Love. Desire. Exegesis.

The Song of Solomon, or Song of Songs

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Episode 23: Love. Desire. Exegesis. This is the ninth of ten episodes we’re doing on the Old Testament. This show is mainly going to be about an Old Testament book called either the Song of Solomon, or the Song of Songs. The Song of Songs is one of the Poetic books of the Hebrew Bible. And like the Book of Job, or the Book of Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs feels – well – different than the rest of the Old Testament.

The Book of Job asks difficult questions about why bad things happen to good people. The Book of Ecclesiastes repeatedly emphasizes that the best thing you can do in life is enjoy it, and enjoy everything God has given you until you bite the dust. And the Song of Songs – well – the Song of Songs doesn’t mention God at all, actually. The Song of Songs is, in the words of one scholar, “a collection of popular love ditties.”¹ The Song of Songs is a series of impassioned monologues between two lovers, vividly detailing their thoughts about each other, their lust, their anxieties, and their memories of one another. So the Song of Songs is another one of those books in the great anthology of the Hebrew Bible that is surprising and remarkable. You don’t expect to find a protracted, hauntingly erotic love poem to show up in the same book that talks about stoning people to death, fearing god, and striking hard against one’s enemies. You don’t expect to, but it’s there. [music]

The Name and Authorship of the Song of Songs

The Song of Songs was produced some time after the Babylonian Captivity – maybe long after. Like Ecclesiastes, it has some Persian loanwords, and even at one point uses a Greek word, appiriyôn, to describe a king’s palanquin. It also has many Aramaic words, and Aramaic was the language that gradually permeated Canaan over the course of the early Iron Age.²So there’s some evidence that the Song of Songs was written well after, say, 500 BCE, and maybe even after 330 BCE.

Now, I want to get into this ardent love poem as soon as possible. But first, let’s talk about the title of the poem, and the traditional theory of its authorship. The first line of the book is “The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s.”³ The Song of Songs is also known as the Song of Solomon – in this show I’m going to call it the Song of Songs. Here’s why. Traditionally, the book has been attributed to the 10th century Judahite monarch, Solomon. Just like the Book of Proverbs is, and Ecclesiastes is. And just like the Pentateuch was ascribed to Moses, and the Psalms to David. And as is the case with most Biblical authorship attributions, the Song of Songs’ professed origin is, by modern biblical scholars, considered unlikely. Even if we were dead sure that Solomon was a real person, and even if the Song of Songs didn’t contain so many Aramaic verbal constructions, and traces of Persian and Greek, there’s a very obvious question to ask. Why would a man who had seven hundred wives and three hundred full time prostitutes enslaved to him write a desperate, perhaps unrequited love poem? Why would he write the majority of it using the voice of a woman? Why would a man who must have had feeding troughs set up for his thousand sex slaves write a – sort of – trembly-hands, butterflies-in-your-stomach, high-school-crush love poem? There’s enough evidence, both internally and considering Solomon’s character, to have led Biblical scholars to dismiss the Song of Songs having Solomonic authorship. Though a few lines reference Solomon, and there are a few moments when the male speaker of the poem seems to have ties with Solomon, or at least a great king, the Song of Songs was almost certainly written hundreds of years after the time of Judah’s most famous kings.

Alright, cool. So now you know Song of Songs is one of the younger books of the Old Testament. And you know that the notion that King Solomon wrote it is more or less discredited. Now we’re going to spend some time with the book itself. I’ll read some fairly long sections from it, because first of all, it’s beautiful! – but also, because it really speaks for itself. The whole book is only eight or nine pages long.

The Opening of the Song of Songs

The only thing I’ll say in advance is that there is a girl speaker and a guy speaker, and they talk about one another, and the girl has more lines. So close your eyes – or not – you might be driving or something – but imagine the most in love you’ve ever felt. Imagine that feeling – that everything in the world is just a flat gray blur, except for that one radiant, enchanting person you’re longing for more than anything. If you take a walk, you imagine taking it with this person. When you see the sunset turning the clouds into salmon and tangerine and aquamarine – this is how the person makes you feel. When you close your eyes, you imagine the contours of this person’s face, shoulders, legs, hands, and body. In just this way, each speaker of the Song of Songs is overcome with love, and longing, and passion. Here’s how it opens. [music]

The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s.
Let him kiss me with kisses of his mouth!
For your love is better than wine,
   your anointing oils are fragrant,
your name is perfume poured out;
   therefore the maidens love you.
Draw me after you, let us make haste. . .
I am black and beautiful,
   O daughters of Jerusalem,
like the tents of Kedar,
   like the curtains of Solomon.
Do not gaze at me because I am dark,
   because the sun has gazed on me.
My mother’s sons were angry with me;
   they made me keeper of the vineyards,
   but my own vineyard I have not kept! (1:1-6)
O that his left hand were under my head,
   And that his right hand embraced me! (2:6)
The voice of my beloved!
   Look, he comes,
leaping upon the mountains,
   bounding over the hills.
My beloved is like a gazelle
   or a young stag.
Look, there he stands
   behind our wall,
gazing in at the [shadows],
   looking through the lattice. . .(2:8-9)
My beloved is mine and I am his;
   he pastures his flock among the lilies.
Until the day breathes
   and the shadows flee,
turn, my beloved, be like a gazelle
   or a young stag on the cleft mountains. (2:16-17)

These quotations are excerpted from the first and second chapters of the Song of Songs, and they’re a good representation of the entire poem. Obviously we’re hearing the words of a woman who’s in love. Occasionally, her descriptions of her beloved sound sensual, as when she says, “Let him kiss me with kisses of his mouth! / For your love is better than wine, / your anointing oils are fragrant.” Additionally, it’s obvious that she wants to be with him. “Draw me after you, let us make haste,” she says, and envisions him watching her through her latticed windows. It’s possible that they’re already lovers. She confirms that “My beloved is mine and I am his,” and earlier, tells us that her brothers are angry at her because “my own vineyard I have not kept!” That takes us to the next subject – the poem’s metaphors.

The Metaphors of the Song of Songs

I performed a little act of interpretation just then. I said that the girl’s line that “my own vineyard I have not kept!” might be a reference to her lack of chastity. It might. It might just be that she didn’t take care of her vineyard. Either interpretation seems reasonable to me. Throughout the poem there are dozens and dozens of metaphors like this unkempt vineyard. The Song of Songs is like a still life of fruits, and spices, and flowers, and gardens, and beautiful animals. Each of these may be read fairly literally, as when the girl says “my own vineyard I have not kept.” Beyond literal interpretation, though, the Song of Songs has offered generations of readers cause to guess at various opaque descriptions in the poem – and to try and guess whether something else is going on. And by “something else” I mean sex. Let’s look at an example in Chapter 5.

First the girl recollects lying at home in her bed, sleeplessly, dreaming of her beloved. “I slept,” she says, “but my heart was awake” (5.2). She hears her lover knocking. He says, “Open to me. . .my love, my dove, my perfect one; for my head is wet with dew, my locks with the drops of the night” (5:2). And then the girl recollects, “I had put off my garment; how could I put it on again? I had bathed my feet; how could I soil them? My beloved thrust his hand into the opening, and my inmost being yearned for him. I arose to open to my beloved, and my hands dripped with myrrh, my fingers with liquid myrrh, upon the handles of the bolt” (5:3-6). Now, different readers have found these verses to mean very different things. But in general, with all the anointing oils, dripping myrrh, opening and closing, gushing fountains, luscious fruits, and handling of door bolts it’s easy to see why the Song of Songs is often called an erotic poem. We don’t need to take every single thing as a euphemism and try to decode it – you know – this blossom is a symbol for this private part, this door bolt for that private part, this flowering a symbol for this sexual act. People have done plenty of that, by the way. But we don’t have to dismantle the poem into a bunch of symbols and meanings to understand that it is fairly obviously filled to the brim with passion.

Now, I could quote almost any verse from the eight chapters of the Song of Songs and you’d see that same passion and eroticism at work. So I want to get a bit more specific about how the lovers talk about each other in the Song of Solomon, or the Song of Songs. They do so, a number of times, by what we might call “itemizing” one another. You know how you’ll hear a person physically described. “He has beautiful eyelashes. His eyes are a deep brown color. His nose is very sharp. He has a chiseled jaw, and a cleft chin. His hair is glossy and brown.” That kind of thing. So we just heard about eyelashes, eyes, nose, jaw, chin, hair. Item, item, item, item, item. The Song of Songs does this all the time. One lover describes the other lover’s components, often with similes. Her hair is as soft as silk. Her eyes are as gray as the clouds. That kind of thing. Only, we’re reading an Iron Age poem, and so sometimes, these similes can sound a little bit. . .weird. You’ll see. [music]

Itemized Descriptions in the Song of Songs

Let’s look at some of those itemized descriptions of lovers. Here’s how the girl describes the guy at one point. “My beloved is all radiant and ruddy,” she exclaims, “distinguished among ten thousand. His head is the finest gold; his locks are wavy, black as a raven. His eyes are. . .doves beside springs of water, bathed in milk, fitly set. His cheeks are like beds of spices, yielding fragrance. His lips are lilies, distilling liquid myrrh. His arms are rounded gold, set with jewels. His body is ivory work, encrusted with sapphires. His legs are alabaster columns, set upon bases of gold” (5:10-15). So there you have a classic itemization – we’ve got the head, hair, eyes, cheeks, lips, arms, body, and legs. As the girl speaks, you can both imagine the boy, and also imagine her imagining him – lying there and roving her mental eyes and hands over her recollections of his physical form, tantalizing herself with her vivid remembrances.

The boy, predictably, also has plenty of stuff say about the girl’s features. Here’s one of several itemizations of her. This particular passage is directly addressed to the girl from the boy.

How beautiful you are, my love, [he says,] how very beautiful! Your eyes are doves behind your veil. Your hair is like a flock of goats, moving down the slopes of Gilead. Your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes that have come up from the washing, all of which bear twins, and not one among them is bereaved. Your lips are like a crimson thread, and your mouth is lovely. Your cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate behind your veil. Your neck is like the tower of David, built in courses; on it hang a thousand bucklers, all of them shields of warriors. Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle, that feed among the lilies. Until the day breathes and the shadows flee, I will hasten to the mountain of myrrh and the hill of frankincense. (4:1-7)

As to what this final line means – I’ll leave that to you to interpret. Now, obviously these are the words of a thoroughly smitten young man. Just as obviously, the livestock similes sound pretty funny to our ears. I don’t think I’d reach for flocks of goats, or freshly shorn sheep if I were looking to bestow a nice compliment on someone’s hair or teeth. I also – uh – usually don’t associate breasts with gazelles – in fact, cloven hoofed mammals in general aren’t something I think about alongside – uh – that kind of thing. But as is almost always the case with the Old Testament, we’re dealing with translations of ancient texts, and of course all kinds of cultural associations existed back then that have long since been forgotten. [music]

Walls, Doors, and Consumation in the Song of Songs

So, you know that the Song of Songs is a series of impassioned monologues between a male and female speaker. You know that these monologues have often been dissected, and scholars have debated the extent to which they are sexually explicit. You also know that these monologues are filled with itemized lists in which each lover catalogues the physical beauties of the other. The two itemized lists we looked at a minute ago are just the tip of the iceberg. So if I were you, I’d have some questions. Mainly, I’d wonder, “Is that it? Does anything actually happen in the Song of Songs?” And the answer is that it’s open to interpretation. I don’t have a strong feeling on this either way, so I’ll lay out the details that have traditionally interested critics.

The answer to whether or not the relationship has been consummated lies in a few frustratingly enigmatic lines. We’ve already looked at one of them – the sixth verse of the first chapter, in which the girl says, “My mother’s sons were angry with me; they made me keeper of the vineyards, but my own vineyard I have not kept” (1:6). And equally suggestive, but inconclusive are some lines in the eighth and final chapter of the Song of Songs. “Come, my beloved,” the girl says, “let us go out early to the vineyards, and see whether the vines have budded, whether the grape blossoms have opened and the pomegranates are in bloom. There I will give you my love” (8:10-12). This doesn’t exactly sound like an invitation to a game of table tennis. But the biggest piece of evidence for the relationship being consummated is, maybe appropriately, at the very end of the poem, in a really opaque, and metaphorical cluster of lines.

I haven’t done much of what we English majors call “close reading” in this podcast. I try to imagine driving, or jogging, or doing laundry or whatever and simultaneously listening to some guy analyze lines of poetry at a granular level. It seems like it would be difficult to concentrate on, and possibly really boring. So I’ll only do it once in a great while. In this case, the lines are an important fulcrum in the Song of Songs, which might impact our understanding of the poem. And conveniently, they’re all about sex, which is not an uninteresting subject.

So bear with me. I’m about to read three verses. In these verses, the girl is talking. She is first talking about having a little sister, and then she talks about herself. There is a sustained metaphor in these three verses. The metaphor involves walls and doors. For the purposes of the interpretation we’re entertaining, imagine “walls” standing for chastity. And imagine “doors” standing for openness to sexual activity. Here are the verses. Again, this is the girl talking. “We have a little sister, and she has no breasts. What shall we do for our sister, on the day when she is spoken for? If she is a wall, we will build upon her a battlement of silver; but if she is a door, we will enclose her with boards of cedar. I was a wall, and my breasts were like towers; then I was in [my beloved’s] eyes as one who brings peace” (8:8-9). Let’s just hit that one more time with some music, since it’s so important.

We have a little sister, and she has no breasts. What shall we do for our sister, on the day when she is spoken for? If she is a wall, we will build upon her a battlement of silver; but if she is a door, we will enclose her with boards of cedar. I was a wall, and my breasts were like towers; then I was in [my beloved’s] eyes as one who brings peace. (8:8-9)

So, here is a simple interpretation of these lines. The girl’s little sister is chaste. But the girl imagines a time in the future when the little sister might be “spoken for.” When this time comes, if the little sister is “a wall,” the little sister will have a “battlement of silver” – in other words, maybe, if the little sister has remained chaste, she’ll have all the advantages of wealth and position. On the other hand, if the little sister is a “door,” or if she’s not been chaste, she’ll be “enclose[d]. . .with boards of cedar” (8:9), or, maybe, face some sort of ostracism and enclosure. Now comes the important part. The girl says “I was a wall,” using past tense, and then reveals “I was in [my beloved’s] eyes as one who brings peace.” In Biblical Hebrew, in the Books of Deuteronomy and Joshua, the phrase “bringing peace” signifies surrender in a siege – the peace comes when this surrender is accepted, when the wall is opened to the besieging army.⁴ So, put very simply, the little sister will allow her wall to come down in due time, but the girl – the main speaker of the Song of Songs, maybe already has.

Okay, close reading over. Now, that was an interpretation, obviously – not an original or brilliant one, but nothing too crazy, either. Literature geeks love this kind of thing. We get to sit there and stare at words and move them around in our minds to see what happens. Sometimes we produce strong readings, and sometimes we produce something abominable, and still others we force texts to fit our specific agendas. It all depends. I’ve introduced the idea of interpretation somewhat deliberately here not because I think you don’t understand it. Of course you do – I mean we all interpret stuff all day long, all the time. I’ve introduced the idea of interpretation with the Song of Songs because maybe, it is the best book in the entire Bible to use to show how Biblical interpretation has been carried out over the ages.

The Song of Songs demands interpretation. The poem’s theme might be the first line of Chapter 5: “Eat, friends, drink, and be drunk with love” (5:1). One scholar writes that “If the Song’s meaning is exhausted as a celebration of human love, it is difficult to attach any theological significance to it, particularly given the absence of God’s name from the composition. To have a book devoted to the joys of physical love in a collection of spiritually oriented and theologically significant writings would appear to make the Song superfluous.”⁵ So how have Jews and Christians, over the past two thousand years, understood the Song of Songs? How have they read it in detail, as we just did, and found a religious message in it? [music]

Biblical Exegesis and the Song of Songs

Main idea time. The main idea of this episode is in its title: “Episode 23: Love. Desire. Exegesis.” An exegesis, plural exegeses, is a careful interpretation of a text – most often, a piece of scripture. The history of biblical exegesis is definitely a specialist field – the kind of thing mostly known to rabbis and divinity school students. But within the world of theology, exegesis is tremendously important. If you accept any book as divinely inspired, it follows that this book must be carefully read and painstakingly interpreted. Accordingly we have millions of pages of exegesis – ranging from Ancient Hebrew midrashim to the commentaries of Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin and Luther, to the inquisitive blog posts and forums of contemporary Jews and Christians. When people do the important work of interpreting the Bible, they partake in a two thousand plus year old group project called Biblical exegesis.

Now, I don’t know what your background is – you may know far more about exegesis, or the interpretation of scripture, than I do. But I thought a solid, greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number way to talk about Biblical exegesis would be to hear a little bit about how rabbis, priests, and preachers have dealt with the Song of Songs. The Song of Songs, after all, is a slippery poem. To make it fit the general mold of the Bible, some very clever reading and interpreting needs to be undertaken. And as you can imagine, from ancient times to the present, many smart thinkers have stepped up to the plate to try and explain what the Song of Songs is doing in the Bible. Let’s hear some of what they’ve come up with. [music]

The Traditional Jewish Interpretation of the Song of Songs

The most influential interpretation of the Song of Songs, both in Judaism and in Christianity, has been that one of the lovers is God, and the other lover his followers. Let’s first consider this reading in the tradition of Judaism.

First, let me just repeat. The most influential interpretation of Song of Songs in the Jewish tradition, from some of the earliest midrashim onward, is that the Song of Songs is about the passionate love between Yahweh and Israel, Yahweh being the male speaker and the people of Israel being the female speaker. Now, of course, this interpretation solves a major problem. A book of the Bible that says nothing about God is radically transformed, and it’s entirely about God. The woman says, “With great delight I sat in his shadow, and his fruit was sweet to my taste. He brought me to the banqueting house, and his intention toward me was love. Sustain me with raisins, refresh me with apples; for I am faint with love. O that his left hand were under my head, and that his right hand embraced me!” (2:3-6). In these lines, the passionate male speaker, if we use the popular orthodox Jewish interpretation – the male speaker is then not a lover, but instead a beneficent father, a father who sustains his beloved Israel with love and nutriment.

Now, this orthodox interpretation has some – uh - kinks to work out. For instance, at one point the male speaker – maybe Yahweh – makes a particularly ardent speech about the beauties of his beloved. “How graceful are your feet in sandals, O queenly maiden! [he says] Your rounded thighs are like jewels, the work of a master hand. Your navel is a rounded bowl that never lacks mixed wine. Your belly is a heap of wheat, encircled with lilies. Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle. Your neck is like an ivory tower. [Y]our flowing locks are like purple; a king is held captive in the tresses” (7:1-5). So, according to a very common interpretation, the male speaker here is Yahweh, and the female addressee the nation of Israel. And you have to ask, really? This is Yahweh, admiring the nation of Israel? The nation of Israel has round thighs, a navel, a belly, nice boobs, a pale neck, and long hair? And God is “held captive” by her? Really? You don’t maybe think it’s just a love poem that happened to get into the Bible?

But actually, I’m not telling the whole story here. Frequently – especially in the Prophetic Books, the nation of Israel is likened to a woman, and God her lover. You don’t need to subject certain passages of Isaiah, Jeremiah, or, particularly, Ezekiel, to any close reading to see that thinking of Israel as a woman, and God as her lover, does come up quite often throughout these books. Let’s look at an example. In this example, from Chapter 16 of Ezekiel, Yahweh recalls meeting Israel first as a prepubescent girl, and then, later, becoming her lover. And here's the quote from Chapter 16 of Ezekiel.

You grew up and became tall and arrived at full womanhood; your breasts were formed, and your hair had grown; yet you were naked and bare. I passed by you again and looked on you; you were at the age for love. I spread the edge of my cloak over you, and covered your nakedness: I pledged myself to you and entered into a covenant with you, says the Lord God, and you became mine. Then I bathed you with water and washed off the blood from you, and anointed you with oil. I clothed you with embroidered cloth and with sandals of fine leather; I bound you in fine linen and covered you with rich fabric. (EZ 16:7-10)

So, simply put, the covenant between Yahweh and Israel here in the Book of Ezekiel is like a marriage between a beautiful young girl and a wealthy man who provides for her. Just like – maybe – just like in the Song of Songs. It’s a weird story, and it emasculates Israel. But the Israel-Bride and God-Groom pair is actually pretty pervasive throughout the Prophetic Books. Nonetheless, there’s a difference between the Song of Songs and the bridegroom passages in the Prophetic Books. Here's that difference.

Each time the bride and groom relationship is mentioned in the Prophetic Books, it’s mentioned in order to emphasize that Israel was unfaithful. In other words, God trusted his bride Israel and married her, only she became unfaithful, just as the Israelites and Judahites often broke their covenant with God. In one of the most viciously misogynistic passages in the Bible, God calls his bride Israel a whore no less than nineteen times in the remainder of Chapter 16 of Ezekiel – the end of that earlier passage I read you. In Ezekiel, God and the metaphorical female Israel may have had a happy union and earlier marriage. But, God says, she prostituted herself, and now she deserves to be stoned and cut to pieces with swords, as she deserves (EZ 16:40). Tirelessly repeating the words whore, and prostitute, and judgment, Ezekiel Chapter 16 imagines God hatefully punishing his unfaithful wife, Israel.

So – uh – yeah, that doesn’t sound much like the Song of Songs, does it? The Song of Songs has no dismemberment, hatred, broken covenants, or bloodthirsty misogyny. Nobody is screamed at, or called a whore. So, while the Prophetic Books do have some passages likening Israel to a bride and Yahweh to a groom, these passages are cut from a different cloth than the Song of Songs. But still, there is that essential pairing – the God-groom slash Israel-bride pairing in various Prophetic Books which makes the traditional Jewish interpretation of the Song of Songs a lot less strange than it might initially sound. And for contemporary believers who interpret the Song of Songs this way, maybe the fact that the Song of Songs doesn’t include any female infidelity or male chastisement is the very thing that makes it really special. Maybe the Song of Songs is, after all the Historical and Prophetic Books (which come before the Song of Songs in the Tanakh), maybe the Song of Songs is the final happy moment when God expresses his everlasting fidelity to Israel, and vice versa. [music]

The Traditional Christian Interpretation to the Song of Songs

Now, on to standard the Christian interpretation. This interpretation or exegesis is structurally identical to the Jewish one. The groom is Christ, the bride his followers, and the whole Song of Songs a record of the passionate devotion between Jesus and his worshippers. This interpretation has the same strengths and quandaries as the orthodox Jewish one. On one hand, it takes Jesus, who is not on the surface present in the Song of Songs at all, and places him directly in the middle of it. On the other hand, this common interpretation shows Jesus passionately envisioning the breasts, thighs, and midriffs of his worldly congregation. Which is a little troubling.

I want to look at two specific examples of Christian exegesis in the Song of Songs. One of them is modern, and the other is ancient. The first is about a verse in the sixth chapter of the Song of Songs. In this chapter, the girl says, “I went down to the nut orchard, to look at the blossoms of the valley, to see whether the vines had budded, whether the pomegranates were in bloom” (6:11). Okay, so, most obviously what’s going on there is that the girl is going to an orchard, and incidentally she then recollects fantasizing about the male speaker. She goes to a nut orchard, to check out blossoms, vines, and pomegranates, and then starts fantasizing about the guy.

Let’s hear a modern Christian exegesis of this verse. This is from Richard Brooks’ book, Song of Songs. “Why is the church described now as a ‘garden of nuts’ . . .? [asks Brooks]. The garden is already a familiar picture in the Song where the church is concerned. . .The nut in question is probably the walnut, having a hard shell with a sweet kernel. This would be suitable as a figurative expression of the church in its relationship both to Christ and the world, going through many tribulations in entering the kingdom of God.”⁶ So, what Brooks sees in this description of the girl going to the nut orchard is a metaphor. She’s not just heading out to a flowery orchard. She’s having a spiritual experience, and the walnuts all around her are symbols of the difficult outer shell of earthly existence, and the sweet inner fruits of heaven. Christian exegeses of the Song of Songs tend to do just what Richard Brooks does here – to sort through the sometimes sensual odds and ends of the Song of Songs and decode each one as part of an overall story about Christ and his worshippers. Brooks’ book, always corroborated with other relevant passages from scripture, is a good, solid example of Christian close reading and interpretation.

So that’s a modern example of Christian exegesis on the Song of Songs. Now let’s look at an ancient one. This is an interpretation from Cyril, the Patriarch of Alexandria during the early 400s CE, when Alexandria was one of the cultural hearts of the Roman Empire, which had become Christian just a century earlier. Cyril is interested in a particularly steamy description in the Song of Songs. This description is in the first chapter, and in it, the girl is going on and on about all the things her beloved is to her. Eventually, she says “My beloved is to me a bag of myrrh that lies between my breasts” (1:13). Again, from the Song of Songs, the girl says “My beloved is to me a bag of myrrh that lies between my breasts.” Now, if you’re going for the normal Christian exegesis of the Song of Songs – that God is the guy and the worshippers are the girl, this myrrh bag between the breasts seems like something you might want to just try and ignore. Cleavage and piety are an exceptionally odd combination. But Cyril of Alexandria was the Patriarch of a great city, and he charged right into it.

To Cyril, this was not a passage about a perfumed bosom, or something even racier. To Cyril, it was a description of Jesus. Just as Jesus was, historically, the lynchpin between the Old Testament and the New Testament, the bag of myrrh in the Song of Songs rests between the woman’s breasts. It’s an – uh – interesting interpretation. And it likens Christ to a bag of potpourri, and the Old Testament and New Testament to – well, boobs. [music]

The Limits of Strictly Biblical Exegesis

The traditional Jewish and Christian exegeses of the Song of Songs, even to those who believe them to be true, have a few stretches, and a few iffy moments, with nuts becoming churches and breasts becoming great holy books. But for many reasons, these exegeses deserve great respect. For one, millions of Jewish and Christian believers today really do interpret the Song of Songs in the way I’ve described here – described rather quickly, I ought to add. These believers have their own readings, they know the book well, and their convictions are based on years of study. Secondly, Jewish and Christian exegeses of the Song of Songs are built on a formidable mountain of sermons, analyses, and commentaries. And lastly, if associating the church with a walnut, or Jesus with a bag of myrrh, seems strange, we need to remember that the Song of Songs also compares a lover’s hair to a flock of goats, and a lover’s teeth to freshly shorn sheep. We’re dealing with metaphors here that are thousands of years old. If the Jewish or Christian exegeses of the Song of Songs come up with something that sounds a bit odd, it’s no odder than many other portions of the Wisdom or Prophetic Books.

Additionally, many Jews and Christians don’t really require the apparatus of an elaborate interpretation in order to read and appreciate the Song of Songs. To some, a passionate love poem in the middle of the great anthology that is the Bible isn’t a problem at all. Love and sex are parts of human life, and to many believers, it’s quite alright to celebrate them, thank you, since they’re just another nice miracle of God’s many creations. This particular take on the Song of Songs is able to appreciate the book without subjecting it to any protracted exegesis or reinterpretation.

What do we do when we interpret? Can we take a deep breath, read the Song of Songs, and somehow arrive at a correct, impartial interpretation of the book? I know I can’t. Iain Duguid, in a recent commentary on the Song of Songs, notes that interpretation is inevitably a subjective process. Duguid writes, “Instead of the text controlling the interpretation, the text becomes a flexible vessel in the hands of the interpreter, a container into which meaning may be memorably imported. Positively, of course, this uncontrolled subjectivism – whether of the spiritual or [secular] variety – generally flows from a conviction of the importance. . .of Scripture. As a result, when faced with a text that is hard to understand, the interpreter defaults to making it support doctrines and truths that he or she believes to be true and important. Like a mirror, allegorical exegesis tells us much more about the interpreter than it does about the biblical text.”⁷ The point is difficult to argue with. Jews, Christians, and atheists, in all their varieties, are liable to find something in the Song of Songs that harmonizes with their worldview. Any exegesis bears the marks of its author.

If we seem to be at an impasse, I’m glad to say that we’re not. Because we have some tools that Cyril of Alexandria didn’t – tools that make even some modern interpreters a bit squeamish. We have access to an archive of ancient literature that has become available over the past two centuries. And while the act of interpreting a text in isolation is unavoidably subjective, when it comes to reading widely, and finding books and poems that have matching lines, or stanzas, or metaphors – this is a reasonably empirical, and objective process – and one I enjoy very much. So now we’ve looked at the contents of the Song of Songs. And we’ve looked at the major interpretations of it. Let’s do something else. Let’s look at some ancient Greek and Egyptian love poetry produced before and around the same time as the Hebrew Bible – love poetry that, from end to end, sounds an awfully lot like the Song of Songs. [music]

The Song of Songs and Papyrus Harris 500

Some time in the mid 1200s BCE, over 700 years before the Song of Songs was set down, the Pharaoh Ramesses II added some rooms to a temple called Karnak, in the city of Thebes. Within these remains of these rooms, some 3,100 years later, archaeologists found a large papyrus scroll that we call Papyrus Harris 500 – a scroll that's now in the British museum. This scroll, covered in hieroglyphics, contained three groups of poems – a total of nineteen love songs exchanged between a male and female speaker. Papyrus Harris 500 is a treasure trove of information about the language of love, sex, and courtship of Ancient Egypt during its prime.

It’s exceedingly farfetched to imagine that whatever Persian-period or Greek-period writers who crafted the Song of Songs somehow traveled 600 miles overland to study a 700 year old scroll that was probably already buried. But it’s not at all farfetched to study the extensive commonalities in form, and metaphor, and diction between Papyrus Harris 500 and the Song of Songs, and conclude that the dual speakers, the elaborate itemizations, and figurative language of the Song of Songs are part of a tradition of love poetry that dates at least back to the New Kingdom of Egypt. Let’s look at some of those commonalities.

This is the fourth poem from the Egyptian papyrus. It is the boy speaking about the girl.

My lover is a marsh, [he says]
   My lover is lush with growth. . .
Her mouth is a lotus bud,
   Her breasts are mandrake blossoms.
Her arms are vines,
   Her eyes are shaded berries.
Her head is a trap built from branches. . .and I am the goose.⁸

The Song of Songs, like this ancient Egyptian poem, repeatedly shows a male speaker itemizing the beauties of his beloved. And just as this Egyptian poem concludes with “Her hair is the bait in the trap. . .to ensnare me,” the male speaker of Song of Songs also pictures the ensnaring ability of his lover’s hair. “[Y]our flowing locks are like purple; / a king is held captive in the tresses” (7:5).

A later poem in Papyrus Harris 500 contains many parallels to the female speaker’s lines in the Song of Songs. “[W]e walk,” says the ancient Egyptian girl, “into the trees around the chamber of love. . .I gather branches, and weave them into a fan. / We will see. . . / We will see if it fans me on my way to the garden of love.”⁹ And the female speaker of the Song of Songs also guides her lover into a leafy world where love and sex will likely take place. “[L]et us go out early to the vineyards,” says the female speaker of the Song of Songs, “and see whether the vines have budded, whether the grape blossoms have opened and the pomegranates are in bloom. There I will give you my love” (8:10-12). The Egyptian girl, once in this garden world, exclaims that “My breasts are smothered with fruit” (2320). Similarly, in the Song of Songs, the Biblical girl’s “breasts are like. . .clusters” of a date “palm tree” (7:7), and earlier, her breasts are nearly smothered with the “bag of myrrh / that lies between my breasts” (1:13).

In fact there are dozens of parallels between Song of Songs and the poems of Papyrus Harris 500 – we could keep combing through the specifics, but I imagine that in the form of a podcast the nitty gritty would start to blur together. So let’s zoom out, with the fourteen Egyptian love poems on one side, and the eight chapters of Song of Songs on the other. Both are collections of love poetry, bifurcated into male and female speakers. Both are bursting at the seams with pomegranates, and mandrakes, berries, sweet wine, budding flowers, glistening hair, and private unions in lush gardens. Both contain the same itemized descriptions – of a lover’s eyes, her lips, her neck, her breasts, her thighs, and other body parts. Ultimately they just sound like one another, and the discovery and translation of Papyrus Harris 500 demonstrated that the structure and language of the Song of Songs may have been quite standard within the world of Ancient Mediterranean love poetry.

The Song of Songs and the Idylls of Theocritus

Papyrus Harris 500, however, is only one of two texts with which the Song of Songs is frequently compared. The second text is a thousand years younger than Papyrus Harris 500, and comes from the pen of the Hellenistic Greek writer, Theocritus. Theocritus, who may have lived all over the Ancient Mediterranean – on Sicily, Alexandria, Syracuse, and Egypt – Theocritus wrote a collection of poems called the Pastoral Idylls. Largely based on love and courtship, these stories feature various figures of Greek mythology – Hermes, Aphrodite, the Cyclops, Zeus, Muses, and many more. But in addition to these figures, Theocritus adds a large cast of country dwelling people, peasants and milkmaids, young men and women experiencing some of their first romantic relationships. Like Song of Songs, or the Egyptian love poems we've looked at, the love scenes in Theocritus’ poetry are filled with itemized descriptions of lovers.

Just as the Song of Songs describes alluring tresses, and parts of lovers likened to milk and honey, a speaker called Eunice, in Theocritus’ 20th Idyll, mentions “my cheeks,” and how “[over] them / Ran the rich growth like ivy round the stem. / Like fern my tresses [over] my temples streamed; / [Over] my dark eyebrows, white my forehead gleamed: / My eyes were of [Athena’s] radiant blue, My mouth was milk, its accents honeydew.”¹⁰ In these lines we can’t be too surprised to see the traditions of ancient love poetry – body parts are likened to fruits, delectables, and beautiful plants.

But there might be much more specific links between the Song of Songs and the poetry of Theocritus. Let’s look at two examples. Toward the beginning of Song of Songs, the female speaker describes how “I am black and beautiful, / O daughters of Jerusalem, / like the tents of Kedar, / like the curtains of Solomon. / Do not gaze at me because I am dark, / because the sun has gazed on me” (SONG 1:5-6). A common interpretation of these lines is that the female speaker of the Song of Songs has been at work in the vineyard and has a deep sun tan. Now, in Theocritus, we also meet a sun kissed girl who inspires great love. A lusty young man describes his beloved as follows: “They call [you] a gypsy, gracious [love], and lean, and sun-burnt, [it’s] only I that call [you] honey-pale.”¹¹ In both the Song of Songs, then, as well as the poetry of Theocritus, we find the same very distinct visual characteristic – a sunburned girl, recognized by others for this physical feature, who inspires deep love and affection. It might just be a coincidence. But it’s not the only distinctive parallel between the two texts. The next specific parallel we’ll look at – probably the most revealing one of all – helps explain one of the stranger moments in the Song of Songs.

I quoted it earlier, and it seems to me to be one of the more erotic moments in the Song of Songs. In it, the girl remembers a nocturnal scene in which her lover came to her home and asked if he could enter. “I had put off my garment; how could I put it on again?” the girl in Song of Songs explains. “I had bathed my feet; how could I soil them? My beloved thrust his hand into the opening, and my inmost being yearned for him. I arose to open to my beloved, and my hands dripped with myrrh, my fingers with liquid myrrh, upon the handles of the bolt” (5:3-6). So this is obviously one of those passages that invites you to decode what may be euphemisms – bathed feet, a thrusting hand into an opening, a dripping door bolt. We’d better just leave it at that. Whatever is happening here is definitely not rated PG. Or is it?

In Theocritus, in his 11th Idyll, a smitten lover asks her maid to do a favor for her – a favor that will help her gain ground with her beloved. “[N]ow,” this lovelorn woman says, “take these magic herbs and secretly smear the juice on the jambs of his gate” (6). In other words, she asks her maid to take sweet smelling herbs and slather them over the gate of her lover, evidently a courtship ritual in the Ancient Mediterranean world. So when the girl in Song of Songs reaches to unlatch her door bolt, and her fingers come away, dripping with myrrh, she knows that she’s found the courtship offering of her lover. In the 90s, we made mix tapes. In the 80s, we asked each other to proms. And in the 200s BCE, evidently, we slimed each other’s gates and front doors with fragrant ointments and goos. [music]

"The Language of Love"

So there are a lot of parallels between Papyrus Harris 500, the Song of Songs, and Theocritus. And while the Song of Songs certainly has a distinct theological meaning within the context of Judaism and Christianity, it’s also clearly part of a tradition of ancient love poetry that spanned a thousand years, and hundreds of texts that are now lost to us.

Now, I have a funny confession to make. While researching this show I was reading a scholarly article published all the way back in 1903 on the parallels between the Song of Songs and Theocritus. Sometimes, older lit crit is just what you need. Anyway, close to the end of this article, the author, Wm G. Seiple, after much Hebrew and Greek translation and intertextual comparison, concludes that there are definitely many parallels, but there aren’t actually any directly borrowed or quoted lines. And then, concluding on why so many similarities are evident between the two texts, this old literary critic, William Seiple wrote, “And after all, the language of love is the language of the heart the world over. In this way many of these parallel passages may be explained.”¹² I looked at that quote and scoffed. “Hah!” I said. “How passé.” I mean all of us who have earned degrees in literature over the past few decades, and raised on Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, and all that stuff – we’ve all been trained to resist these kinds of statements – that there is some core of universal human experiences. “[T]he language of love is the language of the heart the world over,” I read. “Hah. How ridiculous. What a bloated, sententious thought,” I proclaimed, congratulating myself on my well-honed relativism, and laughing under my breath.

Only, I kept reading. I kept looking at Song of Songs, and Papyrus Harris 500, and the Idylls of Theocritus. And in my mind I kept thinking about other epochs of love poetry I’ve come across – courtly love poetry of the late Middle Ages, Petrarchan, Spenserian, Shakespearian sonnets, Augustan and Victorian love poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, twentieth-century confessional poetry. And I stopped laughing. And so I want to close with a final poem. I’m not going to tell you what it is, or where it’s from. Here it is.

Seven days since I saw my [beloved],
And sickness invaded me;
I am heavy in all my limbs,
My body has forsaken me.
When the physicians come to me,
My heart rejects their remedies;

. . .
My sickness is not discerned.
To tell me "She is here" would revive me!
Her name would make me rise;
Her messenger's coming and going,
That would revive my heart!
My [beloved] is better than all prescriptions,
She does more for me than all medicines;
Her coming to me is my amulet,
The sight of her makes me well!¹³

So what is this? A lovesick speaker who feels that the only antidote for his pain is the company of his lover. Is it an excerpt from a lovelorn speaker in Chretien de Troyes? A translation of some of Dante's Vita Nuova? Is it a translated Italian sonnetto, of sixteenth century vintage? Is it an early unpublished poem by the volatile Victorian writer Matthew Arnold? Or teenage work of Robert Lowell? Is it a Shakespeare sonnet, modernized from Elizabethan English into the vernacular? Or a modernized excerpt from Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale? You get the point, don’t you? “And after all,” that hundred plus year old article declared, “the language of love is the language of the heart the world over.” Maybe it’s not such a stupid statement, after all. If you want to know what that poem was, just check out the references section to Episode 23 at literatureandhistory.com.

[LAH guitar] Well, my friends, we have just one more episode on the Old Testament to go. As I set out to do these ten shows on the Old Testament, I was a little worried that I’d get tired of it, but I’ve loved every minute of writing about it and recording theses shows. Our final episode on the Old Testament is going to cover the Prophetic Books – the seventeen final books that stretch from Isaiah to Malachi, a range of writings that span from 700 all the way down to 300 BCE, and a little after. The Prophetic Books contain the darkest and bloodiest lines in the Bible, along with the most sexually explicit; they contain grand holy visions of the future and mysterious references to a time of resurrection and a messiah who will bring this time in. They are from end to end fascinating, chock full of searing images, written with passion, hope, and fury, and I can’t wait to tell you all about them! Thanks for listening to Literature and History, and if you stay on for the songs, I’ll play one for you. If not, see you soon!

Still listening? So for this episode’s song, I got to thinking. What if the Song of Songs were, actually, a song? What kind of song would it be? And I got to thinking about soul and R&B and all that, and I wrote this tune. It’s modeled on a song by one of my favorite singers of all time – you’ll definitely know who – and it’s called “Your Hair is Like Goats.” I hope you like it, and I’ll see you next time.








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