Song of Songs: Chapter Four, verses one-five

Song of Songs, Chapter Four, verse one: Behold, thou [art] fair, my love; behold, thou [art] fair; thou [hast] doves' eyes within thy locks: thy hair [is] as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead.

This is, by the way, the Fellah to the Gal; it’s her hair that falls over her shoulders like shaggy goats frolicking over the rocky shoulders of the mountain. Or something. As for the locks, which are tzammat, I haven’t a clue. It’s translated as locks (of hair) or veil, but only appears here in the Song of Songs which is Solomon’s and in Isaiah 47:2, where it appears in an unquestionably sexual connotation, although that of course doesn’t mean that there the word is necessarily sexual or even that second Isaiah uses the removal of the tzammat to mean more than nakedness. And again, dove is yoni, so I might think that the doves’ eyes within thy locks is actually meant to be a (poetic) description of her ding-a-ling-a-ling, but since it’s paired with what is unquestionably about her hair and shoulders, perhaps it’s about her eyes, really.

Chapter Four, verse two: Thy teeth [are] like a flock [of sheep that are even] shorn, which came up from the washing; whereof every one bear twins, and none [is] barren among them.

... and this is definitely about her teeth. Teeth. This is one of those verses where we’re just missing the idiom. Which is bound to happen. It’s like being cute as a button. What is that about? I would expect, somehow, discussions of beauty to take the form of comparisons, and that the comparisons would be based on cultural referents that outsiders won’t get. A brick shithouse?

I was going to add that the lyricist has managed to work in another reference to fertility, but it looks to me like barren is a bad translation of shakul, which seems as likely to mean missing. A barren woman is an akarah, so if the lyricist meant barren, I would have expected akarah. Further, this business of bearing twins is suspect, at least in the sense that we think of twins as being siblings born of the same pregnancy, such as Jacob and Esau. The NLT makes this bit They are perfectly matched; not one is missing, which has no connotation of fecundity whatsoever. I suspect that the twins and the barrenness are inventions of the Vulgate.

Chapter Four, verse three: Thy lips [are] like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech [is] comely: thy temples [are] like a piece of a pomegranate within thy locks.

Or the first lips, shephat, could be speech (see the Tower of Babel in Gen 11:7), but could certainly be the physical lips, particularly because that makes more sense. On the other hand, the speech is midbar, which means wilderness, but in the words of Thayer, “the context almost requires it to be some member, as was rightly observed by Alb. Schultens, although I do not with him understand it to be the tongue.” Furthermore, temples are something like “thin parts”, and if we are talking about the face, then the temples are certainly a possibility. At any rate, the raqah is where Jael’s tent peg went in, so let’s call it the temple, yes? I don’t really want to change my reading of that story, do you?

Chapter Four, verse four: Thy neck [is] like the tower of David builded for an armoury, whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men.

As for armory, it’s just guessing. There’s a word, which I’ve forgotten, for words like this one, which appear only once in Scripture. Sometimes we can get a good idea of the word by comparing its three-letter root to others, together of course with some context. This could be just about anything. We do, of course, have the traditional interpretations to help us, but I am skeptical of those. The Septuagint is supposed to have been Divinely inspired, what with seventy (or seventy-two) scholars all coming up with the exact same Greek text, word for word, without consulting each with the other. Yep. That story is nearly as true as the one about the oil lamp I’ve been hearing. The Vulgate, as well, is considered by many to be the Divine Word, not only by virtue of scholarship but by direct inspiration. I can’t buy it. I could, just possibly, convince myself that there was a direct line of priestly and then rabbinic interpretation that handed down the correct (but archaic, and so not elsewhere used) meaning of those words, but I’d have to be really trying. Sometimes, then, I’m just left with saying that her neck (and it is a neck, by the way) is not like an armory, but I have no idea what it is supposed to be like. Something fierce, though, from the sound of the rest of it.

Chapter Four, verse five: Thy two breasts [are] like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.

Ooh, she has breasts! Two of them! And they aren’t, you know, different! So, our Shepherd (or perhaps the King, if you want to go there) calls them tz’viyah, female gazelles. Although the prophets use tz’vi to mean glory or beauty rather than a roebuck. Also, young is made up; the word is ofer and is only used in SoS, and appears to mean something like pale, although I’m not convinced of that, either. I suppose that there is some sort of deliberate attempt to compare her gazongas to animals, rather than to, for instance, fruit. And they definitely feed on the lilies. Or he feeds on the lilies, which we already know he does (2:16). At any rate, there are definitely two of them, and one is much like the other, although presumably on the other side.

I’ll stop here for now, with a ranty ranty rant rant rantalooralooralay, so this is a good time for Gentle Readers to return to their regularly scheduled whatnots.

Look, this bit is one of those bits that people quote from when they want to talk about how the Song of Songs is sexy. Her hair is like goats, her teeth are like sheep, her lips are red, her legs are long and lean, her ears are slightly pointed, her eyelashes are free from gunge, her tits are like gazelles. Whoo fucking hoo. It’s so erotic I could plotz. The fact is that the Song of Songs is sexy, but the bits where he is talking about her body (or the bits where she is talking about his, for instance 5:10-16) are not the sexy bits. I mean, fine, if you find them sexy, more power to you, and have fun with that, but as for YHB, it’s the bits where she’s writhing on the bed, unable to sleep, thinking about him, and the bits where she makes him tremble, and the bits where they are driving each other crazy trying to find someplace to get together, the bits where they finally do get together and we’re not sure if it’s a dream, those are the sexy bits.

Or perhaps it’s just a matter of taste. I mean, my own preference for prose (or poetic) pr0n is for the stuff that relies, not on descriptions of the individual involved and their physical attributes, but on the desire. And it’s clear—I mean, it’s explicit—that she desires him, and he desires her, and we’ve seen some of that, and we’ll see more of it, and if I were going to talk about monks beating off to the Song of Songs (to use one of the many examples I’ve read where men (usually) of celibate bent are aroused by this passage), I wouldn’t quote 4:1-5. Particularly since, even if you find detailed descriptions of the physical charms of hot young people exciting, it’s hard to get past the language problem here.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.