Song of Songs

For roughly eighteen centuries, in synagogue and church alike, the Song of Songs was read as being about something other than a man and a woman in love. In Jewish reading the Aramaic Targum on the Song turns it into a history of God and Israel from the exodus to the messianic age. Rashi reads it as Israel's story. Maimonides reads it as the soul's love for God. In Christian reading Hippolytus wrote the earliest commentary we know of, now surviving only in part, and then Origen wrote ten volumes on the book. Jerome's verdict is worth quoting: while Origen surpassed all other writers in his other books, in the Song of Songs he surpassed himself. Origen read the bride as the church and also as the individual soul, and warned that the book should not be given to the spiritually immature.

After him, an almost unbroken line. Gregory of Nyssa preached homilies on it. Bernard of Clairvaux began preaching on the Song to his monks around 1135 and was still going when he died in 1153, eighty-six sermons later, having got barely past the second chapter; another Cistercian abbot, Gilbert of Hoyland, simply carried on where he had stopped. Medieval commentators added a reading of the bride as the Virgin Mary. The Puritans produced some of the warmest devotional writing in English on it. Whole libraries of Christian mysticism, including John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, are built out of this book's vocabulary.

The dissenters were few and were treated roughly. Theodore of Mopsuestia, working in the Antiochene school with its preference for the plain sense, read the Song as a love song of Solomon's and appears to have doubted that it belonged in the canon at all. He was condemned at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553, on Christological charges principally, and his treatment of the Song was among the offences held against him; the commentary itself is lost and survives only in the attacks on it. In the sixteenth century Sebastian Castellio judged the book an obscene poem unworthy of scripture, quarrelled with Calvin over it in Geneva, and did not stay in Geneva.

Now the important part, which is easy to get wrong. The allegorical reading did not dominate merely because earlier Christians were embarrassed about sex, though some of them were. It dominated for four reasons, and at least three of them are good ones. First, God is never mentioned in the book, unless you count the ending of the last word of 8:6, which may be a divine name or may be an intensifying suffix meaning something like a mighty flame. Notice that the BSB prints the second reading, "the fiercest blaze of all", with no footnote, so a student who reads only the BSB would never learn that the first reading exists; the American Standard Version's "a very flame of Jehovah" shows what the other choice looks like. A book in scripture that never mentions God demands an explanation. Second, there is no covenant, no law, no temple, no exodus, no Israel: nothing that connects it visibly to the rest of the canon. Third, and strongest, the prophets had already made marriage the standard figure for God and his people. Hosea marries an unfaithful wife as a sign, Jeremiah 2 remembers Israel's love as a bride, Ezekiel 16 and 23 press the figure to the point of horror, Isaiah 54 and 62 promise that the LORD will rejoice over his people as a bridegroom over a bride. Anyone reading the Song inside that canon would have had to work hard not to hear a figure. Fourth, the reading habits of the ancient world assumed that great texts had depths beneath their surface; Homer was read this way, and Philo read Moses this way.

So the allegorical reading is not a failure of nerve. It is an intelligent answer to a real question, offered by people with reasons. That does not make it right, and the next two sections will press the other case hard, but a student who has been taught to sneer at eighteen hundred years of readers has been taught to be stupid in an educated way.

The canonical status of the Song was disputed, and the rabbis recorded the dispute rather than hiding it. The Mishnah, in the tractate Yadayim, discusses whether Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs defile the hands, which is the technical rabbinic way of asking whether a book is holy scripture. Into that discussion comes the most famous sentence ever written about this book. Rabbi Akiva declares that nobody in Israel ever disputed the Song's holiness, that any argument was about Ecclesiastes, and then: all the writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the holy of holies.

That is not a grudging admission. Akiva takes the name of the innermost room of the temple, the place the high priest entered once a year, and gives it to this book. He is also reported in the same passage as saying that the world was never worth as much as the day the Song was given to Israel. Akiva was the towering rabbinic figure of his generation, and he was executed by Rome in the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba revolt in the 130s, which is to say that this is not the judgement of a man with a sheltered life.

There is a second Akiva tradition, in the Tosefta, that is even more revealing. He warns that whoever trills his voice over the Song of Songs in a banquet hall, treating it as though it were an ordinary song, has no share in the world to come. Read that carefully and notice what it tells you. Akiva is not defending the book against people who thought it was too holy for parties. He is objecting to something people were actually doing: singing it at dinners, as a love song, because that is what it sounds like. The plain reading of the Song is at least as old as the allegorical one, and probably older, and the earliest evidence for it is a rabbi trying to stop it.

Both facts should be taught together. The book is in the canon because the tradition insisted it was supremely holy, and the tradition insisted on that partly because ordinary people kept singing it as what it appears to be. In Jewish practice the Song is read at Passover, tying it to the exodus and so to the allegorical reading; and it remained, in Hebrew, a poem about two young people who cannot stop thinking about each other. Both things have always been true of it at once.

Begin with what the poems are. Eight chapters of lyric verse in two main voices, with a chorus of women of Jerusalem. The woman speaks most of the lines, opens the book and closes it, and is the more active of the two throughout, which makes the Song unusual in ancient literature and in the Bible. The lovers describe each other's bodies at length in three set pieces, at 4:1 to 7, at 5:10 to 16 and at 7:1 to 9, using the conventions of a descriptive praise poem; scholars borrow the Arabic term wasf for the form. They long for each other's presence, they suffer in absence, they look for each other at night, and they plainly want and at points seem to reach the consummation of all this. The book is frank and it is not coarse, and a teacher should say what it is in one clear sentence and then get on with the poetry rather than lingering.

The strongest argument for the plain reading is that the text supplies no allegorical instructions. Compare it with the passages that do. Isaiah 5 sings about a vineyard and then tells you the vineyard is Israel. Ezekiel 16 announces its figure in its first lines. The prophetic marriage metaphor always identifies itself, because a metaphor that does not identify itself cannot be understood. The Song identifies nothing. It has no key, no hinge verse, no moment where a prophet steps in to say thus says the LORD. A figure with no controls will be read in as many ways as it has readers, and the history of interpretation duly shows exactly that.

The comparative evidence points the same way. Egyptian love poetry from the New Kingdom, preserved on papyri such as Chester Beatty I and Harris 500, shares the Song's whole repertoire: lovers who call each other brother and sister as terms of affection, gardens and orchards as the setting and the metaphor, lovesickness treated as an illness, a door that will not open, a beloved compared to gold and to a captured gazelle. These are love songs, nobody argues otherwise, and they are the closest literary relatives the Song has.

Then the theology, which is where the plain reading turns out to be doing more than defending itself. In 7:10 the woman says: "I belong to my beloved, and his desire is for me." The word for desire is teshuqah, which occurs three times in the Hebrew Bible. The other two are in Genesis: in 3:16, where "Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you," and in 4:7, where sin "desires you, but you must master it," said to Cain. Here the rare word appears with the direction reversed, his desire toward her, in a garden, between two people with no shame, with none of the ruling and none of the grasping. A great deal of the Song reads like Genesis 2 recovered. And 8:6 to 7 is the theological summit of the book: love "as strong as death", jealousy "as unrelenting as Sheol", a flame that "Mighty waters cannot quench", and something that cannot be bought, so that if a man were to give all the wealth of his house for love, "his offer would be utterly scorned." That is not a description of an emotion. It is a claim about a power in the world as unstoppable as the grave.

Two more things to know. The book may be an anthology rather than a single composition; the refrain asking the daughters of Jerusalem not to arouse or awaken love until the time is right recurs at 2:7, 3:5 and 8:4, and such repetitions hold it together whether one poet or several are behind it. And it is not naive. In 5:7 the woman searching the streets at night is found by the watchmen, who beat her and take away her cloak. The Song knows the world it is set in.

Take the allegorical reading first, at its best. It gains an answer to the canonical question: it explains why a book with no mention of God sits in the scriptures of Israel, and it links the Song to the prophetic marriage figure that runs from Hosea to Revelation. It takes seriously something the modern church is bad at, which is that the love of God is desire and not only duty, and that scripture is willing to describe it in the most intense language the language has. And judged by its fruit it has produced some of the most searching devotional writing in the history of either faith. Nobody reading Bernard on the Song is reading a man who has lost interest in God.

What it loses is control. Because the text supplies no key, the identifications become arbitrary, and the tradition proves it. The Targum on 4:5 reads the woman's two breasts as Moses and Aaron, the two who nourished Israel. Others found the two testaments there instead. There is no way inside the method to say that one of those is wrong, which means the method can produce anything. It also tends to cost the body dearly: read allegorically, the only meaning the poetry has is a meaning in which bodies do not feature, and a church that reads its one book about desire as being about something else is left with nothing to say about marriage except rules.

Now the plain reading at its best. It gains the text. It honours the plain sense, which is the first duty of any interpreter. It hands the church a canonical theology of the body, of mutual desire, of delight that is neither utilitarian nor ashamed, and it does so in a Bible that is often accused of having nothing positive to say on the subject. And it connects the Song to Genesis 2 in a way that makes it structurally important rather than an oddity.

What it loses is a ready answer to the question the allegorists were trying to answer. If the Song is only a love song, why is it scripture? The best response is to notice that Esther never mentions God either, and nobody proposes allegorising Esther; the canon evidently has room for books that describe a world God made without naming him on every page. Still, a purely literal reading can leave the book sitting in the canon like a beautiful stranger, and pressed the wrong way it turns into a marriage manual, which is its own kind of reduction. Preaching that mines the Song for practical advice about romance has lost the poetry as thoroughly as any medieval allegorist ever did.

A third position, held by many careful readers in both camps, takes the literal sense as the meaning of the text and then allows a second reading built on top of it rather than in place of it. The warrant is not arbitrary. Ephesians 5 quotes Genesis 2 about a man and wife becoming one flesh and calls it a mystery referring to Christ and the church; notice the direction of travel, from the real marriage to the mystery, with the real marriage left standing. The prophets do the same thing. So the Song is first a poem about two people, and because human love is a made thing that images something, the poem also tells the truth about the love of God for his people without ceasing to be about the two people. Robert Jenson argued for taking the allegorical tradition seriously on theological grounds in his commentary of 2005; Ellen Davis has argued for holding both readings together. Read it this way and you neither insult eighteen centuries of readers nor pretend that the woman in chapter 7 is a metaphor for a synod.

This is the last lesson of the track, so stop and look at the ground covered, eleven modules in all. Beginnings took you through Genesis 1 to 11, from an ordered world made by one God to a scattered humanity at Babel. Covenant and Calling put you in Genesis 12 to 22, with a promise made to a childless man and a knife raised on a mountain. The Family That Carries the Promise followed that promise through Genesis 23 to 50, from a field bought for a grave to a family in Egypt with a coffin and an oath. Out of Egypt took you through Exodus 1 to 24, from a God who hears to a covenant sealed with blood and a meal. The Presence took Exodus 32 to 40 and Leviticus and asked how a holy God can live in the middle of a camp of people who made a calf. The Long Way Round walked Numbers and Deuteronomy, a generation buried in the wilderness and a law preached again to their children on the edge of the land. The Land and the Judges watched the conquest and the long spiral afterwards. Kings followed the monarchy from its height to its ruin. The Prophets listened to the men sent to a people who would not hear. Exile and Return sat in Babylon and came home to a smaller temple and a harder faith. And this module has spent five lessons in the books where Israel prays, argues, doubts, teaches and sings.

That order matters. The Hebrew Bible arranges itself in three parts: Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings, which is where the books of this module live. Jesus uses that three-part shape in Luke 24:44 when he speaks of the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms. Put the parts in that sequence and you can see what the Writings are for. In the Torah God speaks and Israel is addressed. In the Prophets God speaks again, mostly in judgement and promise, and Israel is addressed again. In the Writings Israel answers. This is the part of the canon where the people of God talk back: complaining in the Psalms, cross-examining God in Job, taking notes on daily life in Proverbs, refusing to be comforted in Ecclesiastes, and in the Song singing about something that has nothing obviously to do with religion at all. A canon that contains all of that is telling you what kind of relationship this is.

Notice also what these five books do to each other. Proverbs says the world is intelligible and wisdom generally pays. Job says a righteous man can be destroyed and his comforters condemned for explaining it. Ecclesiastes says the successful man cannot find the profit either, and tells you to eat your bread anyway. The Psalms give you words for every one of those positions and make them all addressed to God rather than merely thought. The Song says that in the middle of all of it two people can love each other with a love as strong as death. Any one of those books held alone becomes a distortion. Held together they are something no single book could be, and that is an argument for reading the Old Testament whole, which is what this track has been for.

So a few instructions for what comes next, since a course that ends without them has taught you to be a consumer. Read whole books at a sitting; Ecclesiastes takes under an hour and cannot be understood in fragments. Pray the Psalms in order rather than by preference, and when you reach the ones you would not have chosen, say them anyway. Read poetry slowly and out loud, because the line pair only works at the speed of a voice. Keep a note of the places where you had to hold two things at once, because those are the places where you were actually being taught. And where the church is genuinely divided, learn to state the other side's case so well that someone who holds it would thank you for it. That habit is worth more than any single conclusion you will reach.

One last thing. The standard this school works to is that you should have the best professor you would otherwise never meet, and the reason that standard can be met at all is that the material is this good. You have been reading the actual texts, in their difficulty, without the hard pages glued together. The students who came before you in the churches of Africa, Asia, Latin America and everywhere else that has no seminary within reach did the same thing with fewer tools. Now go and teach somebody. That is what the books of the Writings were made for: not to be studied by scholars, but to be put into the mouths of people who need words.