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Zhang Longxi Source: Comparative Literature, Vol University of Oregon Duke University Press The Letter or the Spirit: The Song of Songs, Allegoresis, and the Book of Poetry Author(s): Zhang Longxi Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Summer, 1987), pp. 193-217 Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1770241 Accessed: 06-10-2015 06:26 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of Oregon and Duke University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Comparative Literature. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 130.166.3.5 on Tue, 06 Oct 2015 06:26:44 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SUMMER1987 Volume 39, Number 3 ZHANG LONGXI The Letter or the Spirit: The Song of Songs Allegoresis, and the Book of Poetry Do not interpretationsbelong to God? Gen.40:8 HEN I FIRST read the Song of Solomon in the quaint and W melodious English of the King James Version, I was filled with surprise at the beauty of its rich imagery and astonishingly sensuous language, and even more so at its inclusion in the austere and august Holy Scriptures. How could anyone fail to be affected by the power of such verses ? Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehementflame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substanceof his house for love, it would utterly be contemned. (8:6-7) The expressions of a passionate love in the Song impressed me so deeply that I was delighted to find critical opinions like that of George Saints- bury who said, with special reference to the verses just quoted, that "I know no more perfect example of English prose rhythm than the famous verses of the last chapter of the Canticles in the Authorized Version" (32). There is no doubt in my mind that the Song of Songs deserves to be placed among the most refined pieces of love poetry in world litera- 193 This content downloaded from 130.166.3.5 on Tue, 06 Oct 2015 06:26:44 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ture, but its inclusion in the Holy Scriptures must give us pause in tak- ing it to be the kind of human as secular love saame writing poems. In fact, it is precisely the presence of a love song in the Bible that has raised the hermeneutic problem for all exegetes throughout the cen- turies. Jews and Christians alike. The problem is not that the Canticle sings of love, but that it surpasses many secular love poems in its praise of feminine beauty, its unmistakably erotic imagery, its oriental sen- suality, and the conspicuous absence of God from the whole text. In other translations like the Jerusalem Bible, the name of God does appear once in 8:6 where the Hebrew word 'alhebetyah, which corresponds to "a most vehement flame" in the Authorized Version, is rendered as "a flame of Yahweh himself." But Marvin Pope believes that "to seize upon the final consonants vh as the sole reference to the God of Israel in the entire Canticle is to lean on very scanty and shaky support" (671). The language of the Song of Songs is the secular language of love. It speaks of the desire and the joy of love, the physical charms of the beloved, jewels and spices, wine and milk, the dove, the rose, the lily, the sweet- smelling myrrh, the grape vines, the apple and the fig tree, the roe and the young hart, but not the usual biblical language of law and covenant, the fear and worship of God, or sin and forgiveness. The uniqueness of the Song of Songs in the biblical context must be explained, and indeed the history of its interpretation is a long record of controversies. The canonicity of the Song has not gone unchallenged. At the council of Jamnia at the end of the first century, the rabbis discussed the holi- ness, or lack of it, of the two books ascribed to Solomon, the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes. Rabbi Judah argued that the Song of Songs defiled the hands, i.e., was taboo or sacred, hence canonical, while Ec- clesiastes did not. Rabbi Jose then expressed his doubt about the pro- priety of including the Song in the canon, but Rabbi Aquiba made a powerful plea, saying, "No man of Israel ever disputed about the Song of Songs, that it did not defile the hands. The whole world is not worth the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the Scriptures are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies." He angrily denounced those who treated this holy Song as an ordinary song (zemir) and chanted it in "Banquet Houses." This does not mean, however, that the Song had remained outside the canon till that time, for "the issue was not whether the book was included in the Canon, but whether it should have been" (Pope 19). Among Christians, similar doubts and disputes arise from time to time. Calvin's fellow reformer Sebastian Castellio revived the view of Theodore of Mopsuestia, which had been condemned by the Roman Church, that the Song was Solo- mon's rejoinder to popular protest against his unconventional marriage to an Egyptian princess; therefore it dealt with nothing but earthly af- 194 This content downloaded from 130.166.3.5 on Tue, 06 Oct 2015 06:26:44 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SONG OF SONGS AND BOOK OF POETRY fections. An eighteenth-century rationalist, William Whiston, even as- serted that the Song "exhibits from the beginning to the end marks of folly, vanity, and looseness," that "it was written by Solomon when He was become Wicked and Foolish, and Lascivious, and Idolatrous (Pope 129). Many of those who question the canonicity of the Song tend to read it as a song about secular love or as Solomon's colloquy with his mistress, and as such they regard it as unworthy of inclusion in the Holy Scriptures. For them, the literal sense of the Song is incompatible with its canonical status. The fundamental way to justify the canonicity of the Song of Songs, among both Jews and Christians, has always been to read the text as an allegory, a piece of writing which does not mean what it literally says. When Rabbi Aquiba insisted that the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies, he "must have understood the Song allegorically," as Marvin Pope points out (19). In the Jewish tradition, the Song of Songs is understood as celebrating the love between God and Israel. Such a claim obviously has to be substantiated through an interpretation which would somehow relate what is described in the Song of Songs either to God or to Israel as his Beloved, or to heroic figures in Israel's legendary history. In "Midrash Rabbah," for instance, the "two breasts" in 4:5 are identi- fied with Moses and Aaron because "just as the breasts are the beauty and the ornament of a woman, so Moses and Aaron were the beauty and ornament of Israel": and later the "navel" of the Beloved is said to represent the Sanhedrin on the ground that when it met, its members sat in a semi-circle, forming a center of such great importance in Jewish society, as the midrashist writes, that "just as the embryo so long as it is in its mother's womb lives only from its navel, so Israel can do noth- ing without their Sanhedrin" (Freedman and Simon 198, 281). How- ever bizarre it may sound to our ears, such identification is nonetheless justifiable if Israel is indeed the beloved woman in the Song. Neverthe- less, when commenting on verse 2:7, "I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem," the midrashist does not identify the Beloved either with Israel or with individual Israelites, but identifies her with God Himself (Freedman and Simon 112). How can the Beloved be allegorically both God and Israel in one and the same song? In the host of rabbinic exe- geses, such inconsistencies are by no means rare, and yet they appar- ently did not bother the ingenious midrashist at all. James Kugel ex- plains that what the midrashistaddressed himself to was not first and foremost the book as a whole, i.e. not the allegory itself-"Granted, it is a love song about Godand Israel" -but single verses, isolated in suspendedanimation. If the precise wording of a verse suggested an interpretive tack that would violate the overall allegorical frame, the midrashist sometimes picked up the suggestion nonetheless. For the 195 This content downloaded from 130.166.3.5 on Tue, 06 Oct 2015 06:26:44 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions COMPARATIVE LITERATURE same reason, of course, midrashic collections do not scruple at assembling differ- ent solutions to the same "problem"in a verse, even though they may contradict one another: it is not that one is right and the others wrong, but that all are ade- quate "smoothings-over."(Kugel, "Two Introductions") In other words, one can hardly say that midrash is already full-fledged allegory.
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