Song of Songs: Chapter Four, verses six-eleven

Song of Songs, Chapter Four, verse six: Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, I will get me to the mountain of myrrh, and to the hill of frankincense.

Er. I’ll point out that while myrrh is generally in Scripture used to talk about sweet sexy smells, frankincense is mostly used in sacrifices. I think they both, and particularly both together, are meant to indicate wealth, even metaphorical wealth, that is, richness in love. A mountain of myrrh. Whew!

Chapter Four, verse seven: Thou [art] all fair, my love; [there is] no spot in thee.

Speaking of sacrifices, it is of course only those animals without blemish that can be sacrificed. And only those people without blemish that can perform the sacrifice. Of course, all this is within the context of the catalogue of body parts in the last bit, so it makes sense that it would conclude with, er, a conclusion.

Chapter Four, verse eight: Come with me from Lebanon, [my] spouse, with me from Lebanon: look from the top of Amana, from the top of Shenir and Hermon, from the lions' dens, from the mountains of the leopards.

Spouse here is kallah, bride, but I think betrothed is probably what’s going on here. I think, by the way, the Song of Songs is a strong impetus for the inclusion of the wedding in the obligations of Judaism:

These are the obligations without measure, whose reward, too, is without measure: To honor mother and father, to perform acts of lovingkindness, to attend the house of study daily, to welcome the stranger, to visit the sick, to rejoice with the bride and bridegroom, to comfort the bereaved, to pray with sincerity, to make peace when there is strife. And the study of Torah is equal to them all.

The study of Torah is equal to them all only because (according to the Rabbis) it leads to them all. Including the rejoicing at weddings.

Chapter Four, verse nine: Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, [my] spouse; thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck.

I know that my sister, my spouse is kinda ewwy, but there is this sense, I think particularly in a society where men and women lead largely separate lives, that people know their siblings better than anyone else. And isn’t there a sense that a lover might wish to have grown up with his beloved, to have seen her first steps, to have taught her to shoot hoops and play candyland, to have comforted her after her first fall off a bicycle. I take this talk in that sense. There is, also, The Analogy, where if we are not, in fact, experiencing pillow talk but theological talk, both sister and spouse are metaphors expressing closeness, and sister is in some sense more permanent, starting earlier and lasting lifelong.

Chapter Four, verse ten: How fair is thy love, my sister, [my] spouse! how much better is thy love than wine! and the smell of thine ointments than all spices!

An odd thing here, for us who pray in Hebrew, is the phrase mah tovu, usually translated how goodly in Num 24:5, How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob, [and] thy tabernacles, O Israel! That’s the first prayer of the morning service at the temple; in fact, some folk say the line the moment they walk in through the doors of a synagogue. It’s what Bala’am says instead of cursing, of course. It’s an odd resonance, particularly if we have The Analogy in the back of our minds.

Chapter Four, verse eleven: Thy lips, O [my] spouse, drop [as] the honeycomb: honey and milk [are] under thy tongue; and the smell of thy garments [is] like the smell of Lebanon.

An odd thing is that in Scriptures, generally, they don’t talk about how people smell. OK, that’s not all that odd. But there are a few places. The Bridge and Bridegroom, obviously, are just eighteen kinds of odoriffic, all of them good. Isaac the Blind—y’all remember the story, yes?—doesn’t just feel Jacob’s faux-hairy arms but smells him, and says he smells like Esau. Oops. And in Jeremiah, the prophet mentions that Moab, here talked about as a person, has remained unchanged, even his smell hasn’t changed. So there’s a pattern here of knowing a person by the smell of them, which frankly is something that a lot of pr0n writers forget to include.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.