Reading The Song Iconographically
Ellen Davis,
Duke University Divinity School
As What Are We To Read This Text?
Among the most important questions for biblical
interpreters to ask is the question of genre: As
what are we to read this text? In the modern
period, it was Hermann Gunkel who brought that
question to the fore. As he demonstrated, that
question confronts us already in the first few pages
of Genesis[i]: do we read this as history
(cum science) or as myth, as something that
happened at a certain time, or as (in the description
of myth offered by the Roman historian Sallust)
“something that happens over and over again”? When it
comes to interpreting the Song of Songs, determining
the answer to the genre question seems to me to be
the most vexed question in modern scholarship. Is the
Song a parody of Torah, Prophets, and sages (André
LaCocque[ii]), or is it a reflex of
Canaanite cultic religion, representing a marriage
ceremony between deities (Marvin Pope[iii])? Is it
“soft porn” (David Clines[iv]), a venture into the
“grotesque” (Fiona Black[v]) which is toxic to readers?
Or is it rather the most exquisite love poetry, that
deserves to be matched and rendered into
comprehensible language by the best efforts of
contemporary poets (Marcia Falk[vi], Ariel and Chana
Bloch[vii])?
What all of these genre identifications (and a
number of variations on them) share is the assumption
that the Song is in the canon because the rabbis who
voted it in did not really know what they were
reading. Almost all these interpreters would say that
the rabbis did the right thing for the wrong reason,
because they thought the Song was about the love
between God and Israel. (Although Clines and Black
would agree that this was the reason for its
canonization, they would of course disagree that its
inclusion was “the right thing.”) As far as I know, I
am almost alone among contemporary biblical scholars
in my conviction that the Song was correctly
understood by those who accorded it a place among
Israel's Scriptures. In other words, I believe that
it really is, in large part, about the love that
obtains between God and Israel — or, more broadly,
between God and humanity.[viii]
The fullest argument for my view is found in my
brief commentary on the Song[ix]; below I will give some
details of my interpretation. However, this essay
sets forth an idea that has only come to me since I
completed my commentary, that the Song is an
iconographic text. Before I explain what that means,
I will briefly trace the way the idea was generated,
because I think it shows something of the unique
complexity — it may not claim too much to say
“mysteriousness” — of interpreting the Song. Perhaps
it even shows the fruitfulness of disagreement about
this most difficult of all biblical books.
The idea that the Song is iconographic came to me
through reading and teaching André LaCocque's
hermeneutical study of the Song, Romance, She
Wrote,  which was published just
about the time my book went into production. I now
ask my students to read the two books together,
because they throw into high relief the current
debate over genre. Our approaches are in several ways
strikingly similar; in terms of method we are, I
believe, closer to each other than to other scholars.
Both Professor LaCocque and I consider that the Song
of Songs presents the greatest hermeneutical
challenge in the Bible, and our books are more in the
line of detailed hermeneutical statements than full
commentaries on the Song. Both of us treat the Song
as a literary whole, arguably the work of a single
poetic imagination. Both of us choose the same
methodology, namely intertextuality, based on our
observation that the Song's most prominent literary
feature is the extraordinarily high incidence of
words and phrases that echo other parts of Scripture
and yet in their creative reuse here become imbued
with fresh and unexpected meaning.
In sum, both André LaCocque and I agree, against
most modern commentators, that the Song has a
familial relationship with the rest of the biblical
books; it is not the foundling in the canon. We
suppose that an Israelite poet created the Song in
direct response to the work of what she[x] already
knew as sacred Scripture — but with what intent? In
answering this question, we differ completely.
LaCocque argues that the Song is the work of a poet
who resolutely subverts the religious traditions of
Israel, taking the praise that is elsewhere offered
to God, along the “vertical axis,” and transposing it
onto the “horizontal axis,” so that the language of
desire and gratitude is focused on her human lover. I
think the Song returns us to Eden with the intent of
imaginatively healing the ruptures that occurred
there: between man and woman, between humanity and
God, between human and non-human creation. So where
LaCocque hears deliberate irreverence, rebellion
against the tradition, I hear adoration — that is,
prayer — in a distinctly traditional mode. Where he
repeatedly asserts the poet's intent to be
“iconoclastic,” I see a style of theological
reflection I have recently come to call
“iconographic” — and for that term I am indirectly
indebted to LaCocque and his opposite way of viewing
the text.
I revert to Hermann Gunkel, because I believe that
what he taught us, now more than a century ago, about
genre identification clarifies the difference between
LaCocque's and my readings and perhaps sheds some
light on the general problem of interpreting the
Song. As every seminary student is told, Gunkel
identified three criteria for identifying the genre
of a piece of biblical literature: first, Sitz im
Leben, the presumed place the text occupied in
ancient Israel life (frequently, since Gunkel favored
the Psalms, in its cult); second, formulaic language,
words or phrases that seem to serve a fixed function
with various texts (e.g., “Thus says YHWH…,” the
messenger formula that introduces prophetic speech);
and third, the somewhat elusive criterion of
Stimmung (“tone”) — what kind of note or
responsive chord does this text strike? Is this psalm
a lament, an appeal for God's deliverance, or part of
a hymn, a statement of confidence in God's ability to
deliver? If we are honest, it must be admitted that
such distinctions are often drawn on the basis of
ambiguous evidence.
With these three criteria, Gunkel gave us modern
readers of the Bible the chance to learn a virtue
that was highly prized by its monastic readers, from
Augustine through the Middle Ages, namely humility in
interpretation. For if we consider the criteria
closely, it is evident that reading a text well
involves something more than skill with the
relatively hard data of language (Criteron #2). It
involves also a large measure of historical
imagination: Sitz im Leben is not something
you can excavate; it has to be imaginatively
(re)constructed — although the imaginative element
has not been sufficiently acknowledged, especially in
the earlier, more confident period of historical
criticism. Further, good reading involves subjective
judgment, in the discernment of Stimmung.
Looking at the difference between André LaCocque's
reading of the Song and my own, it is evident how
important is the element of subjective judgment. With
respect to Gunkel's first two criteria for genre
identification, we would seem to concur entirely:
first, that the Sitz im Leben for this work
was not some oft repeated public ceremony (e.g., a
wedding, either human or divine), but rather a poet's
extraordinary imagination; and second, that the chief
datum for interpretation is “formulaic language,”
which is recontextualized here in wholly surprising
ways. Indeed, LaCocque and I comment on many of the
same words and phrases and trace them to the same
scriptural sources. So it is only on the point of
Stimmung that we part ways, and yet as a
result, there is probably not a single verse of the
Song on whose interpretation we would agree.
What are we who presume to interpret the Song for
others to infer from this? Not that “it's all
relative” anyway, and there is no right and no wrong
interpretation — of this book, at least. In this
case, Professor LaCocque and I cannot both be right
(we might both be wrong). Differing interpretations
might in some cases be complementary. For instance,
although I differ from the medieval allegorists, I
see my reading as congenial with theirs on the most
essential points. (I confess to doubt that they would
agree with me that a reading that includes a sexual
dimension is congenial with theirs.) However,
LaCocque and I disagree fundamentally about what to
read the Song as, and yet neither of us has
succeeded in persuading the other of the probability
of our view. At one time (even recently), I would
have regarded this as a failure of either our
persuasive powers or our open-mindedness. I now think
such disagreement goes with the territory of
interpreting this book, and more so with this than
with any other book of the Bible. 'Twas ever thus,
since the rabbis first debated its inclusion in the
canon, and it will remain so, as long as the Song is
read as Scripture. And why? Because for the Song,
Stimmung, that elusive element whose
identification depends on our subjective judgment, is
everything.
From this I would infer, not that we should give
up trying to persuade one another of the merits of
our distinctive views � that is, after all, what
scholars and teachers are obliged to do. Rather, by
frankly acknowledging the importance of subjective
judgment, we might gain in the practice of humility.
My view is not the only one that can reasonably be
argued, and certain factors predispose me to it.
Concretely, then, I suggest that the practice of
interpretive humility might begin with each of us
identifying, as best we can, what factors in our
personal histories conduce to a certain interpretive
style. I think it must surely be the case that, while
every dedicated interpreter of the Song is likely to
insist upon the special character of this book, our
readings of it in each case bear a strong family
resemblance to our readings of other biblical texts.
So, I end these prefatory remarks by noting that I am
a catholic Christian � a moderately high-church
Anglican, to be exact. Long familiarity with and love
of the liturgy has bred in me an affinity for
monastic theology, in both its medieval and its
modern expressions. Partly as a result, I read the
Bible with a strong theocentric bias. Like the
monastics � and in some contrast to many Protestant
interpreters � I see the central focus of the Bible
as revelation of God's nature, desire, and
involvement with the created world. The undeniable
biblical concern with fulfillment or salvation of the
human person seems to me related and subordinate to
that primary revelation. These biases are reflected
in the reading of the Song that follows.
In my own short
commentary on the Song, I followed Harold
Fisch[xi] in likening the Song to a
dream, which moves from one scene to another without
logical transition. As I have indicated, André
LaCocque's notion of iconoclasm indirectly suggested
to me another comparison, which I have come to prefer
to the dream. It seems to me that the way the Song
functions within Scripture bears some similarity to
the role of an icon or iconostasis in the Eastern
Church. I identify four characteristics of icons and
iconostases that, in my judgment, are closely
paralleled in the Song.
First, the icon is a window opening between two
worlds: the world of history and ordinary sense
perception, on the one hand, and on the other, the
transcendent world we designate as “heaven,” “eternal
life,” “the kingdom of God.” We live now in the first
of those worlds, and the icon provides Orthodox
Christians, at least, with a point of orientation
toward the second. The icon is an image of this
world, but it is far from a naturalistic image.
Rather, it shows us our world as seen in the light of
God's glory. It affirms that our historical, sensible
experience is the basis for our experience of God,
yet at the same time it suggests that the features of
what we call “reality” are more supple than we
generally suppose.
A second point of comparison: the iconic image
does not reflect “universal human experience,” if
there be such a thing. It is a tradition-laden image,
which comes from a theological imagination formed in
the traditions of Israel and the early church. The
icon is “written” to provide orientation and effect
reorientation for those immersed in that tradition.
To those outside, its style of representation is
peculiar and only minimally intelligible.
Third, the iconostasis, the screen of icons that
is the dominant architectural element of an Orthodox
church, is a montage of more-or-less independent
images, although all are anchored by the image of
Christ, flanked on either side by the Virgin and the
Baptist. The other images may be thematically
connected (great saints, for instance), but to my
untrained eye it seems that the richest iconic
montages — in my slight experience, St. Catherine's
Monastery in the Sinai and St. George's Monastery in
the Wadi Qelt — reflect, if not random juxtaposition
of images, then at least loose governing principles.
Their composite beauty and spontaneous unity
resembles that of pieces in a kaleidoscope. One might
imagine that the assemblage of icons mirrors our
fragmented experience of God in this world, at the
same time that it shows the Church straining and
praying toward the One “in [whom] all things hold
together” (Col.1:17) and further, guides the Church
in its prayer.[xii]
A fourth element of comparison: the architecture
of an Orthodox church represents schematically the
Temple in Jerusalem. Within that design, the
iconostasis marks the boundary between the main
sanctuary and the priestly precinct, where the Holy
Mysteries are celebrated. Ideologically speaking,
then, the iconostasis is the point of entry into the
Holy of Holies.
I believe that each of these four aspects of the
function of icons and iconostases finds a parallel in
the canonical function of the Song: one, it mediates
between historical, sensible existence and
transcendent experience; two, it is an imaginative
expression shaped by prayer and the theological
traditions of the Bible; three, it witnesses to our
fragmentation and yet offers glimpses of a higher
unity; and four, as Rabbi Akiba famously declared,
“All the Scriptures are holy, but the Song of Songs
is the Holy of Holies.”[xiii] In what follow, I
shall suggest that the connection between the Song
and the Temple is real and precise, albeit
metaphorical.
These several parallels suggest that the Song may
be seen as something like the verbal analogue and
forerunner of the Byzantine icon. That comparison
implies that the Song is essentially a mystical text,
a text that emanates from religious vision and
invites — even requires — prayerful reading. It
implies further that there is a direct line of
thought connecting the poet who wrote the Song with
its later theocentric interpreters, both Jewish and
Christian. As noted above, I do not share the
currently widespread assumption that the Song entered
the canon as a result of a happy misreading on the
part of the first-century rabbis. I am convinced that
the rabbis correctly judged the genre of the Song and
heard a message that did not deviate widely from the
theological vision of the poet who gave us the Song
in its present form. (Parenthetically, I would allow
that the Song had ancient secular antecedents and
even relatives. I am persuaded by Michael Fox's
argument for resemblance between the Song and the
love poetry of Ramesside Egypt — 19th and 20th
Dynasties, 1305-1150 bce.[xiv])
If the Song is read as an icon, then its anchoring
image is of course the garden. All modern
commentators have observed that the garden is both
the lovers' haven and a metaphor for the woman's body
(e.g., 4:12-5:1; 7:8-9 Heb., vv. 7-8 Eng.). My own
view of the Song depends upon the significance of the
garden for the Israelite religious imagination. What
is crucial is that, in terms of both historical order
(dating the Song to the Persian period) and canonical
ordering, the garden of the lovers is the third
important garden in the Bible. Both the second and
the third gardens are related to the first, to Eden.
The second garden is the Temple, which, as both its
décor and its hymnody show, is the stylized Garden of
God. The columns of the Temple were crowned with
lilies and festooned with hundreds of pomegranates (1
Kgs.7:18-20), symbols of fertility and life. Its
great gold menorah was shaped like an almond tree in
full bloom (Ex.37:17-24). The walls were carved and
gilded with palm trees and flower and cherubim, those
guardians of Eden. Lions lurked under the lavers,
along with more cherubim, and oxen (1 Kgs.7:29). The
inside of the building smelled like the woods; the
whole building was lined with cedar, “not a stone was
seen” (1 Kgs.6:18). On that dry stony hill in
Jerusalem, Solomon had created a second Lebanon, the
majestic and myth-laden mountains of the North. The
whole Temple was a sensuous and at the same time a
spiritual triumph over what would seem to be the
limits of nature and geography. A poet making
pilgrimage to the Temple exclaims ecstatically:
How precious is your covenant-love
(hesed),
O God, and human beings —
in the shadow of your wings they take shelter!
They are drenched with the rich fare of your
house,
And you let them drink from the torrent of your
Edens (or: “delights”).
(Ps.36:8-9[xv])
So pilgrimage to the Temple was conceived as a
return to Eden, to life as it was meant to be, for a
few days each year. But the story of the second
garden, like the first, ends with exile. So I believe
that the third garden of the lovers takes up the
“story line” that proceeds from the other two, and
effects — or envisions — a resolution of the abiding
problem of humanity's exile from the Garden of God.
Of course, the cause of exile, as we see in Genesis,
is disobedience. Torah and Prophets consistently
address the problem in terms of sin and Israel's
refusal to listen to God, which eventually led to
that second exile, from Jerusalem to Babylon. But the
Song opens up a new (though not contrary) way of
looking at the problem, and this in my judgment is
its great theological contribution to the canon. The
Song speaks, not of obedience and disobedience, but
in terms of intimacy and its threatened loss.
And loss of intimacy is exactly what happened in
Eden. Eden was the place where God was most intimate
with humanity. Witness God “taking a walk in the
garden in the breezy part of the day” (Gen.3:8),
obviously expecting to have the humans for company,
and calling out — “Where are you?” — when they do not
appear. There is good reason to imagine that God
intended to impart wisdom to humanity on those walks,
by the drip method. But when Eve and Adam disregarded
God and tried the direct route to “knowledge of good
and evil,” the immediate result was not literal
death. Rather, it was distrust breaking into the
relationship between God and humanity. It was blame
erupting between man and woman (3:12), and the onset
of a long-term imbalance of power between them
(3:16). It was cursing of the fertile soil, and
enmity between the woman's seed and the snake's
(3:15, 17).
Viewed from the inside — as we are most profoundly
touched by it — the exile from Eden represents the
loss of intimacy in three primary spheres of
relationship: between God and humanity, between woman
and man; and between human and non-human creation.
Correspondingly, the Song uses language to evoke a
vision of healing in all three areas. More
accurately, it re-uses language, from other
parts of Scripture; verbal echoes explicitly connect
the garden of the lovers with the two earlier
gardens. (Unsurprisingly, descriptions of Jerusalem
and its Temple find far more echoes in the Song than
do the first few chapters of Genesis. As the paucity
of direct references to Eden throughout the Bible
shows, the second version of Eden impressed itself
more vividly on the Israelite imagination than did
the first.) If, as I believe, the language of the
Song resists systematic interpretation, that is
because it is constantly on the move among these
different spheres, in each of which we can experience
a profound connection with one who is other than and
unlike ourselves. Following the Song's quicksilver
movements is what makes interpretation of the Song an
activity at once difficult and compelling. In my
judgment, the characteristic weakness in both
traditional and modern commentaries is the commitment
to confine its meaning within a single sphere of
relationship, be it divine-human (the allegorical
tradition) or male-female (most modern
interpreters).
The poet of the Song understood that the
well-being of our world — not just the individual
person but the world as a whole — depends upon the
human capacity to cultivate intimacy, indeed love, in
all three areas. Desire for such intimacy may be
glimpsed at various points in Scripture; especially
the Prophets and the Psalms hold out the vision and
hope of it. But the Song goes far beyond all previous
texts in evoking the ecstasy of desire fulfilled, of
intimacy realized in every aspect of human
relationship.
Here I will point briefly to three moments in the
poet's evocation of the time of fulfillment. The
first of them is the woman's repeated references to
her lover by the awkward circumlocution, ('et)
she'ahavah nafshî, “the one whom my
whole-being[xvi] loves” —  a
phrase that is hardly more idiomatic in biblical
Hebrew than in English. The phrase appears five
times, beginning in Chapter One (v.7), and then is
repeated four times in rapid succession in the search
scene in Chapter Three (vv.1-4). It must be more than
a slip of the tongue. Curiously, however, despite
that repetition, the phrase does not well fit its
context. The woman asks the city guards: “Have you
seen the one whom my soul loves?” — a description
obviously inadequate for its ostensible purpose of
filing a missing person's report. Who could recognize
a stranger on the basis of it? Yet in fact there is
One whom we can recognize on the basis of that
description. For the repeated phrase sounds a lot
like the Shema: “You shall love the Lord your
God with all your heart and with all your
whole-being and with all your intensity”
(Deut.6:5). In echoing what both Jewish and Christian
traditions acknowledge to be the most important
commandment in Torah — and echoing it so awkwardly
that the phrase sticks out like a jagged edge and
catches our attention — the poet is making the
indirect affirmation that at last the commandment is
being fulfilled in our hearing:
On my bed at night I sought the one whom my
whole-being loves;
I sought him but could not find him.
…I found the one whom my whole-being loves!
I took hold of him, and I will not let him go.
(3:1, 4)
Another evocation of the time of fulfillment
occurs in several lines from Chapter Two:
Like an apricot[xvii] among the trees of
the wood,
so is my darling among the lads.
In his shade I delight and I sit,
and his fruit is sweet to my palate.
He has brought me to the house of wine,
and his banner over me is love. (2:3-4)
In our commentaries, both André LaCocque and I
spend considerable time exploring the interactions
between this passage in the Song and the fourteenth
chapter of Hosea. There, at the end of the mostly
unhappy love story about Israel and God, Hosea
envisions a future day when Israel will at last
return to their own God. Recall that the Prophets
frequently castigate Israel for consorting with false
gods “under every green tree” (e.g., Jer.2:20, 3:6,
3:13; Ezek.6:13, cf. Deut.12:2). Now Hosea offers the
counter-image; Israel's own God consents to appear as
something like a sacred tree:
I will heal them from their turning away.
I will love them generously....
They will again sit in his shade,
...and blossom like the vine,
and his remembrance [i.e., fragrance] will
be like the wine of Lebanon.
...I myself will be like a luxuriant cypress;
from me will come your fruit. (14: 5-9)
I have highlighted the words in Hosea that appear
in the Song, many of them in the lines just cited
from Chapter Two. LaCocque argues that the poet is
working iconoclastically, desacralizing the sacred
image; the paramour provides the protection that once
was sought from God. By contrast, an iconographic
reading of the passage would suggest that the poet of
the Song knows Hosea's dream, and shares it — or
better, the poet of the Song puts Hosea's future
vision in the present tense. The time of fulfillment
is here:
He has brought me to the house of wine,
and his banner over me is love.
The NRSV renders that last line: “his intention
toward me was love.” But in fact the Masoretic text
is unproblematic and readily intelligible in light of
the similar image in Ps.20:6 (Heb., v.5 Eng.):
In the name of our God (may) we set up our banners.
In both cases, the banner, a military symbol,
denotes protection of the one beneath. Furthermore,
it suggests vindication in the face of fierce
opposition. Multiple moments in the Song attest to
the fact that the lovers face opposition from forces
that come from outside the garden. But for a time at
least, amor vicit omnia; love has
conquered all.
I have emphasized that the poet of the Song shows
fulfillment of the desire for intimacy, and yet the
note of yearning persists in the Song, from the first
line to the last.[xviii] Whatever the poet of
the Song knows about fulfillment, it serves less to
make her satisfied with the present than confident of
the future. In other words, she holds the firm, wild
hope of the prophet or the mystic. Yet she, like the
other biblical writers, is a realist. One of the
surprises in the Song is that we see the lovers'
peace disturbed, not only by external opposition, but
also by the momentary failure of desire. This is
evident from the night scene in Chapter Five, where
the woman hesitates too long to open the door to her
lover when he knocks, and he leaves. But the way she
describes the moment at which he becomes impatient
and she stops dithering is intriguing:
My darling thrust his hand from the opening,
and my guts churned for him. (ûme’aî hamû
’alav, 5:4)
This would seem to be a reference to sexual
excitement as obvious as any in the book. But it is,
at the least, not a simple reference. 
Both LaCocque and I take note of the fact that this
is one of two quotes in this scene from Jeremiah
(31:20). The prophet uses the nearly identical phrase
to describe God's pained yearning for the lost
“child” Ephraim, i.e., the Northern Kingdom of
Israel. Our divergence is predictable. LaCocque sees
this as an expression of a “defiant”
eroticism[xix] that usurps the language
of God's affection for Israel. My own reading
suggests that this unforgettable phrase is being used
in its original sense, to speak of love between God
and Israel. But now it is used with a twist � or more
accurately, with reciprocity. In Jeremiah the phrase
bespeaks God's longing for the beloved. Here it
suggests that “the woman” (Israel) is yearning in
return. In other words, it conveys the sense that at
long last, God's love for Israel is requited; their
story has finally ceased to be tragic. Yes, this time
she responded too late; but the desire is now fully
kindled, and (in the context of the Song's vision, at
least) its flame never flickers again.
I focus in this essay on the Song as an icon that
portrays healing of the relationship between God and
Israel — or, taking the perspective from Eden,
humanity. My commentary attempts to show how the Song
points also to healing in two other realms of
relationship, the sexual and the ecological. With
respect to the former, the Song's contribution to the
canon is its strong affirmation not just of equality
but of profound mutuality between the woman and the
man. Phyllis Trible showed long ago[xx] that the
Song corrects the imbalance of desire and power that
resulted from the disobedience in Eden. Thus God's
stern warning to Eve — “Your desire will be for your
husband, but he will rule over you” (Gen.3:16) — is
transmuted into the Shulammite's jubilant, “My
darling is mine, and toward me is his
desire!” (7:11 Heb., v.10 Eng.). Use of the rare word
teshûqah (which elsewhere appears only once,
in Gen.4:7) assures that the echo and inversion will
be heard by those whose ears are attuned to biblical
idiom.
The case for the healing of rupture in the
ecological realm is admittedly the hardest to make.
It seems to me that in this matter the Song offers us
only glimpses, probably because ancient Israel was
not so troubled or endangered as we are by the broken
relationship between humanity and non-human creation.
The gist of my argument in the commentary is this:
The prophets see the earth or the land of Israel
languishing and sometimes shaking and dissolving
under the pressure of God's anger at human sin (e.g.,
Isa.24:1-20, Jer.4:23-26). Correspondingly, they
envision that in the time of faithfulness, the land,
the whole earth will flourish along with the people
(e.g., Isa.35:1-10). In this connection it is
striking that what comes most clearly into our mind's
eye through the medium of the Song is not two
gorgeous human beings, but rather a gorgeous
land[xxi], an idealized form of
the land of Israel, newly lush with bloom and
bursting with animal life:
Now look, the winter is over,
the rain has passed, taken itself off.
The blossoms have appeared in the land;
the time of melody has come,
and the voice of the turtledove
is heard in our land. (2:11-12)
The poet seems to share the intuition or mystical
insight of earlier Israelite poets; along with the
prophets, one might note psalmists who produced texts
such as Pss.65, 72, and 85. They all saw something
that most of us, it seems, do not see: that the
condition of the earth itself is the first and best
index of the state of health of the relationship
between God and humanity. I believe that this
dimension of the Song is one that we perhaps more
than earlier generations might be ready to receive as
God's word, because we need it so badly. Yet I must
admit that I have wondered what insight or intuition
arose in a much earlier generation to yield the
enigmatic rabbinic saying that anyone who treats the
Song lightly (as a drinking song) “forfeits his place
in the world to come and will bring evil into the
world and imperil the welfare of all
humankind.”[xxii] This is a surprisingly
global statement. Perhaps the medieval rabbis sensed
that the Song has power to counter the depraved
images of self and world that go far back in human
history and have led to our present tragedy and
crisis.
In this essay, I have argued that one important
function this icon-like text serves within the canon
is to depict the healing of the deepest ruptures in
our world, a healing envisioned more fleetingly by
prophets and psalmists. But I do not wish to end
without saying that I am never less sure of my ground
as a biblical interpreter than when I am speaking —
or more properly, stammering — on the Song. And my
uncertainty is itself indicative of what I would take
to be the second indispensable contribution that the
Song makes within the canon of Scripture, namely to
suggest the importance of the inarticulate within our
religious experience. The Song sounds strong notes of
jubilation and adoration. This adoration is not
wordless (else we could not hear it at all), yet the
words explain nothing. They celebrate, intrigue,
confound. They do not make plain; they offer nothing
that translates into simple clear prose. In this, the
Song stands, within Christian tradition at least, as
the counterpart to the liturgy; these are the two
great vehicles of inarticulate experience. Andrew
Louth comments perceptively: “It is not without
significance that inarticulateness about what is
deeply important is characteristic of the child whom
we have to be like if we are to enter the kingdom of
heaven.”[xxiii] Hebrew Scripture
likens us more memorably to a lover, faithless or
not, in our relationship with God; and the Song
reminds us that at the limit of experience, lovers
fall silent, or babble more or less
incoherently.[xxiv] The Song, then, draws
“a margin of silence” around the Scriptures as a
whole; it creates a space where we who read and dare
to interpret them do not have to know just what to
say.
[i] Hermann Gunkel, The
Legends of Genesis: The Biblical Saga and
History, trans. W. H. Carruth (Chicago: Open
Court, 1901; repr. New York: Schocken, 1964).
[ii] André LaCocque, Romance,
She Wrote: A Hermeneutical Essay on the Song of
Songs (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press
International, 1998).
[iii] Song of Songs, The
Anchor Bible (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,
1977).
[iv] “Why Is There a Song of
Songs, and What Does It Do to You If You Read It?” in
D. J. A. Clines, Interested Parties: The Ideology
of Writers and Readers of the Hebrew Bible,
JSOTSup. 205 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press,
1995), 94-121.
[v] Fiona Black, “Unlikely
Bedfellows: Allegorical and Feminist Readings of Song
of Songs 7.1-8,” in The Song of Songs: A Feminist
Companion to the Bible, Second Series, ed.
Athalya Brenner and Carole R. Fontaine (Sheffield:
Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 104-129.
[vi] Marcia Falk, Love Lyrics
from the Bible: A Translation and Literary Study of
the Song of Songs (Sheffield: The Almond Press,
1982).
[vii] Ariel Bloch and Chana
Bloch, The Song of Songs: A New Translation with
an Introduction and Commentary (New York: Random
House), 1995.
[viii] I say that I am “almost
alone,” because Sister Edmée SLG (Oxford University)
also treats the Song as a mystical text about the
love between God and humanity. She does not share my
view that the Song is also a celebration of human
love. See Sister Edmée SLG, “The Song of Songs and
the Cutting of Roots,” Anglican Theological Review
80/4 (Fall 1998): 547-561; and also “On Interpreting
the Song of Songs,” Fairacres Chronicle 26/1 (Spring
1993): 16-25.
[ix] Ellen F. Davis, Proverbs,
Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs, Westminster
Bible Companion (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox,
2000).
[x] LaCocque argues strongly for
female authorship of the Song; I treat it as a
possibility. However, since I think female authorship
is more likely here than with other biblical books,
in the interest of balance I adopt the feminine
pronoun in reference to the author.
[xi] Harold Fisch, Poetry
with a Purpose: Biblical Poetics and
Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1988), 80-103.
[xii] Andrew Louth observes:
“The Scriptures tell the story of God's way of
leading men back into unity, and the way has to be
from the fragmented to the unified. The history of
the Old Testament fashions a matrix, a kaleidoscope,
which shares in our fragmentedness and yet harks
forward to the One ‘in quo omnia constant’”
(Discerning the Mystery: An Essay in the Nature of
Theology [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983],
130).
[xiii] Mishnah Yadayim 3:5.
[xiv] Michael V. Fox, The
Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).
[xv] All translations are my
own, unless otherwise indicated.
[xvi] While I recognize that
“whole-being” is poetically awkward, I use it in
order to avoid the dichotomy between the physical and
the spiritual that the common (and in some ways good)
translation “soul” may evoke. The Hebrew word
nefesh denotes an animate creature, human or
non-human, in its totality. It literally means
“throat,” through which one breathes and eats. It is
therefore evident that any translation that allows
physical being to be overlooked—or even accorded
second place—is inadequate, and especially so in the
context of the Song.
[xvii] I am persuaded to adopt
this translation (over the traditional “apple”) by
the argument of Ariel and Chana Bloch (The Song of
Songs, 149).
[xviii] Tremper Longman
emphasizes the note of yearning in his recent
Songs of Songs, The New International
Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2001).
[xix] André LaCocque,
Romance, She Wrote, 117.
[xx] Phyllis Trible, God and
the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1978), 159-160.
[xxi] It was Michael Fox who
first drew my attention to this, with his argument
that the biblical lovers go much further than their
Egyptian counterparts in using metaphors to construct
an imaginative world. See “Love, Passion and
Perception in Israelite and Egyptian Love Poetry,”
JBL 102/2 (1983), 227.
[xxii] Tosefta Sanhedrin
12:10 (also Baba Sanhedrin 101a).
[xxiii] Andrew Louth,
Discerning the Mystery, 91.
[xxiv] Vladimir Lossky, drawing
on the thought of Basil the Great and Ignatius of
Antioch, observes that there is “‘a margin of
silence’ which belongs to the words of Scripture and
which cannot be picked up by the ears of those who
are outside” (cited by Louth, ibid.).
© 2003, Society for
Scriptural Reasoning
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