of the person you're in love with, your eyes might be on your interlocutor, but your ears and full attention are "scenting the air," as it were, to catch a hint of what is said about your beloved.  This exists in a parallelism that simply praises the scent of the lover: long before we knew about pheromones, we knew about pheromones.A positively ghastly depiction, in which a rather wealthy-looking goatherd and a positively upscale vineyard-wench are the picture of marital bliss. Pardon me while I hurl.

Then too the couple appeals relentlessly to one anothers' ego, complimenting each other in beautiful (if sometimes strange and rural) imagery.  She says of him, "Rightly do the maidens love you."  He, paying back the compliment, says, "You are like a mare among Pharaoh's chariots."  (He is not saying she is horsey.  Stallions pull the chariots.  Introduce a mare among an army of stallions, and remove yourself to a safe distance.  He is saying the effect of his beloved on the local boys is wildly electrifying.)

In other words, in the words of Billy Squier, "Everybody Wants You."

He compares her teeth to sheep just back from the washing, each with its twin: in the days before modern dental hygiene, this was no small compliment, no doubt.  Her hair is a flock of goats descending a mountain, which, if you've ever seen such a thing (I have) is quite stylish, wavy, undulating, and impossible to look away from.  Her belly is a heap of wheat, not because it's enormous, but because it's rich and emblematic of fertility.  (Compare the setting of Ruth 3:7-8 where Ruth effectively offers herself in very sexual though honorable terms to Boaz at a heap of wheat.)

They like to turn each other on.  Before phone sex, there was the Song of Solomon saying things like, "My beloved is to me a sachet of myrrh resting between my breasts."   Oh yes.  

She goes on to say, Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest  is my beloved among the young men. 
I delight to sit in his shade,  and his fruit is sweet to my taste."  Like an apple tree...?  Not the tallest, not the strongest tree in the forest, but, yes, with dangling fruit, and did she just say...?

She did.

But note that this is "suggestion," relying on the beauty and power of the language to make elegant the image that inevitably must leap to our mind when we interrogate the language.  It is meant to be delicate, like those fade-to-black moments in old movies.

"Let him lead me to the banquet hall,  and let his banner over me be love," she says.  "Love" here is not the Christian ideal of philanthropic agape,  but a lot closer to the Greek eros, desire.  In our day and age it's impossible to imagine what it must have been like in their culture, but it seems that sometimes a little time at the local roadhouse was a prelude to desire.  Imagine that.  How things change.

We have several dream and fantasy sequences.  One of them (Song of Solomon 3:6-11) is an odd vision of Solomon, image and emblem of splendor and wealth, on a litter coming up from the desert.   There are with him sixty men in uniform, that staple of female fantasy, each "wearing a sword," if you get my drift, and "experienced in battle," if you follow me, "in case of alarms by night," if you take my meaning.  No, nothing exactly stated, but the dress-blues lend their masculine tone to a poem shaping up to be one of desire and sex.

Similarly, a pair of dream sequences (Song of Solomon 3:1-5 and Song of Solomon 5:2-8) contain imagery highly suggestive of masturbation as she "seeks for [him] on her bed" with her "fingers [dripping] with myrrh] or erotic dreaming ("I was asleep, but my heart was awake," perhaps the best description of a dream I've ever read).  (Note in those passages that "feet" is often a euphemism in the Old Testament for the genitals, so her description of cleaning her feet may be lightly suggestive.)

Without a doubt it's suggestive when in chapter four he compares her to a variety of spices, honey, and milk, with suggestions about where the honey and milk reside; and she calls on the winds to blow the scent of her garden (!) to her lover, who will then come and taste its choicest fruits. He responds enthusiastically (Song of Solomon 5:1), assuring her she's on the menu.

Yowza.  Banned in Boston.

But it would be a mistake to think of The Song as ancient porn or even "mere" erotic literature.

One of its principle tensions is that of the role that this passion is supposed to play in the life of the community, as well as thoughts of the future life-giving aspects of sex.

Goats and sheep are supporting actors in the Song of Solomon. Try to grasp the emotional content the poem sets up rather than thinking too hard about images like this one.The couple is not married: he calls her "my bride," from time to time, but he also calls her his sister, and this suggests that he is emphasizing a closeness of desire rather than an actual status.  She complains that she is anxious to take her into the chamber of her mother (Song of Solomon 3:4), probably because her mother would witness the consummation of the marriage.  (I know, I know.  Talk about performance anxiety.)

She wishes he were her brother, of all things, so she could kiss him without being despised (Song of Solomon 8:1). 

They meet in the forest (Song of Solomon 1:16-17), with imagery drawn from the Temple of Solomon.

But the most telling detail is the one that is most central to the poem: it is about the nature of physical / sexual / romantic desire, which is an agony of ecstasy.  The woman's constant refrain is, "I adjure you, daughters of Jerusalem... do not stir up desire until it is ready."  That is, love is a flame that consumes one until it's allowed to burn freely.

And it has been said that the only cure for it is marriage: which is not merely a cynicism.  It's the case that certain manifestations of desire only function because we do not have what we want, and so it's a psychological reality.  But more to the point, such desire as the couple expresses in the poem, they each express in their different ways, is not sustainable.  They say in their epilogue (Song of Solomon 8:6-7) that love is stronger than death, and many waters cannot quench it.  One cannot burn in endless desire.

In that very special sense, it is a poem about marriage: that marriage is the cure for what ails them, the "seal upon your heart" that is required to give substance to the desire that Dante (a devotee of Bernard of Clairvaux, not coincidentally) imagined as a hot wind that blows the citizens of desire endlessly and endlessly, without weight.

Comments

[Natalie]

It was nice to finally get a glimpse of your class on this topic, something you have mentioned here and there over the past few years.