OK, then. The Song of Songs. I’m having trouble organizing myself, here (not altogether surprising, you say?), so I think I’ll take a moment before we go through the text closely and talk about a couple of general issues. If you have never read the text, Gentle Reader, go ahead and read it now. It’s eight chapters, about a hundred and thirty verses altogether, maybe 2500 words (depending, of course, on your translation).
It’s a love poem, or rather a collection or anthology of love poems. There’s no narrative inherent in the text, although there are ways to interpret the text to make it a story. Those stories are imposed on the text, though, rather than in it. There is a woman, from the peasant class evidently, given the task of minding the family vineyards. There is a woman, possibly the same woman, who lives in the city, perhaps in the palace. There is a woman, possibly the same woman, who wears fancy jewelry and necklaces, unless that’s just poetic license, and she is as beautiful as if she were wearing fancy jewelry.
There’s a young shepherd, who is wicked hunky. There’s King Solomon, unless that’s just poetic license, and the hunky shepherd is as kingly and powerful as Solomon. There may be more than one guy, or there may be one guy with more than one aspect, or there may be a bunch of guys and a bunch of gals, and the poet is (poets are) talking about love generally, rather than in specific, or in lots of specifics rather than in one specific.
Sometimes the man and woman (or men and women) are talking to each other, and sometimes they are talking about each other, to somebody else, maybe to us. Sometimes somebody asks the man or woman a question, or comments on the action.
To me, I imagine it as an oratorio, in a way, with a male voice, a female voice, and a female chorus (the daughters of Jerusalem). The male vocalist represents the beloved of the female, but is not playing a particular part—he’s not Solomon, he’s not a shepherd, he’s Essence of Man in Love. Similarly, the female voice is a voice of Woman in Love. It’s not a story, with characters. It’s not representational in that way. It’s glimpsing moments of lots of lives.
Then there’s the obvious question: what the hell is this thing doing in Scripture? Is it Scripture just because the tradition tells us that Solomon wrote it? Surely, if we were going to keep every scrap of Solomonic wisdom, we would in addition to having ruminations about love or vanity or prudence have a bit of friggin’ case law, yes? A compilation of decisions and precedents, for the use of judges (if not Judges), well, that would come in handy. We don’t have that. We have some love poetry about a vine-maiden and shepherd. Even if it is Solomon—and it isn’t—what is it doing there?
In fact, the rabbis didn’t really want to put it in the canon. Rabbi Akiva made them. He really like the Song of Songs, enough to say that “all the Writings are holy, whereas the Song of Songs is the holiest of the holy”. It’s not about a shepherd shagging a vine-maiden after all, you see, it’s about the holy love between the Lord and the people of Israel. Ah, of course. No. No, it isn’t. Yes, it is. Fine, we’ll put it in.
There’s nothing in the thing whatsoever—tell me, as we go through, if you spot anything, because I sure haven’t—that indicates that it was written to be an analogy. It is screamingly obvious that the whole analogy thing is an invention after the fact to justify the inclusion of some lovely but totally secular love poetry. This goes for the Christian version of the analogy as well, where it is (if I understand correctly) all about the love between Christ and the Church, or for protestants the love between Christ and the soul of the Christian. I don’t buy it.
Neither does my rabbi. The problem, for me, is that having refused that particular purchase, Papa Rabbi is unwilling to discuss the implications of the analogy, the particulars of it or its effects. I think (and I sense that Baby Rabbi agrees with me, but I could be projecting, because I like Baby Rabbi a lot) that the fact that the rabbis made it up makes the analogy more interesting, not less. If it doesn’t tell us that much about the original intent (stop it... we’re not having that discussion here), it tells us ever so much about the rabbis who invented it, and about the rabbinic Judaism that we inherited from them. If it supposed to be written by Solomon, it tells us about what we are supposed to think about Solomon, and what we do think about Solomon has got to be connected to that.
So. For the purposes of my attack on this Song of Songs, it is both (a) a collage of scraps of very old love poetry, probably cobbled together in around the third century before the common era, and (2) Solomon’s allegory of the relationship between the people Israel and the Lord. And probably a dessert topping as well. We’re keeping our minds open here, right? Let’s move on.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.