{"id":10372,"date":"2006-12-01T11:31:20","date_gmt":"2006-12-01T16:31:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2006\/12\/01\/10372.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:55:40","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:55:40","slug":"song-of-songs-chapter-two-vers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2006\/12\/01\/song-of-songs-chapter-two-vers\/","title":{"rendered":"Song of Songs, Chapter Two, verses eight-seventeen"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Song of Songs, Chapter Two, verse eight<\/a>: The voice of my beloved! behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.<\/b>\n

We’re changing scenes again. If you remember, in verse seven we left the two of them sleeping it off (or at least he was sleeping; she was dishing to her girlfriends and then shushing them). Now, the Bride is hearing her boyfriend’s voice. I think this is the first appearance of the image of the Bride hearing but not seeing her fellow; this works particularly well if you are projecting of the figures onto the people Israel and the Divine.\n

Chapter Two, verse nine: My beloved is like a roe or a young hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the windows, shewing himself through the lattice.<\/b>\n

He is there, but not there. Nearby, but not visible. Watching her, but from outside. Read as a religious allegory, it’s way less hot than read as pr0n.\n

Chapter Two, verse ten: My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.<\/b>\n

Just to distract us from the seduction, isn’t kumi<\/I>, rise up, what Jesus says to one of the people he heals? (later)<\/I> OK, found it, Mark 5:41<\/a>, he says “Talitha cumi” to the little girl. I’m not saying it’s a reference—what else would he say?—but rise up<\/I> seems to be part of the typescene for healing, which makes its use in this scene, between the Lord and the People, a healing<\/I> scene. What? Yes, I know, it’s pr0n. I’m doing the job of the Rabbis, who had to keep saying “Hey! Not pr0n! No pr0n in Scripture! Just allegory!”\n

Chapter Two, verse eleven: For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over [and] gone;<\/b>\n

Ah, whew. We’ve gone to poetry. It’s spring...\n

Chapter Two, verse twelve: The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing [of birds] is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;<\/b>\n

Fertility images. Turtledove<\/I>, by the way.\n

Chapter Two, verse thirteen: The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines [with] the tender grape give a [good] smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.<\/b>\n

It’s the first of May, when they can go outside and ... Hey! Allegory!\n

Chapter Two, verse fourteen: O my dove, [that art] in the clefts of the rock, in the secret [places] of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet [is] thy voice, and thy countenance [is] comely.<\/b>\n

Here it’s the man that is looking for the woman. They seek each other, they want to see each other face-to-face, him looking for her, her looking for him, hearing each other’s voices, but never quite touching. If this is<\/I> allegory, it’s interesting that the Lord is seeking his Bride\/people as eagerly as she seeks the Divine.\n

Chapter Two, verse fifteen: Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines [have] tender grapes.<\/b>\n

I have no idea. Are the little foxes rivals for his love? Some translations have this attributed to the chorus, that is, to the Daughters of Jerusalem.\n

Chapter Two, verse sixteen: My beloved [is] mine, and I [am] his: he feedeth among the lilies.<\/b>\n

I’m sure he does. The lilies. I’m sure he feeds right there among ’em. OK, here’s as good a place as any for bringing up something that’s been bothering me as I read through this. It’s clear that this text is a fragment from a genre that has no other representatives in Scripture. Nor do we, as far as I know, have any other Hebrew romantic or erotic works from that time period or any period close to it. So what we know of the vocabulary is all from totally different kinds of works. That’s one reason why so many words in the Song of Songs appear nowhere else in Scripture, and we have to guess their meaning from only the one bit of context, or from patterns we know about the formation of other words from similar roots. All that’s fine, and everybody struggles with it. What I’m wondering is if there is a sort of vocabulary particular to this genre that uses words we think we know, but with other meanings.\n

Imagine you knew the English language from, say, newspapers. You have ten years or so of the Times<\/I> and the Post<\/I>, with pictures and stuff, and perhaps you have some translations of some of the articles into your native language, which helps a lot, although you do have to be careful, because the translators have their own agendas, and their translation had to be vetted by your government, who they couldn’t risk offending. Still, if you worked at it, you could get quite a good working grasp of the language, and could with sufficient study, get to the point where you felt you could translate something new.\n

The new thing you get to translate is a Penthouse letter.\n

Well, the first time you see the word cock<\/I>, aren’t you going to be thrown for a bit of a loop? Searching through your concordance, you might well be able to figure out that the word is occasionally used for a male bird, as in cockerel<\/I> or peacock<\/I>. You might even translate it as rooster<\/I>, with perhaps a note saying that it seems that the poet intended it as a sort of stand-in for the penis. Similarly, the poet uses the word cat<\/I> to refer to the female genitalia. It’s a trope. It’s a sort of extended metaphor, our body parts as animals. You’d be inclined to find other references to that metaphor, and my guess is you would find them.\n

Now, I don’t claim that shoshanna<\/I> is ancient Hebrew slang for tits<\/I>. I suspect that the poet really is coming up with lovely language, capable of being interpreted in different ways. I’m saying that if there was commonly used Hebrew slang for tits<\/I> that only was used in ancient Hebrew pr0n, and it seems very likely to me that there would have been, we would have a lot of difficulty recognizing it, particularly since the only surviving records from people who might have actually read some were from the same people who were waving their hands and saying “Hey! Allegory!”\n

Chapter Two, verse seventeen: Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.<\/b>\n

It’s odd (and, I must say, sexy) that this near-visit, with him outside the walls, calling for her to come out, perhaps not knowing which window is hers, ends without them meeting. And it sets up the even sexier bit in Chapter Three.\n

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Song of Songs, Chapter Two, verse eight: The voice of my beloved! behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills. We\u2019re changing scenes again. If you remember, in verse seven we left the two of them sleeping…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scripture"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10372"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17903,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10372\/revisions\/17903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}