The contents of this book justify the description of it in the
title, i. 1, as the "loveliest song"--for that is the meaning of the
Hebrew idiom "song of songs." It abounds in poetical gems of the
purest ray. It breathes the bracing air of the hill country, and the
passionate love of man for woman and woman for man. It is a
revelation of the keen Hebrew delight in nature, in her vineyards
and pastures, flowers and fruit trees, in her doves and deer and
sheep and goats. It is a song tremulous from beginning to end with
the passion of love; and this love it depicts in terms never coarse,
but often frankly sensuous--so frankly sensuous that in the first
century its place in the canon was earnestly contested by Jewish
scholars. That place was practically settled in 90 A.D. by the Synod
of Jamnia, which settled other similar questions; and about 120 A.D.
we find a distinguished rabbi maintaining that "the whole world does
not outweigh the day when the Song of Songs was given to Israel;
while all the _Writings_ are holy, the song is holiest of all."
This extravagant language suggests that the canonicity of the song
had been strenuously contested; and it may have been a latent sense
of the secular origin of the song that led to the prescription that
a Jew must not read it till he was thirty years of age. Its place in
the canon was no doubt secured for it by two considerations, (i) its
reputed Solomonic authorship, (ii) its allegorical interpretation.
The reception of the book in the Canon led, as Siegfried has said,
to the most monstrous creations in the history of interpretation. If
it be by Solomon, and therefore a holy book, it must be a
celebration of divine love, not of human. So it was argued; and the
theme of the book was regarded as the love of Jehovah for Israel.
Christian interpreters, following this hint of their Jewish
predecessors, applied it to the love of Christ for His church or for
the individual soul. The allegorical view of the poem has many
parallels in the mystic poetry of the East, and it even finds a
slender support in Hosea's comparison of the relation of Jehovah to
Israel as a marriage relationship; but taking into account the
general nature of the poem, and the tendencies of the Hebrew mind,
it may be fairly said that the allegorical interpretation is
altogether impossible. Any love poem would be equally capable of
such an interpretation.
Another view, first hinted at in a phrase of Origen, is that the
book is a drama, a view which has held the field--not without
challenge--for over a century. There is much in the language of the
song to suggest this: it is obvious, e.g., that there is occasional
dialogue, i. 15, 16, ii. 2, 3, but the actual story of the drama was
very far from clear. The older view was that it was a story of
Solomon's love for a peasant girl, and of his redemption from his
impure loves by his affection for her. But as in viii. 11 f. and
elsewhere, Solomon is spoken of by way of contrast, room must be
made for a third person, the shepherd lover of the peasant maid;
and, with much variety of detail, the supporters of the dramatic
theory now adhere in general to the view that the poem celebrates
the fidelity of a peasant maid who had been captured and brought to
Solomon's harem, but who steadily resisted his blandishments and was
finally restored to her shepherd lover. The book becomes thus not a
triumph of love over lust, but of love over temptation. The story is
very pretty; but the objections to it and to the dramatic view of
the book are all but insuperable. It must be confessed that, to
arrive at such a story at all, a good deal has to be read between
the lines, and interpreters usually find what they bring; but the
most fatal objection to it is that the text in vi. 12, on which the
whole story turns--the maiden's surprise in the orchard by the
retinue of the king--is so disjointed and obscure that the attempt
to translate it has been abandoned by many competent scholars.
Apart from that, the story can hardly be said to be probable. "She,
my dove, is but one," vi. 9, would sound almost comical upon the
lips of one who possessed the harem of vi. 8. But in any case, it is
almost inconceivable that Solomon would have taken a refusal from a
peasant girl: Oriental kings were not so scrupulous. Again, it is
very hard to detect any progress on the dramatic view of the book.
Ch. viii. with its innocent expression of an early love, follows ch.
vii., which is sensuous to the last degree. Further, in the absence
of stage directions, every commentator divides the verses among the
characters in a way of his own: the opening words of the song, i.
2_a_, may be interpreted in three or four different ways, and
equal possibilities of interpretation abound throughout the song. Of
course the difficulties are not quite so great in the Hebrew as in
the English (e.g. i. 15 must be spoken by the bridegroom and i. 16
by the bride), but they are great enough. Again, how are we to
conceive of so short a play--ll6 lines--being divided into acts and
scenes? for the scenes are continually changing, and the longest
would not last more than two minutes. It would not be fair to lay
too much stress upon the fact that there is no other illustration of
a purely Semitic drama; that would be to argue that, if a thing did
not happen twice, it did not happen once. Nevertheless, coupled with
the untold difficulties and confusions that arise from regarding the
song as a drama, the absence of a Semitic parallel is significant.
The true view of this perplexing book appears to be that it is, as
Herder called it, "a string of pearls"--an anthology of love or
wedding songs sung during the festivities of the "king's week," as
the first week after the wedding is called in Syria. Very great
probability has been added to this view by the observations of
Syrian customs made by Wetzstein in his famous essay on "The Syrian
Threshing-board," and first thoroughly applied by Budde to the
interpretation of the Song. Syrian weddings, we are told, usually
took place in March, ii. 11ff. The threshing-floor is set on a sort
of platform on the threshing-board covered with carpets and pillows;
and upon this throne, the "king and queen," i.e. the bride and
bridegroom, are seated, while the guests honour them with song, game
and dance. This lasts for seven days (cf. Gen. xxix. 27; Jud. xiv.
12); and the theory is that in the Song of Songs we have specimens
of the songs sung on such an occasion. In particular, it is
practically certain that vi. 13-vii. 9 is the song which
accompanied the "sword-dance" (as the last words of vi. 13 should
probably be translated) performed by the bride on the eve of her
wedding day. This would explain the looseness of the arrangement, no
special attempt being made to unify the songs, though it may be
conceded that the noble eulogy of love in viii. 6, 7, as it is the
finest utterance in the book, was probably intended as a sort of
climax.
The king, then, is not Solomon, but the peasant bridegroom, who
enjoys the regal dignity, and even the name of Israel's most
splendid monarch, iii. 7, 9, for the space of a week. Ch. iii. 11,
with its reference to the bridegroom's crown (cf. Isa. lxi. 10), is
all but conclusive proof that the hero is not king Solomon, but
another sort of bridegroom. His bride, perhaps a plain country girl,
counts for the week as the maid of Shulem, vi. 13, i.e. Abishag,
once the fairest maid in Israel (vi. 1, I Kings i. 3). So throughout
the "king's week" everything is transfigured and takes on the
colours of royal magnificence: the threshing-board becomes a
palanquin, and the rustic bodyguard appear as a band of valiant
warriors, iii. 7, 8. There is a charming naivete, and indeed
something much profounder, in this temporary transformation of those
humble rustic lives. We are involuntarily reminded of scenes in _A
Midsummer Night's Dream_. This view of the book has commended
itself to scholars like Nõldeke, who formerly championed the
dramatic theory, though two of the latest writers[1] have argued
skilfully against it.
[Footnote 1: Harper, in the Cambridge Bible "Song of Songs," and
Rothstein, in Hastings' _Dictionary of the Bible_.]
The following may be taken as an approximate division of the songs,
though some of the longer sections might easily be regarded as a
combination of two or three songs. The bride praises the bridegroom,
modestly depreciates her own beauty, and asks where her bridegroom is
to be found, i. 2-8. Each sings the other's praises: the happiness of
the bride, i. 9-ii. 7. A spring wooing, ii. 8-17. The bride's dream,
iii. 1-5. The bridegroom's procession, iii. 6-11. The charms of the
bride, iv. 1-v. 1. The beauty of the bridegroom, v. 2-vi. 3. Praise of
the bride, vi. 4-12. Praise of the bride as she dances the sword-dance,
vii. 1-10. The bride's longing, vii. 11-viii. 4. The incomparable power
of love, viii. 5-7. The bride's proud reply to her brothers, viii. 8-10.
The two vineyards, viii. 11, 12. Conclusion, viii. 13, 14.
The immortal verses in praise of love, viii. 6, 7, show that, in
spite of its often sensuous expression, the love here celebrated is
not only pure but exclusive; and the book, which once was regarded
as a satire on the court of Solomon, would in any case make in
favour of monogamic sentiment, and tend to ennoble ideals in a
country where marriage was simply regarded as a contract.
The mention of Israel's ancient capital Tirzah in vi. 4 (if the text
be correct) as a parallel to Jerusalem, would alone be enough to
bring the date below Solomon's time (cf. 1 Kings xiv. 17, xvi. 23).
But it is no doubt much later. The Persian word _pardes_ in iv.
13 appears to imply the Persian period, and is used elsewhere only
in post-exilic books (Neh. ii. 8; Eccles. ii. 5). Indeed the word
_appirion_ in iii. 9 appears to be the Hebraized form of a
Greek word _phoreion_, and if so would almost necessarily imply
the Greek period, though the Hebrews may have been acquainted with
Greek words, through the Greek settlements in Egypt, as early as the
sixth century B.C. Many of the words and constructions, however, are
demonstrably late and Aramaic; and the linguistic evidence alone
(unless we assume an earlier book to have been worked over in later
times) would put the Song hardly earlier than the fourth century
B.C. Yet the fact that though a secular writing, it is in Hebrew and
not Aramaic, which was rapidly gaining ground, shows that it can
hardly be brought down much later. On the whole, probably it is to
be placed somewhere between 400 and 300; and its sunny vivacity thus
becomes a welcome foil to the austerity of the post-exilic age. If
this argument is sound, it follows that the book cannot have been by
Solomon. The superscription, i. 1, was no doubt added by a later
hand on the basis of the many references to Solomon in the book,
iii. 7-11, viii. 11 f, and of the statement in 1 Kings iv. 32 that
he was the author of 1,005 songs.
Where the songs were composed we cannot tell. The scenes they
reflect so vividly are rather those of Israel than of Judah, but the
repeated allusions to the daughters of Jerusalem would be most
naturally explained if the songs came from Jerusalem or its
neighbourhood. With this agree the references to Engedi, Heshbon,
Kedar, while the northern places mentioned, Lebanon, Hermon, Gilead,
Damascus, are such as would be familiar, at any rate, by reputation,
to a Judean.