Introduction

The extraordinary variegation of the books of the Hebrew Bible in style, genre, and outlook is one of the most exciting aspects of this anthology that spans nearly a millen nium. But even against that background, the Song of Songs stands out in its striking distinctiveness—a distinctiveness that deserves to be called wondrous. The delicate yet frank sensuality of this celebration of young love, without reference to God or covenant or Torah, has lost nothing of its immediate freshness over the centuries: these are among the most beautiful love poems that have come down to us from the whole ancient world. Famously, the erotic nature of the Song constituted a challenge for the framers of the canon, both Jewish and Christian, and their response was to read the poems allegorically—in the case of the early rabbis, as the love between the Holy One and Israel, and in the case of the Church fathers, as the love between Christ and the Church. “If all the writings are holy,” Rabbi Akiva proclaimed in a discussion of the Song’s canonicity, “the Song of Songs is holy of holies.” Both religious traditions, however fervently they clung to this allegorical vision, never succeeded in entirely blocking the erotic power of the text. There are, for example, medieval Hebrew liturgical poems that earnestly follow the theological plot of the allegory yet knowingly or sometimes unwittingly let the young lovers’ delight in the carnal consummation of love make its presence felt.

Little is known about the origins of these poems. Different elaborate theories have been proposed about them: that they are wedding poems, that they should be read as drama, that they originated in poems to a pagan love goddess, that they constitute a single architectonic poetic structure, that they are direct adaptations of Egyptian or Mesopotamian love poetry. All such theories should prudently be rejected. The book as a whole has an anthological look, though a case might be made for certain recurrent configurations constituting a kind of unity. It is conceivable that embryonic versions of some of these poems were in oral or perhaps written circulation for centuries, but there is no way of proving that hypothesis. The evidence of the language of the poems—some of the vocabulary and certain grammatical forms—clearly indicates a relatively late date of composition; the fourth century B.C.E. seems a reasonable guess, though some would put it a little later. It may be that one or two of the poems were in fact written as wedding poems, but the content of most of them leads one to conclude that the free enjoyment of the pleasures of love and not marriage is what the poets had in view. Several of the poems have an urban setting, with the young woman addressing “the daughters of Jerusalem” or confronted by the town watchmen, but the predominant background of the poems is bucolic or sylvan—luscious gardens, verdant forests, vineyards, rolling hills, and mountains. Solomon is mentioned more than once, but the intention seems to be to draw a contrast between the two young lovers delighting in each other in the vernal lushness of nature and the luxuries of the royal court.

These poets are finely aware of the long tradition of Hebrew poetry, but notably there is little in the way of allusion to earlier Hebrew texts. This is hardly evidence that the poets were unfamiliar with those texts, only that the antecedent biblical literature did not much suit their own purposes.

The formal system of parallelism between versets—that is, parts of the line—that governs Hebrew poetry from its earliest extant texts going back to around 1100 B.C.E. is still very much in evidence, although in quite a few lines the parallelism is looser than in earlier eras. The first line of the book, for example, like a good many after it, is not constructed on semantic parallelism: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, / for your loving is better than wine.” In this instance, the second verset does not parallel the first but instead explains it. Other lines that appear to diverge from the convention of poetic parallelism actually follow a precedent well attested in earlier Hebrew poetry. Thus the first poetic line of 1:4 reads: “Draw me after you, let us run. / The king has brought me to his chamber.” Here, as in many lines in the Prophets, Psalms, and elsewhere, the second verset traces a narrative development of what is introduced in the first: the young woman first declares her eagerness to run off after her lover; in the second verset, they have completed their running and come to his bedchamber, reported in a verb that indicates a completed action. More generally, however, these poets deploy the millennium-old convention of poetic parallelism inventively and vividly. When the beloved describes her dark complexion (1:5) as “like the tents of Kedar, / like Solomon’s curtains,” she uses the parallelism to make an argument against those who would mock her for her peasant’s suntan. Yes, I am dark, she says, like nomads’ tents woven from black goat’s hair (the name Kedar puns on a Hebrew root that means “dark”), but if I seem to belong to a rough Bedouin setting, my darkness is also something lovely, like Solomon’s tent hangings, which might well be dyed, in royal fashion, in deep blue or purple.

The predominant use of semantic parallelism in the poetic corpus of the Bible is to concretize, focus, or intensify material from the first verset in the second. This strategy is vividly evident in line after line here. Chapter 8, for example, begins with the following line: “Would that you were a brother to me, / suckling my mother’s breasts.” It is possible to construe the second verset as a participial phrase, which is done in this translation in part for the sake of readability in English. But it is equally possible that it is a noun phrase, “a suckling of my mother’s breasts,” which would be in keeping with the procedure of parallelistic verse to substitute in the second verset a paraphrase or epithet for the plain noun (here, “brother”) of the first. We should note what is effected through the substitution. The general fraternal relationship marked by “brother” becomes something biological and intimately physical: the beloved fantasizes her lover sucking the same breasts that she has sucked. This fantasy of shared physical closeness in infancy then becomes a vivid anticipation of another kind of physical closeness in adulthood. One can see that the poet had a subtle sense of how the inherited poetic system worked as he put the system to a rather different use from what one finds in the earlier poems that have been preserved in the canon.

Much of the enchantment and the sensual richness of the celebration of love in the Song inhere in its metaphoric language. Some of the metaphors drawn from the animal kingdom and from architecture—teeth as newly bathed ewes, a neck as a tower—may seem a little strange to modern readers, though that probably was not true for the ancient audience. Other figurative comparisons—eyes like doves, breasts like twin gazelles, kisses sweeter than wine—retain all their lovely expressiveness after more than twenty-two centuries. What is remarkable is how consistently the figurative language of these poems evokes the experience of physical love with a delicacy of expression that manifests the poet’s constant delight in likening one thing to another. (The Hebrew verb damah, “to be like,” is repeatedly flaunted.) There is a recurrent shuttling between the metaphor and its referent, in some instances creating a sense of virtual interchangeability between the two that enables the poet to speak candidly of sexual gratification without seeming to do so. In a related kind of poised ambiguity, we often don’t know, because of the figurative language, whether we are inside or outside. Here is an exquisite metaphor from the first chapter: “A sachet of myrrh is my lover to me, / all night between my breasts. / A cluster of henna, my lover to me, / in the vineyards of Ein-Gedi” (1:13–14). A young woman making herself desirable might possibly wear a sachet of fragrance between her breasts. Reading the lines, we of course realize what the lover, playfully miniaturized as a sachet, is doing in that place, but the realization is nuanced in feeling by the charming metaphor. And the concluding verset, “in the vineyards of Ein-Gedi,” leaves us pleasantly hovering between possibilities: has the henna of the metaphor been grown at the Ein-Gedi oasis overlooking the Dead Sea, or rather, in a slide through the metaphoric to the literal, are the lovers actually enjoying their love in the vineyards of Ein-Gedi, as elsewhere vineyards or gardens become their bower?

These ambiguities, always evocative, never arch, between figure and referent are most brilliantly deployed in the relatively long poem that starts at 4:8 and runs to 5:1. The flourishing natural landscape, beginning with the wild and distant mountains of Lebanon, is the apt background for the young lovers, who are themselves vernal, like the world though which they move. But there is a fine transition inaugurated at 4:12 from the literal realm of green things to a figurative one. Now the beloved’s body is a “locked garden” filled with luscious fruit and fragrant plants, and she invites her lover to enter the garden and enjoy its fruits. The audience of these lines is of course expected to know exactly what she is talking about, but the delicacy of expression is sustained by the harmonious continuity between outside and inside. This distinctive use of metaphor does not explain everything, but it is surely one of the features of the Song of Songs that makes it among the most beautiful collections of love poetry in the Western tradition.