WARNING: This one is long. Go get your coffee before starting. And, special thanks to the Mindsetters group, who inspired me to create most of the material here.
A couple weeks ago, I mentioned to a friend that if I ever teach a Bible as Literature course, I’d use the Song of Solomon as my opening unit.
“Oh!” she said. She looked around to make sure no one was watching and added, “The sex one!”
We giggled because, you know, that’s what we do. But in the back of my mind, I could hear the protests of centuries of exegetes, insisting she was wrong.
My former pastor, who retired last year, had once sent me on a mission to dig up every possible interpretation of the Song that I could find. Halfway through the following week, I texted him to whine that it seemed like there was an endless number of interpretations. He responded that yes, in fact, the Song was probably the second most over-interpreted book in the Bible, right after Revelation.
Pastor was fond of sending me on fact-finding missions in the Scriptures. I had never heard him call something “over-interpreted” before. And I realized that was his lesson for that particular mission.
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Side note: I said “exegetes” above without defining it. “Exegesis” is the act of critically analyzing and interpreting a text, and it usually refers to Scriptural interpretation. It’s related to, but distinct from, the term “hermeneutics,” which is an overall approach to or theory of interpretation. Hermeneutics is the big picture; exegesis is the act of using that theory to understand a specific text.
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So, why would I want to use Song of Solomon … or Song of Songs, or Canticle of Canticles, or just plain old “Songs”… as the launch of a class on the Bible as Literature? Easy peasy answer: because how you interpret it depends entirely on your beginning theory of what it must be about. Is it poetic drama? Is it metaphoric parable? Is it encoded allegory? Is it literal? Just what world of hermeneutics do we start in to get a decent exegesis?
But notice the mistake I made in that paragraph above. I’m implying is has to be one of those choices, and not some combination of several of them. That reveals one of my own biases – that a text has to mean something, some THING, one truth. Where did I get that idea? When did I start believing that God couldn’t put layers of meaning and strata of interpretation into a single work? Have I decided to throw the handcuffs on the Holy Spirit before He’s even begun to open my mind to mysteries of this work?
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Side note: The Spanish for “handcuffs” is esposas. That is also the Spanish for “wives.” That’s funny in and of itself, but it raises in my mind questions about what kind of member of the Bride of Christ I would be if I started handcuffing and limiting the Bridegroom. The only one to lose out in that scenario would be me.
THE SONG: AN OVERVIEW
Here’s a quick overview of the Song of Solomon for those who need a refresher. The Song is:
- a collection of poetic exchanges recording a woman’s romantic and sexual longing for her beloved,
- the beloved’s longing in return,
- and a choral group of women who speak intermittently to help with the descriptions and flow of dialog.
The Song follows this general flow:
- An immediate expression of the woman’s desire for her beloved, as well as her lament that her brothers have been punishing her by making her work in the vineyard, and are holding her back.
- Exchanges between the woman and the beloved, reflecting on how they will make love in the fields.
- Extensive back-and-forth praise between the two, primarily focused on their mutual physical attributes.
- A dreamlike sequence, in which the woman wanders in longing to find the beloved whom she calls (either literally or symbolically) Solomon.
- A full chapter in which the beloved praises the woman’s eyes, hair, teeth, lips, cheeks, neck, breasts, her “mountain of myrrh,” her eyes and hair again, her breasts again, her lips again, the milk under her tongue, the smell of her garments, her paradise of pomegranates …okay, you get the idea. He’s very into her. It culminates with each of them eating of the other’s garden.
- A second dreamlike sequence, in which the woman feels the beloved even closer this time, nearly in her chambers, but then disappearing again, causing her to wander in search of him once more. The daughters of Jerusalem weep with her in the search.
- She praises his skin, his hair, his eyes, his cheeks, his lips, his hands, his belly, his legs, his whole form, and his throat.
- The two come together in the beloved’s garden, with a whole lot more bodily descriptions, primarily featuring commentary on her breasts. The affair, it seems, is secret – she wishes he were her brother, so that she could publicly show him all her affection without causing suspicion.
- True love’s nature is declared in the end – “Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame. Many waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot wash it away.”
- The brothers of the woman at last officially turn her over to the beloved, along with a huge dowry – the very vineyard she had been working at the beginning. The lovers unite in that garden.
DIFFICULTIES INTERPRETING THE SONG
I want primarily to focus on three alternatives to interpreting this book’s role in Scripture and its meaning to all generations of Christians. But first I should spell out the difficulties behind any single hermeneutical approach.
DIFFICULTY #1 – No historical consensus on how to interpret the Song.
As my pastor taught me, the Song is perhaps one of the most diversely interpreted books of the Bible. Just one example of that: the 12th century theologian Bernard of Clairvaux preached 86 sermons on the first two chapters alone, dying before he could finish his interpretations. He’s just one exegete. Multiply that by three thousand years and countless interpreters. Get the picture?
DIFFICULTY #2 – No similar literary form in Scripture.
In form, the Song is unique within the Holy Scriptures … a dramatic, poetic back and forth exchange among characters, nearly like a play. This is odd, because Israel seems to have had no tradition of dramas, the way neighboring Assyria or distant Greece had.
To further complicate exegesis, the question of who is speaking which lines in the book is a matter usually solved by different Bible versions assigning the words “Beloved,” “Lover,” and “Daughters of Jerusalem” to the text – designations not found in early manuscripts. Some interpreters protest that those breaks might not have been assigned to the right speakers from time to time.
DIFFICULTY #3 – Embarrassingly candid.
As for its content, the Song is also unique in the canon for its explicit, celebratory descriptions of human love and sexuality. While much of the rest of Scripture employs modest euphemisms like “he knew his wife,” “he took her to his tent and married her,” “she uncovered his feet,” the Song uses wafer-thin metaphors and explicit poetic similes that leave little to the imagination:
Your stature is like that of the palm, and your breasts like clusters of fruit. I said, I will climb the palm tree; I will take hold of its fruit.
Such explicitness (and I didn’t even select any of the meatier similes) probably explains why the Song is rarely seen by preachers as the number one choice for next Sunday’s family sermon.
DIFFICULTY #4 – No explicit theology
If the sex is explicit, the theology is not. The Song is theologically distinct, as one of only two books in Scripture making absolutely no mention of God (the other is Esther), and making no direct theological claims or expressions. Further, the Song is never quoted in the New Testament, neither by Jesus nor by the writers of the epistles (another trait Esther shares with the Song). This leaves us at a loss as to how the Lord or the Apostles might guide us in an interpretation.
SO PICK AN HERMENEUTIC ALREADY!
For dozens upon dozens of exegeses I’ve discovered in my studies of the Song, there do seem to be several general categories into which a majority of interpretations fall. Remember, this is by no means a complete list; it’s simply the standouts that stick with me.
a. HERMENEUTIC THE FIRST: The Song is an Allegory
An “allegory” is a work of art that can be decoded to reveal a hidden meaning, as long as one has the key to the decoding. You probably noticed I used the terms “metaphor” and “simile” up above; an allegory is much more than those. In essence, it’s a huge sequence of carefully ordered metaphors. In an allegory, every single image is a hidden message for the underlying truth. If you’ve ever read Pilgrim’s Progress, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Throughout history, this has been the number one way to interpret Song of Songs. It is, according to this approach, a detailed, secret message about God’s relationship with Israel, or perhaps Christ’s relationship with the church, or perhaps the Trinity’s mystical relationship with the individual believer’s soul, or perhaps a prophecy of the ages through which the church will pass before the second coming of Christ.
Notice that up there: Allegory was the hermeneutic, but each of its different applications was a distinct exegesis.
Whichever scenario is used to decode it, it’s easy to see why the Song As Allegory approach is comfortable for interpreters. It solves numerous difficulties:
- It helps explain why a book never mentioning God or the history of Israel could make it into the canon … since, once decoded, the whole book is about God.
- It helps “denature” (to use one commentator’s term for it) the sexual aspects of the book, since all references to sexual acts and sex organs can now be decoded to something less explicit.
- It appeals to the “secret message” part of our brain, what I think of as our Inner Gnostic. After all, once we decode Revelation and number crunch all the weeks of Daniel, we need something to do … and the Song of Solomon can be a playground of super secrets for the decoders among us.
Obviously, that last point wasn’t seriously offered as a benefit of the Song-As-Allegory approach. In fact, it’s the approach’s key weakness. Anyone can see anything in an allegory … and the history of interpretation proves that.
I’ll finish off talking about the Song as Allegory by focusing on one image and how it’s been interpreted. I’ll use the Scriptural author’s favorite: breasts.
In my brief research, I found the lover’s breasts interpreted as:
- the Old and New Testaments
- Moses and Aaron
- the twin precepts of loving God, loving neighbor
- Baptism and Eucharist
- the Blood and the Water
- The Son of God and the Son of Man
- The two witnesses of Revelation
- Outer man and Inner man
- And many more
I only found one ancient commentator who thought that maybe the breasts were … wait for it … actual breasts. That was Theodore of Mopsuestia in the late 300’s. His view that the breasts might be breasts was later rejected as heresy by post-Constantine Roman councils. Apparently (if you’ll pardon my cheekiness here), while all roads lead to Rome, no boobs can lead there.
b. HERMENEUTIC THE SECOND: The Song is a “Type”
The “Song as Type” approach saves interpreters from the main weakness of the Song as Allegory approach – an excessiveness that leads to Gnostic decoding.
A “typological” hermeneutic would approach the Song as a broad-brushstroke image of the relationship of God and mankind, but it would still retain the view that this is a literal episode from the life of Solomon.
In this interpretative approach, the Song records a real love affair with a real woman. However, when the reader steps back, he can easily see that the work as a whole encapsulates the love of Christ for the church (or even for the individual soul). With this view, we’re saved from decoding every single plum, date, raisin, and bounding gazelle in the text. We retain the intuitive understanding of the historical interpreters – that God would have a deeper theological meaning for the work – but we avoid the jots-and-tittles trap and the pride that comes from personal interpretation and decoding.
Nice, but this approach has its weaknesses, too. For one thing, in the final chapter, it is the woman, not the beloved, who delivers the final moral of the story, the lesson on love and its jealousy in chapter 8. In essence, she schools the beloved, something that seems dramatically out of place if the Beloved is, indeed, Christ.
Second, if the Beloved is Christ, he is being shown through Solomon … a king who is the least likely symbol of God’s single-hearted fidelity to His people, especially considering his “sixty queens and eighty concubines and maidens without number”(Sol. 6:8). It is the woman who is the faithful, pure, untouched one, a garden enclosed, a spring shut up, a fountain sealed (Sol. 4:12).
If the Holy Spirit were inspiring this piece as a typological reflection of God’s love for the church or the individual soul … would it be the woman portrayed as the faithful one who delivers the final lesson on how love works? Or would the imagery be more as it is in the rest of Scripture: God as the faithful husband whose fickle wife continues to wander away, unfaithful?
HERMENEUTIC THE THIRD: “The Song is Literal”
In hermeneutical history, the approach to the Song that’s least in evidence seems to be accepting it for what it says it is: A celebration of the passionate, human love of two people struggling with the mind-numbing sexual passion they feel for one another, until finally they’re able to consummate their love (after plenty of fantasizing in dreams and attempts to be together).
That was a mouthful. Go back and read it again. Slowly.
For some reason, Bible commentators and many contemporary preachers appear to loathe this view. Even the staunchest literalist seems to find it difficult to take the Song literally, presumably because it’s believed God would never write about dirty acts of sex in the Bible.
But let’s turn off that filter and consider it anyway. Under this literalist approach, the Song celebrates the passion that grows during the courtship process, and it affirms that the full expression of the love represented is within the bounds of marriage, even though plentiful longing and fantasizing of the sex acts has taken place beforehand.
The exegesis that develops from this hermeneutic shows literal brothers who keep the little sister safe from premature sexual intercourse (and keep the beloved safe, as well, since he, too, is longing to have her). At the end, she confesses that the brothers were right to keep her passions in check. Those fantasies were meant to remain in her heart until the time that the vineyards were turned over to the beloved.
She, in turn, shares the book’s message with her lover, now husband – the message that, while it felt as if nothing could control the love they were feeling and the sexual fantasies they shared and entertained, it was right, in the end, to keep the garden enclosed until the proper season. First they dreamed of sex, talked of it, and longed for it; now, as husband and wife, they see the joy built up by their earlier longing.
This approach has one major difficulty: It has no direct theological message.
Certainly it has plenty of indirect messages … but to accept a literalist approach, one would have to accept that God chose to insert a book in the Bible that does nothing more than celebrate human love and passionate longing for sex, executed properly through courtship and marriage.
Why would God celebrate premarital longing and passion and dreaming of sex … when clearly, lusting in one’s heart is supposed to be wrong? And why would he inspire a book that seems to have no crisp, clean, neat doctrines to post in our church’s “Summary of Beliefs” page on the Internet?
Questions, questions, questions …
Not all blogs can end with pithy answers.
Marana Tha,
Cosmic Parx
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