Song of Songs

Thought for the Month

From St John's Eagle December 2001
The Song of Songs

A few days ago, I listened once again to Palestrina's glorious motet based on sections of the Song of Songs. Afterwards, I found myself reflecting on the checkered history of this Biblical text.

For the last hundred years or so, it has been a favorite of avant-garde writers and intellectuals (along with Ecclesiastes and Job) — perhaps because it focuses on distinctively human experience without so much as a mention of God.

Yet precisely for such reasons, the more distant past had grave difficulties with this work. (Even one of my Ithaca College students described it as "gross" Ancient Hebrew scholars only reluctantly accepted it as canonical: its contents struck them as highly suspect, but its opening verse, "The Song of Songs, which is Solomon's," gave it an authority that was hard to deny. So they decided to include it in the Bible but to give it an allegorical interpretation. The pervasive erotic imagery was discreetly ignored; Solomon, it was claimed, was really depicting the love of God for Israel. Christians were all too ready to pick up this clue, only revising the allegory as a paradigm of Christ's love for His church. Despite Protestant suspicions of any "official" interpretations of scripture, these glosses can be found in older editions of the King James Bible.

Reformed liturgies dealt in summary fashion with this ancient poem. Although the Song of Songs had a prominent place in the traditional Roman Catholic feasts of the Virgin Mary, the Anglicans almost completely banished this work from their prayerbooks. Indeed, I can find no liturgical use of the Song of Songs from the first Book of Common Prayer of 1549 down through the 1928 American prayerbook. Our present prayerbook uses two utterly innocuous verses (8:6-7) in the first common for a monastic (p. 926) — a service not often used at Saint John's! [editor's note: Song of Solomon 2:10-13; 8:6-7 is a suggested and popular text for the celebration of a marriage.]

But for all these churchly reservations, the Song of Songs has received much attention from modern Biblical scholarship. In the 1860s, a German consul at Damascus noted important similarities between the scriptural text and peasant wedding celebrations he attended, in which the groom and his bride were for a day treated as though they were Solomon and his consort. Wetzstein reasoned that in isolated rural communities, customs might well be preserved for centuries if not for millennia.

Other critics have viewed the Song of Songs simply as a collection of erotic songs, with no discernible relationship to religious or social practices. Others have turned to Near Eastern myths of the fertility God Tammuz in his annual springtime marriage to Ishtar. Still others have treated the work as a drama, with Solomon, his new bride, and her shepherd-lover as the three characters and a chorus of "the daughters of Jerusalem" (the members of the royal harem). The Dartmouth Bible is one example of this approach; it ends with Solomon graciously returning the woman to her true lover. Anna and the King of Siam provides a reality check as to how Oriental despots usually responded to any threat to the exclusivity of their harems!

The Song of Songs may well present us with insoluble problems of interpretation. Yet for all its difficulties it remains as one of the most striking books in the Bible. Perhaps it is best simply to read it aloud (at a meeting of a young people's group?) and let the extraordinary richness of its imagery wash over us.

During my teaching years, it was clear to me that young people ceased to be much interested in church when they discovered the complex intensities of physical passion. Perhaps such a reading might do something to break down our long inherited fear of any overt connection between sex and religion.

Perhaps the Song of Songs found its way into the Bible by the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
by John Harcourt

Professor Harcourt is the Charles A. Dana Professor of
English English Emeritus at Ithaca College.