Song of Songs, Chapter Three, verses one-five

There seemed to be sufficient interest to go on, and it’s just possible I’ll goad people into actually commenting...

Song of Songs, Chapter Three, verse one: By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.

The first question about the scene we’re entering is whether it’s a dream or it’s actually happening. If you remember, in Chapter Two, our Hunk was looking in through a lattice, calling to the Babe to come away with him. Now, she’s in her bed, searching for her lover. One possible interpretation is that she took him to her bed, and then woke up in the night and he had left. I don’t like that one. Another is that she had been sleeping, dreaming he was there, and then she woke up and found that he wasn’t there (and never had been). A third (which I like best) is that she is describing something in her dream, and that in her dream she was looking for him in the bed.

A fourth, by the way, is that she was masturbating while thinking of him, and was unable to climax, and eventually had to get up and go for a walk to cool off. I don’t think that was directly meant, but I do think that it is deliberately evoked as part of a general sense of heightened sensuality. Again, there’s a temptation to put all of this into one big narrative, and I think that’s a mistake; there are individual vignettes but I’m coming to think of the thing more as a post-Dylan song lyric, where an image can be thrown out simply to heighten the mood. Anyway, I think there’s a tendency when we come across something like this to think “oh, modern audiences have dirty minds, the Scripture couldn’t have meant that.” Actually, I think the Scripture probably has as dirty a mind as I do, and that’s saying something.

And before I go on, just a note: if we keep in our mind the image of the woman on the bed, unable to sleep, filled with thoughts of her love, and then settle the Analogy over it, we’re left with an image I find unsettling but powerful. Do I want the urge to the Divine to be like lust? My own urge to the Divine is much calmer, more intellectual—I do find emotional release in prayer, but the kind of religious ecstasy we’re seeing here is something that I think of as a kind of psychosis, leading more to violence and terror than any positive religious experience. But then, I’m a nerd. It’s also interesting that this kind of intensity bothered the rabbis less as religious than as physical lust.

Chapter Three, verse two: I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.

I think this may work best as part of the dream, although of course there is an erotic charge in the image of the Babe in her nightgown, wandering through the angry streets at dawn, looking for her lovin’ man.

Chapter Three, verse three: The watchmen that go about the city found me: [to whom I said], Saw ye him whom my soul loveth?

One of the things I find dreamlike about this bit is that she doesn’t ask for him by name, just as she’ahavah nafshi, the love of my soul. As if the guards would know who she loves. Also, I’ll just point out again the themes of seeking and seeing.

Chapter Three, verse four: [It was] but a little that I passed from them, but I found him whom my soul loveth: I held him, and would not let him go, until I had brought him into my mother's house, and into the chamber of her that conceived me.

I don’t think this is taking him home to mother; I think this is taking him home to her mother’s bedroom while she is away. I’ll also point out the way that sex is linked both to pleasure and to fertility; the author more than once goes out of his way to throw in a passing reference to fertility, often as if it were an erotic enhancement, which of course it may have been.

Chapter Three, verse five: I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake [my] love, till he please.

This is the refrain that indicates the end of that sequence, whether it’s a dream sequence or not. It the same refrain as in 2:7 and we’ll find it later in 8:4. It’s possible that it stands as a sort of camera pan across to the clock, discreetly indicating the hot sex that followed the last verse without actually describing it. Or it could just be a refrain, repeated for poetic reasons.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.