YOUR TEETH ARE LIKE SHEEP: How to Read the Song of Solomon Hi, all. We’ll get started. Since tonight’s class is entirely in text, I thought I’d break up the monotony by using my trusty screen. That way, a few graphics can serve to mark our progress. :: SOS 001 :: <<--- I use these tags to remind me to change the graphic. See? A gorgeous title page. It’s all smooth sailing from here. I know graphics can take a few seconds to rez in SL, so I'll pause for a few seconds when I load a new one. :: SOS 002 :: 1) INTRODUCTION TO THE SONG: Beyond the Giggling A few year ago, I mentioned to a friend that if I ever teach a Bible as Literature course, I’ll use the Song of Songs 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. “She’s wrong!” they bellow. “If she sees sex in that book, then she’s reading it wrong!” But I’m getting ahead of myself, tossing in spoilers. Let me back up a few years: :: SOS 003 :: My former pastor, who passed away eight years ago, once sent me on a mission to dig up every possible interpretation of the Song of Songs 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 THAT was his lesson for that particular mission. He wasn’t teaching me about the Song. He was teaching me something about the *readers* of the Song. Side note: I said “exegetes” above without defining it. :: SOS 004 :: “Exegetes” do “exegesis,” 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 theory of interpretation. Hermeneutics is the mind set, the big picture; exegesis is the act of using that mind set to understand a specific text. It’s easiest to see the distinction between hermeneutics and exegesis when you consider that final book of the Bible, the Revelation. If your hermeneutic is that the Revelation is a sneaky code about near-future 21st century events ... ... your exegesis of the text will turn up near-future interpretations everywhere, ripped from today’s headlines. If your hermeneutic is that it’s a sneaky code about the events of circa 70 A.D. Jerusalem ... ... your exegesis of the text will turn up tons of history at every interpretive turn. So, why would I want to use the Song of Songs … or Song of Solomon, or Canticle of Canticles, or just plain old “the Song” as I’ve started saying here … ... why would I want to use that book as the launch of a class on the Bible as Literature? Easy peasy answer: Because how you interpret it depends entirely on your mind set, your beginning theory of what it must be about. In the technical terms I was just tossing around: Your hermeneutic will dictate your exegesis. :: SOS 005 :: Is it a poetic drama? Is it an extended parable? Is it encoded allegory? Is it literal with a ton of metaphors? Just what world of hermeneutics do we start in to get a decent exegesis? But notice the mistake I made with those questions I just asked. I’m implying it has to be ONE of those choices, and not some combination of several of them. That reveals one of my own hermeneutical 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 handcuffs on the Holy Spirit before I’ve even begun to open my mind to the mysteries of this work? Another 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 a question in my mind: 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. :: SOS 006 :: 2) THE SONG: AN OVERVIEW Here’s a quick overview of the Song 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. :: SOS 007 :: The Song follows this general flow: 1. An immediate expression of the woman’s intense desire for her beloved, as well as her despair that her brothers have been punishing her by making her work in the vineyard, which darkens her skin and holds her back. 2. Exchanges between the woman and the beloved, reflecting on how they will make love in the fields. 3. Extensive back-and-forth praise between the two, primarily focused on their mutual physical attributes. 4. A dream sequence, in which the woman wanders in longing to find the beloved whom she calls (either literally or symbolically) Solomon. 5. A full chapter in which the beloved praises (with ever crazier metaphors) 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. 6. 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. New characters, the “daughters of Jerusalem,” weep with her in the search. :: SOS 008 :: 7. Next, she praises his skin, hair, eyes, cheeks, lips, hands, belly, legs, whole form, and his throat. 8. The two come together in the beloved’s garden, with a whole lot more bodily descriptions, primarily featuring commentary on her breasts. 9. 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.” 10. The brothers of the woman at last officially turn her over to the beloved, along with a significant gift: the very vineyard she had been working at the beginning. The lovers unite in that garden. :: SOS 009 :: 3) 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. :: SOS 010 :: 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 a couple thousand years and countless interpreters. Get the picture? :: SOS 011 :: DIFFICULTY #2 – No similar literary form in Scripture. In form, the Song is unique within the 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 isn’t clear. Different Bible versions assign the words “Beloved,” “Lover,” and “Daughters of Jerusalem” to the text – – but those designations aren’t in early manuscripts. Some interpreters protest that those breaks might not have been assigned to the right speakers from time to time. :: SOS 012 :: 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. For example: “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.” Imagine Doug or Jerome reading those lines in service and concluding with, “The Word of God, for the People of God ... thanks be to God.” 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. :: SOS 013 :: DIFFICULTY #4 – No explicit theology The Song’s sex is explicit. Its theology is not. The Song is theologically distinct, as one of only two books in Scripture making no direct 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. :: SOS 014 :: 4) SO, PICK AN HERMENEUTIC ALREADY! For dozens upon dozens of exegeses I’ve browsed 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. :: SOS 015 :: 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” earlier; 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 John Bunyan’s _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. :: SOS 016 :: Notice what all those different scenarios share: Allegory was the hermeneutic. But also notice how they differ: Each of its different applications was a distinct exegesis. Whichever scenario is used to decode it, it’s easy to see why a “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 “Song as Allegory” by focusing on one image and how it’s been interpreted. I’ll use the Scriptural author’s favorite: breasts. :: SOS 017 :: In my brief research through ancient exegetes, I found the lover’s two 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 11 - 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), while all *roads* lead to Rome, no boobs can lead there. :: SOS 018 :: 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 humankind, but it would still retain the view that this is a literal episode from the life of (maybe) Solomon. You’ll notice I keep hesitating to say this piece was written by Solomon (which is the historically traditional view). That’s because many language scholars pin its style of Hebrew to the third century before Christ. Solomon was ten centuries before Christ, a seven-hundred-year difference. How do language scholars know such things? :: SOS 019 :: Let me quickly demonstrate how much a language can change in seven centuries. Here’s a bit of 700-year-old English: “But, sires, by cause I am a burel man, At my bigynnyng first I yow biseche, Have me excused of my rude speche. I lerned nevere rethorik, certeyn.” :: SOS 020 :: If I suddenly added the following lyrics to those lines – “And if the band you're in starts playing different tunes I'll see you on the Dark Side of the Moon.” – even non-scholars would be able to say, “You know, that’s probably not from the same century as the first piece.” Seven hundred years bring a lot of change to a language. But back to hermeneutics: In the “Song as a Type” interpretive approach, the Song records a real love affair with a real woman. However, when readers step back, they can easily see that the work as a whole encapsulates the love of God for the Israelites (if you're Jewish) or the love of Christ for the Church (if you're Christian). With this view, we’re saved from decoding every single plum, date, raisin, and bounding gazelle in the text. We retain the intuitive hermeneutic of the historical interpreters – that God would have a deeper theological meaning for the work – but we avoid the jots-and-tittles trap that comes from personal interpretation and decoding. Nice, but this approach has its weaknesses, too. :: SOS 021 :: For one thing, in the final chapter, it is the woman (either Israel or the Church, according to this interpretation), not the beloved (God/Christ) who delivers the final moral of the story, the lesson on the essence of love and its jealous power at the close of Songs chapter 8. In essence, she “schools” the Beloved, something that seems dramatically out of place if the Beloved is, indeed, God or Christ. :: SOS 022 :: Second, if the Beloved is Christ, he is being symbolized here through the image of Solomon … ... a king who is the least likely symbol of God’s single-hearted fidelity to His people, considering his “sixty queens and eighty concubines and maidens without number” (Sol. 6:8). Those numbers jump to 700 wives and 300 concubines when you visit the book of I Kings. 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 writers and editors of this piece were intending it to be a typological reflection of God’s love for humans … ... 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 who must cajole the fickle female into fidelity? That very juxtaposition has led some modern interpreters using a feminist hermeneutic to suggest that the Song is the work of a female writer. Be that as it may, even the safer “Song as a Type” approach presents us with those glaring issues above. :: SOS 023 :: c. 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 sexual fantasizing in dreams and attempts to be together). For some reason, Bible commentators and most contemporary preachers appear to shun this view. Even the staunchest literalist seems to find it difficult to take the Song ~literally~, presumably because it’s assumed God would never want explicit acts of sex in the Bible to be about actually enjoyable sex. But gosh, rebels that we are, let’s turn off that filter and consider it anyway. Under this literalist approach, the Song celebrates the passion that grows during a forbidden courtship process, and it affirms that the full expression of the love includes plentiful longing and fantasizing of the sex acts, even before one is in a marriage. The exegesis that develops from this hermeneutic shows literal brothers who are somewhat angry in the beginning, more caring and protective near the end, brothers who appear to be trying to keep their little sister walled in, away from premature sexual intercourse. :: SOS 024 :: Throughout the text, the woman gives warnings (to herself? to others?) not to “stir up love before it’s time” – in effect, a sense of inner conflict, since plenty of love is being stirred up, ALL of the time, in the Song. The flow of the plot – if we can call it a plot – is just as chaotic as the emotions and hopes and fears of any young love affair. There might be sex going on ... or the couple might just be talking about it a lot. There might be a marriage in the works ... or calling the woman “my bride” might be just as symbolic as calling her “my sister.” (In fact, the lover uses the terms “my bride, my sister” together just enough to make it feel weird.) Most modern interpretations of the Song that take a more literal approach to it will tell you up front that it is a celebration of sexual love within marriage. :: SOS 025 :: Let me give you my opinion: It most certainly is not. Within marriage, I mean. There might be a marriage at the very end, when a vineyard gets sold to Solomon and there’s a dowry-like exchange of silver pieces. But all the hanky-panky that’s been going on has not been within the bonds of that marriage. If our hermeneutic is going to be literalist, this was certainly premarital shenanigans. The Song shows brothers who are against the affair. The poem brings in city watchmen who are against the affair. Even the Daughters of Jerusalem, a chorus of ladies usually on the woman’s side, are sometimes against how excessive the woman’s praise of her lover is. But the sexual interaction is there, it’s happening, and it’s all before the “maybe-a-marriage” mini-scene at the end. The couple dreamed of sex, talked about it, longed for it, snuck off and did it. :: SOS 026 :: And that gives us our next major difficulty: Why does the Bible have a book in it that celebrates extramarital longing and passion and dreaming and secret engaging in sex … when clearly, other parts of the Bible declare that lusting in one’s heart is supposed to be wrong? And more troubling: Why would the Holy Spirit 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? I mean ... that’s just short sighted, isn’t it? Questions, questions, questions … But all of those questions lead back to my original question: Why would I want to use this book as an introduction to the Bible as Literature? :: SOS 027 :: Three reasons: 1) ITS OVERALL SHOCK FACTOR. People approach the Bible expecting a certain level of decorum. The Bible, we’ve learned, is noble, stately, solemn, exalted, dignified. This book, the Song, goes right at those expectations and grabs them by the throat. To appreciate what the Bible is in all its genres, we have to shake away preconceptions. You don’t put new wine in old wineskins. :: SOS 028 :: 2) ITS SPECIFIC SHOCK METAPHORS If I call my husband “honey,” he doesn’t picture himself in Winnie the Pooh’s cupboard, awaiting consumption. But if I look him in the eyes and quote the Song -- “Oh, that I might savor the juice of your pomegranate” -- I am in brand new metaphor territory. Sentences like that – the Song is full of them – they have to be pondered. They have to be savored. They have to be appreciated with new eyes and new ears and, I suppose, new pomegranates. And isn’t that what appreciating literature is all about? Leaving our expectations behind and being jolted awake by new surprises? :: SOS 029 :: 3) ITS REFUSAL TO GIVE ANSWERS I aim this one right at myself. As I mentioned at the beginning, I’ve often demanded the Bible give me answers. Maybe it’s time for me to let go of that. Maybe I don’t need to do exegetical dissection on every line of sacred writ. Maybe sometimes I just need to sit and cry with Jeremiah. Maybe I need to feel furious with the Psalms when my life isn’t right, or dazzled with Ezekiel when I see wonders that make no sense to me, or confused and blinded with Saul of Tarsus when I demand to know, “Who are you, Lord?” And in this book, the Song of all songs, maybe I’m not supposed to demand that it be an allegory, a parable, a drama, a choral ritual song. Maybe I need it to be a bubble bath. Maybe I need to just feel it press all around me, enveloping me. I have to appreciate its fragrance. I shouldn’t read it. I should inhale it. And then, of course, I should giggle. Because, you know, that’s what we do. ~ THE END ~ :: SOS 030 ::