The Song of Songs and the Eros of God: a Study in Biblical Intertextuality

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DURANDUS OF ST POURÇAIN A Dominican Theologian in the Shadow of Aquinas Isabel Iribarren (2005) THE TROUBLES OF TEMPLELESS JUDAH Jill Middlemas (2005) TIME AND ETERNTIY IN MID-THIRTEENTH-CENTURY THOUGHT Rory Fox (2006) THE SPECIFICATION OF HUMAN ACTIONS IN ST THOMAS AQUINAS Joseph Pilsner (2006) THE WORLDVIEW OF PERSONALISM Origins and Early Development Jan Olof Bengtsson (2006) THE EUSEBIANS The Polemic of Athanasius of Alexandria and the Construction of the ‘Arian Controversy’ David M. Gwynn (2006) CHRIST AS MEDIATOR A study of the Theologies of Eusebius of Caesarea, Marcellus of Ancyra, and Anthanasius of Alexandria Jon M. Robertson (2007) RIGHTEOUS JEHU AND HIS EVIL HEIRS The Deuteronomist’s Negative Perspective on Dynastic Succession David T. Lamb (2007) SEXUAL & MARITAL METAPHORS IN HOSEA, JEREMIAH, ISAIAH, AND EZEKIEL Sharon Moughtin-Mumby (2008) THE SOTERIOLOGY OF LEO THE GREAT Bernard Green (2008) ANTI-ARMINIANS The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I Stephen Hampton (2008) THE THEOLOGICAL EPISTEMOLOGY OF AUGUSTINE’S DE TRINITATE Luigi Gioia (2008) THE SONG OF SONGS AND THE EROS OF GOD

A Study in Biblical Intertextuality

EDMÉE KINGSMILL SLG

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13579108642 To my Sisters of the Love of God and in memory of Mother Jane This page intentionally left blank Preface

When I joined the Community of the Sisters of the Love of God in 1966, the Monastic Diurnal, which we then used, was rich in verses from the Song of Songs, notably the ‘Common of Feasts of the Blessed Virgin Mary’, in which all the antiphons came from the Song. But it was the 1960s, and revision was in the air, influenced in the Community by what I describe in the Introduc- tion as the ‘friend’ type of response to God. Over the next ten years or so all trace of the Song would be eliminated from our worship. In the same years I noticed, while reading theological journals and the like, that the modern interpretation of the Song requires the use of the adjective ‘erotic’ in the same breath as any reference to it. I recall a Sister showing me an article she had written in which she referred to the Song as being ‘full of erotic imagery’. ‘If the Song was full of erotic imagery’, I said to her, ‘it would arouse my erotic imagination, and it doesn’t.’ She thought for a moment and, agreeing, scored out the phrase. Thus when, after twenty years in the Community, I was unexpectedly given leave by my Superior to pursue full-time study, and told to choose a subject, the Song immediately presented itself. I planned to learn Latin and Greek in order to study the Patristic commentaries, and I spent several profitable years, on and off, in the classes of the Dominicans at Blackfriars. But I was soon led to the writings of Gershom Scholem, and I recall sitting in the Bodleian Library in a state of near-ecstasy while reading the chapter ‘The Age of Shiur Komah Speculation and a Passage in Origen’ in his book Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition. Consequently, although continuing to regard any attempt to learn Hebrew as an impossibility, I visited Leo Baeck College to meet Rabbi Professor Jonathan Magonet––which proved decisive. ‘How do you know’, he asked, after quoting the Hebrew title of the Song––Shir ha-Shirim asher liShlomo––‘that all those shshs don’t mean something?’ The same capacity for the unusual decision led my Superior to agree to my going to Leo Baeck College as a student, where I spent five immensely fruitful terms, 1987–9. To that time I owe several friendships, in particular that of Dr Joanna Weinberg whose critical acumen and profound understanding of the Rabbinic literature have continued to be available to me. Other acknow- ledgements, up to the time of submitting a D.Phil. thesis in 2003, are recorded in that work. Here I can only mention the most important help I have received during the last six years of preparing this book for publication. viii Preface

Dr Jeremy Hughes has continued to give me the benefit of his exceptional knowledge of Semitic languages, and although our approach to the subject is fundamentally different, my debt to him is immeasurable. Christopher Morray-Jones has been crucial to my study of early Jewish mysticism, above all by sending me the typescript of his ‘Merkabah Mysticism in Rabbinic and Hekhalot Literature’, now published in The Mystery of God, written in conjunction with Christopher Rowland––another friend who has been a great help to me at various times. Juliane Kerkhecker, whom I first met when I joined her Latin class, has become a most valued friend. I owe a very great deal to her help in checking languages for me. But where would all this have got me without help in using a computer? I was lucky indeed to find Absolute Computers in Headington where I met Pat and Mike Rogerson, from whom I have received endless kindness and instant help whenever a problem has arisen. Our IT expert, Rachel Severn, has been on the spot these past few years, and has patiently borne being interrupted whenever a crisis occurred. I could not have managed without her. Neither could I have managed without Bob Muller of the Society of Biblical Litera- ture, who has supplied fonts and given indispensable help whenever applied to. One of the joys of living in Oxford are its great libraries, and I have been particularly grateful for the help given by the staff of the Bodleian, the library of the Oriental Institute, and the Theology Faculty Library. I should also like to thank Diarmaid Macculloch who, as Chairman of the Oxford Theological Monographs series, has punctuated the last few years with gentle and encouraging enquiries about the progress of the work which I have very much appreciated. There are others, too numerous to mention, who have helped me at one time or another, but the person to whom I am most indebted is Professor John Barton. First, he responded to my request to support an application to study for an Oxford thesis, and then supervised that thesis with a judgement I soon learnt to trust implicitly. During these last six years he has always been available when needed, but it is the comments he wrote after reading the manuscript of this book for which I can never be sufficiently thankful. Finally, it is impossible to express the debt I owe to my Community for allowing me to do something not normally considered to be part of our vocation. I am especially grateful to Mother Rosemary without whose consent and encouragement I could not have undertaken a doctoral thesis. The Superior, who originally allowed me to study, departed this life long ago. But it is to her, together with my Community, that I dedicate this book. Fairacres Oxford Contents

Abbreviations xiii Translation xv Introduction 1 1. The title and the question of dating 6 2. Rabbi Akiva 8 3. The question of canonicity 12 4. Origen 14 5. The ‘Bride’ and ‘Friend’ distinction 17 6. Bridal imagery in the ascendant 19 7. The rise of the ‘Friend’ psychology 22 8. From Luther to Herder 25 9. From Herder to the present 26 10. The question of provenance 35 11. The author 39 12. Some clariﬁcations 42 Conclusion 44 1. The Eros Strand in Wisdom 46 1....which belongs to Solomon 46 2. A wisdom book 47 3. Correspondences with the book of Ben Sira (i) 14: 20–7 49 4. Ben Sira (ii) 24: 13–21 50 5. Ben Sira (iii) 24: 8–12 52 6. Correspondences with the book of Proverbs (i) 5: 18–19 54 7. Proverbs (ii) 7: 12–18 57 8. The question of wisdom vocabulary 59 9. Wine, milk, honey, lips, and tongue 61 10. Palate/taste; uprightness/smoothly 64 11. Gold 65 12. Pleasant/delightful; pleasant/sweet 67 13. ‘Bless’ and ‘praise’ 68 14. Master workman 70 15. Despise/contempt; wealth 71 Conclusion 74 x List of Contents

2. Breast Imagery 75 1. In the Bible 75 2. In Ezekiel 78 3. In the Song 80 4. The pre-Masoretic evidence for ‘breasts’ at Song 1: 2 and 4 85 5. Links with Egyptian liturgy and poetry 88 6. The Odes of Solomon 96 3. Symbols of Israel 99 1. Hosea 14: 6–9 (ET 5–8) 99 2. Dew 100 3. Lily 101 4. Lebanon 102 5. Fragrance 104 6. Shadow 104 7. Vine 105 8. Wine 106 9. A luxuriant ﬁr tree 106 10. Fruit 108 11. 4 Ezra 5: 23–8 108 12. Vine and vineyard 110 13. Planting-place 113 14. The lily 114 15. The river 115 16. Zion 116 17. The dove 117 18. Sheep 118 19. One people, one root, one perfect one 120 4. Mythical Elements 123 1. Jerusalem––the omphalos of the world 124 2. The body as myth and as metaphor 129 3. Visionary seeing, and the ‘two camps’ 131 4. ‘The chariots of my willing people’ 133 5. ‘The curved lines of your thighs’ 136 6. The round bowl 138 7. A heap of wheat 140 8. A tower of ivory; Heshbon; and a tower of Lebanon 141 9. Weaving in scarlet and purple 144 10. ‘Mountains of cutting’ 147 11. ‘Come from Lebanon’ 150 12. ‘Love is strong as death’ 151 List of Contents xi

5. The Garden Temple 155 1. The garden of Eden and sanctuary symbolism 155 2. ‘A garden barred’ 158 3. ‘A paradise of pomegranates’ 159 4. ‘All the chief spices’ 161 5. ‘Flowing streams from Lebanon’ 162 6. ‘Awake north wind, and come O south!’ 164 7. ‘My beloved has gone down to his garden’ 165 8. ‘The Four Who Entered Pardes’ 169 6. The Beloved 179 1. ‘This is my beloved, and this is my friend’ 179 2. Links with Daniel 182 3. The Shiur Koma 185 4. ‘The Body of the Glory’ 189 5. Akiva again 192 6. A fragment from the Chaldean Oracles 193 7. The Eros of God 197 1. The imagery of marriage and death 197 2. Three witnesses to the eros of God 199 3. The necessary equipment 202 4. ‘Turn your eyes from me’ 204 5. ‘I am faint from love’ 205 6. ‘I sleep, but my heart is awake’ 207 7. ‘My beloved is mine and I am his’ 209 8. The seeking/calling motif 211 9. ‘I have put oﬀ my tunic’ 215 10. The Qumran Psalm scroll of Sirach 51 217 11. The wound of love 219 Commentary: Looking at the Whole 223 Chapter 1 224 Chapter 2 236 Chapter 3 246 Chapter 4 (up to 5: 1) 252 Chapter 5 258 Chapter 5 (continued from 5: 2) 258 Chapter 6 267 Chapter 7 271 Chapter 8 275 Primary Sources 286 References 289 xii List of Contents

Index of Biblical References 305 General Index 315 Abbreviations

ACW Ancient Christian Writers Alexander Alexander, Targum of Canticles (see Primary Sources) BDB Brown, Driver and Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament BHS Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia BKAT Biblischer Kommentar Altes Testament BN Biblische Notizen BZAW Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft Cant. Rabbah Song of Songs Rabbah (see Primary Sources) CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly CRINT Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum DJD Discoveries in the Judaean Desert EDB Edizione Dehoniane Bologna FAT Forschungen zum Alten Testament GCS Die griechischen christlichen Schrifsteller. GKC Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar (see References) HALOT Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament HTR Harvard Theological Review HUCA Hebrew Union College Annual ICC International Critical Commentary ITC International Theological Commentary JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society Jastrow Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature. New York, 1967. JBL Journal of Biblical Literature JJS Journal of Jewish Studies JQR Jewish Quarterly Review JSJ Journal for the Study of Judaism JSJSup Journal for the Study of Judaism Supplement Series JSOT Journal for the Study of the Old Testament JSOTSup Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series xiv Abbreviations

JSQ Jewish Studies Quarterly JTS Journal of Theological Studies LXX Septuagint MT Masoretic Text NEB New English Bible NICOT New International Commentary on the Old Testament NRSV New Revised Standard Version of the Bible ODCC Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. OTG Old Testament Guides RB Revue Biblique REB Revised English Bible RSV Revised Standard Version of the Bible RTF Robert, Tournay, and Feuillet, Le Cantique des Cantiques (see References) SBL Society of Biblical Literature TDOT Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament TSAJ Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentum VT Vetus Testamentum Translation

Chapter 1 1 The Song of Songs which is Solomon’s. 2 May he kiss me from the kisses of his mouth, for your breasts are better than wine. 3 For fragrance your oils are good; your name is oil poured forth, therefore the maidens love you. 4 Draw me, we will run after you; the king has brought me into his chambers. Let us rejoice and be glad in you, let us praise your breasts more than wine; righteous ones love you.

5 I am black but comely, O daughters of Jerusalem; as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. 6 Look not on me because I am black, because the sun has gazed upon me. My mother’s sons were incensed against me; they set me to keep the vineyards. My vineyard which belongs to me, I have not kept.

7 Tell me, you whom my soul loves, where you pasture your flock, where you make it lie down at noon, lest I be like one going astray by the flocks of your companions. 8 If you do not know, O fairest among women, go forth in the footsteps of the flock, and pasture your kids beside the shepherds’ tents.

9 To my mare among the chariots of Pharaoh I have likened you, my companion. 10 Your cheeks are comely with circlets, your neck with strings of beads. xvi Translation

11 Circlets of gold we will make for you with studs of silver.

12 While the king reclined at his table, my nard gave forth its fragrance.

13 A bundle of myrrh is my beloved to me, that abides between my breasts. 14 A cluster of cypress is my beloved to me in the vineyards of En-gedi.

Chapter 2 1 I am a bud of the plain, a lily of the valleys. 2 As a lily among the thorns, so is my companion among the daughters. 3 As an apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. In his shade I delight and will abide, and his fruit is sweet to my taste.

8 The voice of my beloved! Behold, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills. Translation xvii

9 My beloved is like a gazelle or a young hart; behold, he stands behind our wall, gazing through the windows, peering through the lattice. 10 My beloved answered and said to me: Arise, my companion, and go forth my fair one. 11 For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. 12 The blossoms appear in the land; the time of singing has arrived, and the voice of the turtle-dove is heard in our land. 13 The ﬁg tree has formed its green ﬁgs, and the vines are in bud and give a fragrance. Arise my companion, and go forth, my fair one.

14 O my dove, hidden in the clefts of the rock, in the secrecy of the steep places, let me see your appearance, let me hear your voice, for sweet is your voice, and comely your appearance.

15 Seize for us the foxes, the little foxes, the ones ruining the vineyards, when our vineyards are in blossom.

16 My beloved is mine and I am his; he who feeds among the lilies.

17 Until the day breathes and the shadows depart, turn, my beloved, be like a gazelle or a young hart upon the mountains of separation.

Chapter 3 1 By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loves; I sought him, but I found him not. 2 I will rise now and go about the city; in the streets and in the broad ways xviii Translation

I will seek him whom my soul loves. I sought him, but I found him not. 3 The watchmen who go about the city found me. ‘Have you seen him whom my soul loves?’ 4 Hardly had I passed from them when I found him whom my soul loves. I held him and would not let him go until I had brought him into my mother’s house, and into the chamber of her who conceived me. 5 I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles or by the hinds of the ﬁeld, that you stir not up nor awaken love ‘til it please.

Chapter 4 1 Behold, you are fair, my companion, behold, you are fair; your eyes are doves from behind your veil. Your hair is like a ﬂock of goats which have come forth from Mount Gilead. Translation xix

2 Your teeth are like a ﬂock of shorn ewes, which have come up from the washing; all of them bear twins; not one among them has miscarried. 3 Like a thread of scarlet are your lips, and your mouth is comely. Your temple is like a slice of pomegranate behind your veil. 4 Your neck is like the tower of David built in terraces, on which hang the thousand shields, all bucklers of mighty men. 5 Your two breasts are like two young harts; twins of a gazelle that feed among the lilies.

6 Until the day breathes and the shadows disappear, I will get me to the mountain of myrrh and to the hill of frankincense.

7 You are all fair, my companion; there is no blemish in you.

8 Come from Lebanon, O bride, come, journey from Lebanon; travel from the top of Armana, from the top of Senir and Hermon; from the dens of lions, from the mountains of leopards.

9 You have struck at my heart, my sister, my bride, you have struck at my heart with one of your eyes, with one bead from your necklace. 10 How fair are your breasts, my sister, my bride, how much better your breasts than wine, and the fragrance of your oils more than all spices. 11 Your lips, O bride, drop ﬂowing honey, honey and milk are under your tongue, and the fragrance of your garments is like the fragrance of Lebanon.

12 A garden barred is my sister, my bride; a spring barred, a fountain sealed. xx Translation

13 Your shoots are a paradise of pomegranates, with excellent fruit; cypresses with nards. 14 Nard with saﬀron, calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices. 15 A spring of gardens, a well of living water, and ﬂowing streams from Lebanon.

16 Awake north wind, and come O south! Blow upon my garden that its spices may ﬂow forth! Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat its choice fruits.

Chapter 5 1 I have come into my garden, my sister, my bride, I have gathered my myrrh with my spice. I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey, I have drunk my wine with my milk. Eat, friends! Drink and be drunk, beloved ones!

2 I sleep, but my heart is awake. A sound! My beloved is knocking! Open to me, my sister, my companion, my dove, my perfect one, for my head is full of dew, my locks with the drops of the night.

3 I have put oﬀ my tunic, how shall I put it on? I have washed my feet, how shall I deﬁle them?

4 My beloved put his hand through the opening and my inward parts were moved for him. 5 I rose up to open to my beloved, and my hands dripped with myrrh, my ﬁngers with ﬂowing myrrh, upon the handles of the bolt. 6 I opened to my beloved, but my beloved had turned and gone. My soul went forth at his departing. I sought him, but I found him not; I called him, but he did not answer me. Translation xxi

7 The watchmen who go about the city found me, they smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took my veil from me. 8 I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if you ﬁnd my beloved, what will you tell him? [Tell him] that I am faint from love. 9 What is your beloved more than another beloved, O fairest among women? What is your beloved more than another beloved, that you so charge us?

3 I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine, he who feeds among the lilies.

10 Who is she who looks down like the morning star, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as the bannered hosts?

11 I went down to the garden of nuts, to look at the green shoots of the valley; to see whether the vine had sprouted, the pomegranates had blossomed.

12 Before I knew it my soul had set me in the chariots of my noble people.

Chapter 7 1 Return, return, O Shulamite, return, return, that we may see you. What will you see in the Shulamite? [You will see something] like the dance of Mahanaim. 2 How fair are your feet in sandals, O noble daughter! Translation xxiii

The curved lines of your thighs are like ornaments, the work of the hands of a master craftsman. 3 Your navel is the rounded bowl, may it not lack the mixed wine; your belly is a heap of wheat fenced round with lilies. 4 Your two breasts are like two young harts, twins of a gazelle. 5 Your neck is like the tower of ivory; your eyes are pools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bat-rabbim; your nose is like the tower of Lebanon which looks towards Damascus. 6 Your head upon you is like Carmel, and the hair of your head like purple cloth; your fringe is bound with bands.

7 How fair and pleasant you are, O love, for delights! 8 This your stature is like that of a palm tree, and your breasts to its clusters. 9 I said, I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of its boughs. Then may your breasts be like clusters of the vine, and the fragrance of your nose like apples. 10 And your speech, like the best wine, goes smoothly to my beloved, moving the lips of sleepers. 11 I am my beloved’s and upon me is his desire.

3 His left hand is under my head, and his right hand embraces me. 4 I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that you stir not up, nor awaken love ‘til it please.

5 Who is this coming up from the wilderness leaning upon her beloved? Under the apple tree I awakened you, there your mother travailed with you, there she travailed who bore you.

13 O you who dwell in the gardens, the companions hearken to your voice; enable me to hear it.

14 Flee, my beloved, and be like a gazelle or a young hart upon the mountains of spices. This page intentionally left blank Introduction

His left hand is under my head, and his right hand embraces me.

This verse in the Song of Songs occurs twice, at 2: 6 and 8: 3, and is one of many which have given rise in modern times to the view that the Song is a collection of love lyrics and concerns a pair of lovers engaged in a highly- charged sexual aﬀair. But this view is very modern indeed. From Methodius of Olympus in the third century to the end of the nineteenth century the Song has been seen as an exhortation to chastity: in the earlier centuries for the sake of God; in the later centuries for the sake of morality. Paul Ricoeur, in a chapter on the Song called ‘The Nuptial Metaphor’, writes very positively about the change in the reader which has led ‘to the kind of assumption that today distinguishes the naturalistic from the allegoristic reading’. And he goes on to note that the major cultural factor in this change is the evaluation of sexuality as a meaningful human relation. Later, on the same page, he writes:

In my opinion, it is to this major cultural change that we must attribute the almost universal triumph of the erotic reading of the Song of Songs, which has become the dominant reading. Of course, this reading is largely traceable to changes that have occurred within the sphere of exegesis itself. But it would be naive to believe that the transformations that have taken place on the level of modern culture have had no effect on the history of reading. And he concludes the paragraph: ‘the triumph of the erotic sense, taken as self-evident, is itself a fact of reading, where the technical changes within the exegetical field and cultural changes affecting public discourse about sexuality reinforce each other’.1 This leads into the final section of ‘The Nuptial Metaphor’, which is called ‘Toward a Theological Reading of the Song of Songs’, where Ricoeur writes: ‘I want to begin by turning to the cry of jubilation found in Genesis 2: 23: “This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called ishshah for out of ish was this one taken."’ Ricoeur here provides a footnote which

1 1998: 294–5. 2 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God reads: ‘The connection between the Song of Songs and Genesis 2 is forcefully presented in Karl Barth’, and references to Church Dogmatics follow. This view of Barth, that Genesis 2 and the Song are closely related, has been widely influential.2 Barth writes of the Song that we should not wish it were not in the canon, nor treat it as if it were outside. And we should not spiritual- ize it as if what is in the canon can only have a spiritualized significance. He goes on: ‘As all honest exposition must admit, and as ought to be recognized gladly rather than with hesitation or embarrassment, it is a collection of genuine love-songs in the primitive sense . . .’3 Consequently, in a chapter called ‘Man and Woman’, where Gen. 2: 18–25 and the Song are, as always in Church Dogmatics, put together, Barth calls them ‘marginal texts’, a phrase he repeats several times in this discussion.4 In another, after quoting ‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine’ (Song 6: 3), Barth goes on: It is almost incredible that this should be found so unreservedly in the Bible. It may well be said that taking up so definitely the thought of Gen. 2, and even enlarging upon it, in its isolation from the rest of the Old Testament, the Song of Songs merely gives sharper point to the question which arises in connexion with Gen. 2.5 There is much more: ‘“They twain shall be one flesh.” Hence Gen. 2 speaks of the covenant made and irrevocably sealed. It sets at the beginning that which in the Song of Songs is the goal’ (ibid.) This discussion takes place in a chapter called ‘The Covenant as the Internal Basis of Creation’ and it leads directly into a consideration of the ‘remarkable fact that the prophets always described the alliance between YHWH and Israel in terms of love and marriage’, and Barth goes on to discuss some relevant texts, Ezek. 16: 1–14 and chapter 23, the first three chapters of Hosea, and Jeremiah 3, and he asks: ‘By what bitter necessity is [the Old Testament] thus compelled to portray the relationship between YHWH and Israel only as a devastated erotic relationship?’6 At this point a reader might ask: Why does Barth not see the Song of Songs as the reversal of this devastated erotic relationship, as providing the biblical literature with a picture of the ideal, and thus as being central not marginal to this literature? The answer is evident in Barth’s understanding of the term eros, which he uses several times in the above discussion without negative connotation. But a later volume, IV/2, concludes with a discussion of Christian love running to 113 pages, in which Barth opposes agape to what for him is its antithesis, eros. He claims, undeniably indeed, that agape comes

2 On Phyllis Trible, for instance, who, in her turn, wrote an influential commentary on the Song (1978). 3 1960: 294. 4 1961: 216–17. 5 1958: 313. My emphasis. 6 Ibid. 320. Introduction 3 from God and, more questionably, that eros comes from what he calls ‘self- contradictory man’. Anyone reading Barth’s description of the kind of love to which he gives the term eros would be bound to recognize him- or herself more or less clearly, for it is the kind of love which is rooted in the ‘self’––the term Barth could as well have used. But the term eros has connotations of major importance for Barth, as also for Anders Nygren, the Swedish Lutheran theologian. Nygren’s book, Agape and Eros, was hugely successful when its first part was published in 1932, and by the time both parts were published together in 1953, it had become required reading in Anglican theological colleges. A historical survey of the Christian centuries, it has, with its combination of learning and compelling air of verisimilitude, been extremely influential on the question of the exaltation of the Christian agape motif against the eros motif. ‘It was the Eros motif’, Nygren writes, ‘which, once accepted into Christianity, threatened more than anything else in its subsequent history to empty the Christian Agape motif of its specific content.’7 Thus Nygren’s one comment on the Song is that ‘we need hardly mention the disastrous part played by the mystical interpretation of the Song of Songs in assisting the identification of the Eros motif with the Christian idea of Agape’.8 The book works toward the tri- umphant conclusion that only Luther has succeeded in freeing Agape from its entanglement with Eros, a claim we will, indeed, see corroborated when we come to Luther’s commentary on the Song. Although Barth’s position on agape and eros is exactly that of Nygren, Barth is too deep a thinker to be happy with Nygren’s over-confident tone, and his references to Nygren all contain a note of criticism. Nevertheless what is clear in both writers is that agape stands for the Protestant Reform and eros for the Catholic Church. To understand what this means in relation to the eros of the Song I now turn to a paper by Andrew Louth, Mary and the Mystery of the Incarnation, which, in a remarkably brief compass, succeeds in revealing both the greatness of Barth’s thought and that limitation in it which has considerable implications for this study. Louth describes how for Barth a belief in the virgin birth leads to belief in the Incarnation of the Son of God; it is not simply admitted as a fact, but invested with deep theological significance. ‘But for Barth, this leads to no reflection about our Lady, to no Mariology. Why not?’ The answer takes up the rest of the paper, and much as I should like to quote all of it, since all is relevant, I will confine myself to the first point. Louth writes: [‘Barth] sees that it is not in virtue of her divine motherhood that Mary possesses the importance she has for Catholic Mariology, but in virtue of her acceptance of

7 1953: 162. 8 Ibid. 230. 4 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God God’s will for her; and this Barth calls, in language which from him is loaded, her “bridal relationship” to God.’ It is here that Mariology becomes a problem for Barth. Barth agrees that Mariology does not make a goddess of Mary, that she is seen precisely as a creature. Louth goes on: And he agrees that the mere physical fact of her involvement in the mystery of redemption is not what provides the springboard for Mariology. But what does provide the springboard, he rightly sees, is her willing co-operation in the mystery. And for Barth this at once suggests the idea of some capacity on the part of the creature to establish a point of contact with God––and such a capacity he utterly rejects.9 ‘Some capacity on the part of the creature to establish a point of contact with God.’ And, certainly, if the capacity of the creature to establish a point of contact with God is utterly rejected the Song of Songs can only be interpreted as contact between humans. But in the contemplation of God in prayer our unknowing contact with an unknowable God becomes possible, as the mystical commentaries on the Song have shown, and in which we ﬁnd encouragement for that contact with God in love which a God of love must intend. Thus it becomes clear that the diﬀerence between the mystical interpretation of the Song and the human lovers interpretation is, ultimately, a theological one. But in the reaction to the Song of the individual, it is, rather, a temperamental one. The temperament may have been formed by culture, or by a religious environment which favours one response or the other but, however it is formed, there is usually a depth to it which is not to be touched by argument. This study, then, is written for those who are interested in discovering whether there are any grounds in the Hebrew text for the traditional, mystical interpretation of the Song without the necessity of imposing a meaning on the work. It is, as I hope to show, all there in the Hebrew original. I also hope it may be seen that the antithesis between agape and eros divides what should be kept together since eros comes from God no less than agape. But I do see a distinction in the human side of response to God which I have called ‘Bride’ (= eros) and ‘Friend’ (= agape). And I have seen this distinction as representing on the one side the feminine principle and on the other the masculine principle. Barth is markedly ‘masculine’, not because he is of the male gender but because his thought is profoundly masculine.10 The Song, on

9 1977: 16. 10 In his last footnote, Louth reports the story, told in Eberhard Busch’s biography (1976: 484), of Barth’s visit to the Pope in 1966, two years before his death, when he was received with open arms by Pope Paul VI. During their hour-long conversation the difficult point of Mariology came up, the Pope having heard that Barth would prefer Joseph, the foster-father of Jesus, as the primal image and function of the Church. The Pope assured Barth that he would pray that in his advanced age he should be given a deeper insight into the matter. Introduction 5 the other hand, expresses the feminine principle, and we will see what this means, especially in Chapter 2, ‘Breast Imagery’. Further, in regard to understanding the Song as a mystical text, I want to return to Ricoeur’s chapter on the Song and the important point he makes in it which has been noticed by subsequent writers and repeated a number of times: Whereas for Platonic philosophers, the intelligible world has its own language, its own concepts, its own dialectic, within the setting of the Christian Church the spiritual lacks a means of expression. This is why the language of the Song of Songs turns out to be irreplaceable. Without it, mystical experience would remain mute. (284) This is only true, however, because mystics have recognized in the language of the Song the language of mystical experience. Although the words may be understood carnally, the language exhales another level to the one who has experienced that other level, as we learn from such writers as Gregory of Nyssa, Bernard, Teresa of Avila, and John of the Cross, whose experience we will meet in Chapter 7, ‘The Eros of God’. All that is, in my view, the essence of the Song. But the bulk of what follows is concerned with the biblical character of the Song. There are two passages known to me which explicitly claim this biblical character, the first from René Bloch: The vocabulary of the poem [Song of Songs] is directly and consistently biblical. The most classical themes are used: king, shepherd, flock, vineyard, garden, Lebanon, blossoming springtime, night, awakening; all with eschatological significance and grouped around the central motif, already developed by Hosea, Jeremiah and 3 Isaiah: the unfaithful wife (Israel) taken back by her husband (YHWH) as though he had just married her.11 The second is from Ellen Davis: [the Song is] a mosaic of quotations from other parts of scripture. Phrases from the prophets, the Torah, and the Psalms abound . . . not just scattered words, but in many cases connected phrases––vivid images and terms too specific for their other contexts to be forgotten by those familiar with biblical language.12 These passages provide an appropriate opening to the present work, which aims to uncover the relationship between the 117 verses of the Song and those biblical books to which they point. That the language of the Song is metaphorical is perforce accepted by commentaors, but that its metaphors are biblical is not. Here the pursuit of the Song’s metaphors will be through the biblical books and will, I hope, reveal a consistency both in their use and in

11 1978: 41. 12 Ellen F. Davis 2000: 68. All references to Ellen Davis will be to this book. 6 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God the contexts in which such metaphors are used (never in narrative, for instance). Frequently, as I hope to show, the vocabulary leads to texts which indicate that a network of biblical allusions is being woven in the Song for the purpose of conveying a picture opposite to that we find in the prophets who, confronted by the continual ‘adultery’ of Israel, poured forth their condemnations with unwearying passion. In dramatic contrast, the Song presents a paradisal picture; not the primordial paradise of innocence but the eschatological paradise in which abide the righteous at the end of time,13 ‘For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear in the land, and the time of singing is come’ (Cant. 2: 11–12). This view of paradise emerged in Jewish apocalyptic in the centuries before the turn of the era, and I hope to be able to show that this is the realm to which the Song is significantly linked. My intention in this Introduction is primarily to provide reasons for the approach taken here, to clear away some misconceptions, and to suggest that distinction already noted, ‘Bride’ and ‘Friend’, which is, I believe, found in the Old Testament itself, and is certainly manifested in the history of the Song’s interpretation.

1. The title and the question of dating

Commentators customarily pass over the title and focus on the ascription to Solomon, the importance of which is thought to provide a sufficient explanation for the acceptance of the book into the Hebrew canon. But it is the title on which attention should first be focused: Shir ha-Shirim, The Song of Songs, a superlative expression which declares that what is claimed for the work is that it is the finest of all songs––the song of songs. Thus, in the context of the biblical literature––compiled by ‘editors’ who understood the material in a way hardly possible for us––this title can only mean that the work is the supreme example of singing the praises of God. The word shir, including both the noun ‘song’, and the verb ‘to sing’, occurs about 125 times14 in the Hebrew Bible in the context of praising God. It is found particularly in the Psalms, most frequently in headings, and in such typical lines as, ‘Sing to the Lord a new song’. A glance down the long list of occurrences in any concordance reveals that shir is so closely associated with worship that it would be odd, if not impossible, for a late biblical writer, or his redactors, to apply it to a work unless the praise of God is intended.

13 Cf. Sebastian Brock 1990: 49. 14 Richard S. Hess gives ‘some 166 times’ for the noun alone (2005: 37). My attempts to get an accurate count from Mandelkern’s Concordance have not been very successful. Introduction 7 This point receives confirmation in Contra Apionem, 1: 8, where Josephus states that the sacred scriptures of the Jews amount to only twenty-two books, five of which belong to Moses, thirteen to the prophets, while the remaining four books contain hymns to God, and precepts for the conduct of human life. The difficulties of this list are numerous,15 but the four books may be understood to be Psalms and Song of Songs as hymns to God, and Proverbs and Ecclesiastes as providing precepts for the conduct of human life. The title, The Song of Songs, could, then, with equal accuracy be translated The Hymn of Hymns,16 and this is borne out by the use of shir, in the early Jewish mystical literature, where it occurs hundreds of times. Once this is noticed, the countless occasions when the use of ‘song’ meaning ‘hymn’, and the translation ‘hymn’ for shir is given, confirm that shir in its various forms, means what we would call ‘hymn’. One example must suffice. In his book, The Shiur Qomah: Liturgy and Theurgy in Pre-Kabbalistic Jewish Mysticism, Martin S. Cohen cites an article in which the author Alexander Altmann writes: ‘there can be no vision of the chariot-throne without hymnody’––an assertion which, Cohen goes on to say, can be verified on almost every page of the early mystical literature. The title of Altmann’s article is ‘Shire Qedushah besifrut haHekhalot haQedumah’ (‘Songs of Holiness [i.e. Holy Songs] in the Ancient Books of the Hekhalot’).17 Moreover, to the Hekhalot literature may be added the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice of Qumran, and the various tracts of Enoch. And since all this literature reveals numerous links to the Song, differences of tone and content notwithstanding, the evidence that its title is announcing that what follows is the praise of God par excellence is as conclusive as it is possible to get when dealing with the biblical and related ancient material. A third-century dating for the Song has been generally accepted since the commentary on the Song of H. Graetz in 1871, although the question is still being argued. For instance, F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp writes, at the ‘Conclusion’ of a long and detailed article: The presence of several Persianisms provide our most sensitive linguistic barometer for gauging the actual date of Cant’s language, pointing rather concretely to the two centuries of Achaemenid rule in the Near East (539–323 BCE), and it is here that I am most inclined to place the composition of the poems themselves.18

15 See John Barton 1986: 26–9. 16 Alison Salvesen tells us that the usual superscription to the Song in Syriac means ‘the praise of the praises of Solomon’, i.e. ‘the greatest hymn’. 2005: 260. 17 Martin S. Cohen 1983: 88 and 151 n. 33. 18 2005: 71. 8 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God Dobbs-Allsopp goes on to say, ‘This position is not incontrovertible, of course’, and it is indeed controverted by Giovanni Garbini, who dates the Song with a confidence his reasons do not seem sufficiently to support, to 68 or 70 BCE.19 That the Song might be so late is, perhaps, possible in the light of the four Qumran fragments of the Song which all date to the Herodian period, namely, between 30 BCE and 68 or 70 CE.20 Whether a period of sixty years or so gives enough time for the Song to have become established as scripture may be a difficulty. Nevertheless, the fact that Garbini is able to claim such a late date encourages me to believe that Sirach pre-dates the Song as it seems more likely that the author of the Song alludes to Sirach than that the author of Sirach is expanding upon the Song. The frequent recourse I have had to Jastrow’s dictionary of the Talmudic and Midrashic literature has long inclined me to accept a late date for the Song, and the later the better in regard to the links proposed in Chapters 5 and 6 with the Merkava literature. But it is not a subject about which I can do more than hope that a date between that suggested by Dobbs-Allsopp and that asserted by Garbini might be possible.

2. Rabbi Akiva

One of the earliest comments on the Song is that of Rabbi Akiva, c.50–135 CE, which is recorded in the Mishnah (Yadayim 3: 5), in a discussion on whether Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs render the hands unclean.21 Rabbi Judah declares that the Song of Songs renders the hands unclean, but there is disagreement regarding Ecclesiastes, against which Rabbi Jose claims that Ecclesiastes does not render the hands unclean but there is disagreement about the Song of Songs. Rabbi Simeon ben Azzai then comes in and says that he has heard a tradition from the seventy-two elders that both the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes render the hands unclean. In his discussion on this passage in The Targum of Canticles, P. S. Alexander writes: ‘If around 100 C.E. there was a declaration in favour of the canonicity of Canticles, it cannot have been very eﬀective since, as the pericope also indicates, Rabbi Akiva, possibly some thirty years later, still felt the need to issue his famous declaration.’22

19 Garbini dates the Song on the basis of links to: the Story of Susanna; the story of the eighty women ‘in Ascalona’ (m. Sanhedrin 6: 4); and the unhappy first marriage of Cleopatra Selene. 1992: 293–6. All these links are, to say the least, highly improbable. 20 M. Abegg Jr., P. Flint, and E. Ulrich 1999: 612. 21 See the next section, ‘The question of canonicity’, on this problematic category. 22 2003: 34. References to this work are, e.g.: Alexander 83 n. 50. The first figure, 83, stands for the page number and the second figure, 50, stands for the note number of Alexander’s commentary on the Targum. Introduction 9 Famous indeed it is, quoted by every commentator on the Song, and invariably followed by an astonishing disregard of its content. Here it is: ‘Heaven forbid! (lit. Forbearance and peace!) No one from Israel has ever disputed concerning the Song of Songs that it does not render the hands unclean, since the whole world is not worthy of the day that the Song of Songs was given to Israel. For all the Scriptures are holy, but the Song of Songs is the holy of holies, and if they have disputed they have not disputed concerning it but concerning Ecclesiastes.’ R. Jochanan ben Joshua, the son of the father-in-law of R. Akiva, said: According to the opinion of Ben Azzai they disputed, and thus they concluded.23 There is always much more in a Rabbinic passage than meets the eye, but I shall touch only on those misreadings and misrepresentations to which this one has given rise in modern times. First, it is significant that Akiva is allowed to claim without contradiction that no one in Israel ever disputed that the Song of Songs does not render the hands unclean, for had he not been articulating what everyone believed, contrary opinions against his declaration would have been recorded. It was not, moreover, as often alleged, Akiva’s authority which silenced contradiction, for discussions in the Mishnah and Gemara show that Akiva is contradicted as often as not. Even here it is not stated that the ruling was made in accordance with his opinion but with that of Ben Azzai. Second, the claim that the Song is the holiest book of all the holy books is so baffling in the present climate that attempts to modify it are not surprising. The word for ‘Scriptures’ is Ketuvim, ‘writings’. But since the third category, Writings, of the Hebrew Bible is also called Ketuvim, this has allowed editors and such-like, wherever this passage is quoted, to provide a footnote: ‘i.e. Writings’, or ‘Hagiographa’, this last being the term frequently used for the third division of the biblical books.24 This solves the problem in regard to rating the Song higher than the Pentateuch, but it hardly solves it in regard to the Writings themselves: more holy than the Psalms? The only solution is to allow Akiva’s rating and either enquire into his meaning or dismiss his view as incomprehensibly biased. That Akiva did indeed rate the Song unimagin- ably high is shown by the sayings concerning it which have been attributed to him. The first, from the Mishnah quoted above, shows that Akiva compares the Song to the holy of holies, and while this is generally taken to be an

23 m. Yadayim 3:5. 24 That such a division was established in the time of Akiva is shown by Barton (1986) to be unlikely. See especially chapter 2, ‘The Law and the Prophets’ for a highly instructive discussion. A contrary view, that of Stephen Dempster (2001), adduces evidence of a tripartite division from the biblical books themselves. Whatever be the case, Akiva should here be understood as referring to ‘all the Scriptures’. Happily, recent discussions have moved in this direction. 10 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God analogy I believe that he is doing much more than making an analogy. For Akiva the Song of Songs is the holy of holies. In her discussion of the title, Ellen Davis makes a similar point: I suspect that the most important reason the Song is called ‘Solomon’s’ lies precisely in this association with the Temple. Although the Temple in Jerusalem is never mentioned directly, I shall try to show that the cumulative effect of the language and images of the Song is to orient us toward that place of ultimate intimacy with God . . . Further, perhaps the title suggests that the Song is one way of entering that holy place . . . (239–40) A second saying attributed to Akiva is from t. Sanhedrin XII. 10: ‘The one lifting up his voice in a drinking house with the Song of Songs, and who treats it like a kind of secular song, will not have a place in the world to come.’ A third, in b. Sanhedrin 101a, is similar but with the ominous addition that the penalty would not be confined to the individual alone but would bring evil into the world and imperil the welfare of all mankind. And a fourth, from Aggadat Shir ha-Shirim, is no less striking: ‘If the Torah had not been given, the Song of Songs would have sufficed to guide the world.’ Akiva is, thus, intimately associated with the Song of Songs, both in the exoteric and in the esoteric literature. Joseph Dan, the Gershom Scholem Professor of Jewish Mysticism at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, consistently takes the view that the Song does not figure much before Akiva and that it was brought into prominence and given a new interpretation by him. If this is correct, it applies not to the esoteric texts, to which Akiva’s name may have been applied at a later stage of redaction precisely because it had become associated with the Song, but to a new direction in Rabbinic exegesis, and reflects that emphasis on the Pentateuch which Louis Ginzberg attributes to the system of Akiva in his article on him in the Jewish Encyclopedia. Ginz- berg’s article is, in approach and language, dated in parts, but it remains important, and with implications for rabbinical exegesis. For instance: Akiba . . . perceived that the intellectual bond uniting the Jews––far from being allowed to disappear with the destruction of the Jewish state––must be made to draw them closer together than before . . . As the fundamental principle of his system, Akiba enunciates his conviction that the mode of expression used by the Torah [Pentateuch] is quite different from that of every other book. In the language of the Torah nothing is mere form; everything is essence.25 That Akiva regarded the Song, the ‘holy of holies’, as the light by which the Torah is illumined and thus lived is, I believe, to be understood from the

25 1901: 306, 307. The problem of different transliterations of Hebrew names and terms is one we shall encounter frequently, especially in Chapter 6. Introduction 11 Yadayim passage. But the consequence of his system for the Song was that it came to be interpreted in relation to the Exodus from Egypt, rather than for itself. This is well brought out by Daniel Boyarin in a chapter called: ‘The Song of Songs, Lock or Key: The Holy Song as a Mashal’. The ‘Lock or Key’ of his title refers to a well known passage once attributed to Saadya, 882–942, and now to an anonymous writer of the same period who wrote at the beginning of a commentary on the Song: ‘Know, my brother, that you will find great diversity of opinions as regards the interpretation of this Song of Songs, and it must be confessed that there is a reason for it, since the Song is like a lock, the key of which hath been lost.’ Commenting on this Boyarin writes: The rabbis of the midrash who understood that the Writings as a whole are a reading of the Torah did not perceive the Song of Songs as being at all like a lock to which the key has been lost. They understood it rather as a hermeneutic key to the interpretation of the Torah. The way in which the Writings were comprehended as interpretation was by relating the more or less vague situations of various poetic texts to specific parts of the Torah. The reading method was accordingly not allegorical––relating signifier to signified––but intertextual, relating signifier to signifier.26 This method of reading the Song may have been exactly what the anonymous commentator was complaining about. He saw that by it the Song, in being used as a ‘hermeneutic key to the interpretation of the Torah’, had lost its key. This is, in any case, the view of the present commentator in regard to Rab- binic interpretations of the Song. They are fascinating, as Daniel Boyarin shows in his profound exposition of Rabbinic motivation, and brilliantly constructed in relation to the great themes of the crossing of the Red Sea and the giving of the Torah at Sinai––the two places at which the Song is argued to have been delivered to Israel, R. Eliezer favouring the Red Sea and R. Akiva, Mount Sinai. But there is a huge shift of focus from the original motivation for the writing of the Song to its use in providing a midrash to the Torah. Yet, in reading the midrashim and the Targum to the Song, it is possible to detect that certain traditions and interpretations have survived both the centuries and the use of the Song as a hermeneutic key to the Torah applied to the Song in the wake of Akiva’s policy. Thus I have used Rabbinic interpretations when they seem to illumine the original intention of the work while remaining aware that the discernment necessary for such decisions may sometimes be faulty. We will return to Akiva again in Chapter 6.

26 1990: 115. 12 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

3. The question of canonicity

Of the misreadings and misrepresentations to which the Yadayim passage has given rise, we have touched on two: the notion that the decision to include the Song among those scrolls which defile the hands was due solely to Akiva’s defence, and the reading of ‘all the writings (namely, Scriptures) are holy’ as applying to the Writings only. This latter misreading is now on its way out. A third continues to need some hearty pushing: the assumption that the capacity of scrolls to ‘defile the hands’ indicated their canonical status. John Barton has argued compellingly against this assumption, first in Oracles of God where, quoting Megillah 7a, he notes that ‘two other books are also mentioned about whose capacity to cause uncleanness there was some dispute: Ruth and Esther’. He goes on: ‘This surely confirms that canonicity is not the point at issue; neither of these books was of doubtful authenticity.’27 Secondly, in his book The Spirit and the Letter: Studies in the Biblical Canon (1997), Barton responds to an article by Martin Goodman, ‘Sacred Scripture and “Defiling the Hands”’ (1990) which caused Barton to go back as it were to the beginning and to lay the whole subject out afresh, adding to it Goodman’s view of the background and development of the notion of ‘defiling the hands’, and Jewish attitudes to the Tetragrammaton. Most recently, Barton has tackled this question specifically in regard to the Song in a paper called ‘The Canonicity of the Song of Songs’, which begins: It is a received opinion that there were disputes about the canonicity of the Song of Songs in both Judaism and Christianity around the turn of the era. It is widely assumed that these disputes were caused by the erotic character of the Song, which made it hard for some to accept that it could stand as part of Holy Scripture. Canon- icity was eventually secured for the book, so it is held, only by interpreting it allegorically as a celebration of the love of God for Israel (in Jewish circles) or for the Church (in Christian ones). The purpose of this paper is to argue that there is no evidence to support any of these beliefs.28 Barton follows this by reproducing the following passage on the Song by the editors of The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible: Because of its frankness and unabashed celebration of sexual love, some of the early Rabbis and early church fathers were disturbed by this delightful little book, interpreting it in a variety of ways that played down its sexuality. Some early Jewish and Christian sages found the contents plainly unacceptable and attempted to block its acceptance into the canon of the Hebrew Bible. Certain Rabbis, however, recognized the Song of Songs as Scripture but sought to interpret its contents in terms of the

27 1986: 69. 28 2005: 1. Introduction 13 relationship between God (the lover or bridegroom) and Israel (the beloved or bride). Many church fathers who also accepted this book as Scripture interpreted it as depicting the relationship between Christ and his church. But in more recent times both Jews and Christians have increasingly come to recognize the sexual and romantic nature of the Song of Songs.29 Barton then asks, ‘What was the discussion recorded at Yadayim 3: 5 about?’ Barton goes on: Discussion has been dominated by the assumption that ‘to make the hands unclean’ is equivalent to ‘to be canonical’, an assumption which most scholars see no need even to justify. But it is far from evident that the two ideas are indeed equivalent. ‘Canon- icity’ is a concept to do with the authoritative status of books, their value and importance. ‘Defiling the hands’ belongs to the world of ritual practice. The non-equivalence can be seen clearly in the next chapter of the Mishnah (m. Yadaim 4:5) where we read that biblical books do not defile the hands if they are in the wrong script . . . (4) Or even, he shows, in the wrong place. Barton then reiterates the striking point he makes in both his earlier discussions: that the books discussed from the standpoint of defiling the hands all lack the divine name YHWH, a subject he illumines with much interesting detail. But he emphasizes that his argument does not depend on this suggestion, there may be others. In particular, the physical nature of the scrolls in question must be taken seriously. There is much more in this paper I should like to quote. For instance, Barton turns on its head the view that the Song was allegorized in order to make it acceptable. ‘On the contrary, allegorical reading in ancient times was practised precisely on books that had a high status. The assumption that it was highly serious texts that qualified for allegorical reading persisted down to the Enlightenment and even beyond’ (2). Returning to the discussion in Yadayim, we might wonder whether there was an awareness of the Gospels, and of the fact that the figure described in them, and claimed to be the long-awaited and much prophesied Messiah, is called in all four ‘Bridegroom’. If so, the desirability of keeping the Song in the Hebrew Scriptures prevailed, and it was confirmed in its function as the book which describes the love that ideally exists between God and Israel. Thus, among the hundred or so references to the Song in the Babylonian Talmud we read, in a discussion on dreams: ‘Those who see the Song of Songs [in a dream] may hope to attain piety’ (b. Berachot 57b). The anathema pronounced against anyone singing the Song in a drinking house, often adduced as evidence of its secular nature, does not, therefore, express

29 Abegg, Flint, and Ulrich 1999: 611. This passage must surely represent the nadir of statements lacking evidence now made on the Song. 14 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God Rabbinic concern about the nature of the Song but concern about blasphemy. The possibility of putting a blasphemer to death in this world no longer existed for the Rabbinic authorities, but it remained in regard to the next. Hence there is no ‘portion in the world to come’ for the person who blas- phemes by an impious use of the Song. The ampliﬁcation, that the penalty would not be conﬁned to the individual alone but would bring evil into the world and imperil the welfare of the human race, manifests an understanding of human responsibility in regard to the sacred which in our day is largely lost. If there was concern it was about the esoteric character of the Song. But that would come later, and brings us to Origen.

4. Origen

Origen (c.185– c.254) stands in much the same relation to the Song in the Christian tradition as Akiva in the Jewish. Until the commentary on the Song by Origen’s older contemporary Hippolytus, c.170–c.236,30 only a handful of references survive: one doubtfully attributed to Irenaeus, one to Melito of Sardis, a couple to Tertullian, and a couple to an anonymous author.31 The third century saw a dramatic increase of interest, but it was Origen’s Two Homilies and the Commentary which provided a mine of mystical doctrines and inspired a stream of imitators. They survive chieﬂy in Latin, the Homilies having been translated by Jerome and the Commentary by Ruﬁnus which, unfortunately, only survives up to 2: 15 of the Song. Of the Greek original only fragments remain, most of them in the catena-commentary on the Song ascribed to Procopius of Gaza.32 That they survived in Latin was to be decisive for the Song’s place in Western Christianity. In the Prologue to his commentary, Origen is anxious that his readers shall understand the nature of the love which is the Song’s theme, and he notes two

30 The commentary of Hippolytus is always assumed to be earlier than that of Origen. But Mark Edwards, in a lecture given in Oxford on Origen and Hippolytus on the Song (2006), expressed the opinion that it is impossible to say which of the two ‘cut the first Christian path in exegesis of the Song’. 31 R. F. Littledale, in refuting the allegation that the interpretation of the Song in Christian tradition originated with Origen, and that he got it from the Jews, cites two more: Cyprian, and the mention by Theodoret of a solitary note on Cant. 3: 9 by Theophilus of Antioch, d. between 178 and 189, which indicates the method followed in the second century (1869: xxiv). 32 W. Baehrens, in his critical edition (1925), printed these fragments below the Latin text together with two or three small pieces discovered in other catenas, and R. P. Lawson, in his translation of the Commentary (1957) included them similarly. See now Maria Antonietta Barbára (2005) who has collected nearly 90 fragments of the original Greek into one book. Introduction 15 types who are unlikely to benefit from its exposition: spiritual infants and carnal adults. Of the first he says that ‘just as in childhood we are not affected by the passion of love, so also to those who are at the stage of infancy and childhood in their interior life . . . it is not given to grasp the meaning of these sayings’; and of the second he fears that for ‘any man who lives only after the flesh . . . the reading of this Scripture will be the occasion of no small hazard and danger. For he, not knowing how to hear love’s language in purity and with chaste ears, will twist the whole manner of his hearing of it away from the inner spiritual man and on to the outward and carnal.’ He goes on to advise everyone ‘who is not yet rid of the vexations of flesh and blood, and has not ceased to feel the passion of his bodily nature, to refrain completely from reading this little book’.33 Then comes the passage which, since Gershom Scholem used it in a seminal chapter of his book, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition, has become famous in studies of the Jewish mystical work, Shiur Koma: For they say that with the Hebrews also care is taken to allow no one even to hold this book in his hands who has not reached a full and ripe age. And there is another practice too that we have received from them, namely, that all the Scriptures should be delivered to boys by teachers and wise men, while at the same time the four they call δευτερσει , that is to say, the beginning of Genesis, in which the creation of the world is described; the first chapter of Ezekiel, which tells about the cherubim; the end of the same, which contains the building of the Temple; and this book of the Song of Songs, should be reserved for study till the last.34 After quoting this passage, Scholem writes: ‘There is no doubt but that this quotation refers to the fact that esoteric teachings were connected with the four texts enumerated’,35 and he goes on to link the passage in Origen with the Shiur Koma literature, which in turn links with the passage in the Song, 5: 10– 16, where the male figure is described. Well chewed in the scholarly arena though it has been, Scholem’s exciting chapter, ‘The Age of Shiur Komah Speculation and a Passage in Origen’, has hardly been touched in regard to its implications for the Song. An attempt towards repairing this omission will be made in Chapter 6. The different legacies of Akiva and Origen generated not only numerous

33 Lawson 1957: 22–3. 34 Ibid. See 313–14 n.7, where Lawson explains that the Greek word δευτερσι in the singular is the usual translation for the Mishnah, but that here it is in the plural and seems to denote the four portions of Scripture that formed a second and more advanced course for students. Lawson goes on to say that these four sections of Scripture cited by Origen are similarly identified by Jerome as those to be studied last, Comm. in Ezech. I praef., where Jerome adds that the age required was thirty. 35 1965a: 38. 16 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God commentaries on the Song in the following centuries,36 notably Gregory of Nyssa’s among the Greeks and the highly influential Targum among the Jews,37 but works of every kind which were permeated by their influence. And although on the Christian side there would be a notable exception to the consensus on the Song,38 it was not until Humanism began to prevail in the late fifteenth century that the Song came to be read more widely at a different level. Meanwhile, it achieved its apogee through a combination of congenial influences which gave it a central place in the spiritual world of Latin Christi- anity. The same may be said for the place of the Song among the Kabbalists, for while they remained true to the Rabbinic tradition of making the Torah the focus of devotion, the Zohar, a kabbalistic work written in the late thirteenth century in Spain by Moses de Leon, gives to the Song a prominence it gives to no other book outside the Pentateuch,39 with consequences which were unprecedented for Jewish religious life. But before going on to look at the results of various influences in the history of interpretation, I should like to make some attempt to understand causes. Why is the Song of supreme importance to one soul, and quite without interest for another? Why is it revered as the most sublime of all biblical books in one period and regarded as a collection of love lyrics in another? Why is its emphasis profoundly focused on the feminine aspect of the human race, and in what sense is this emphasis to be understood? In order to suggest possible answers to these and similar questions I should like to indicate a way of understanding a characteristic of both the biblical literature and the individual temperament––already touched on––which, I believe, sheds light on the varying fortunes of the Song in the history of its two thousand years of interpretation. But since this characteristic involves a binary distinction it will not, I am afraid, resonate with all readers––as experience has shown. Nevertheless, too much hangs on it for it to be omitted altogether.40

36 See Mark W. Elliott (2000), who lists twenty-two writers up to the mid-fifth century who read the Song Christologically. 37 Since this Targum is more a commentary than a translation, and since Philip Alexander regards it as being by a single author, it can be compared with actual commentaries. See Alexander’s Introduction, passim. 38 Theodore of Mopsuestia (350–428) was a rationalist who argued that the Song was written by Solomon to celebrate his marriage to Pharaoh’s daughter (1 Kgs. 7: 8; 9: 16 and 24), a view for which he was condemned in 553––ironically at the same Council of Constantinople that condemned Origen. 39 See the translation in five vols. of The Zohar, first published 1934. The more recent compil- ation in three volumes by Isaiah Tishby (1989) hardly cites the Song at all. 40 I recall Professor Barton telling me that he had heard someone on the radio quoting a saying to the effect that the world is divided into two types of people: one type believes that the world is divided into two types of people; the other type does not! I apologize to those who belong in the latter category, namely, according to my distinction, ‘Friends’. Introduction 17

5. The ‘Bride’ and ‘Friend’ distinction

All things are twofold, one opposite the other, and he has made nothing incomplete. One conﬁrms the good things of the other, and who can have enough of beholding his glory?

These lines from the Wisdom of Ben Sira (42: 24–5) have many applications, in particular, the twofold nature of sentient beings, especially of the human race, as we read in Genesis: ‘male and female created he them’ (1: 27). And since this same verse states that God made the human race in his image, we may understand that these two aspects represent the one nature of God, inherent in the creation, and manifest at every level from the simplest to the most subtle. From this latter end of the spectrum the twofold nature of the human race may be considered not so much in terms of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ but in terms of male and female principles. And this perspective allows us to detect these principles in Scripture itself: in biblical figures, in biblical accounts, and in biblical books. For there are figures whose function–– irrespective of gender––may be understood to be either ‘male’ or ‘female’; accounts which manifest the stamp of one principle or the other; and books which are similarly marked. Moreover, this twofoldedness of all things is also reflected in periods of history, some periods revealing themselves to be predominately male while others manifest the marks of the female principle. Further to this idea is another, closely related. Beyond the response of the creatures to each other is the response of the creatures to their Creator, and it is here that observation leads to the discovery that there is not one type of response to God, varied according to the individual, but two which are distinct, and can be detected in the portrayal of many Old Testament figures while they emerge explicitly in the New in the figures of John the Baptist and Mary––the ‘Friend’ and the ‘Bride’, that is to say, the biblical equivalents of the male and female principles. In the Old Testament Moses is pure ‘Bride’ in relation to God in, for instance, his unwillingness to act (Exod. 3: 7–4: 13)––a characteristic of the Bride temperament which desires not so much to act as to be acted in. Among the prophets, there is not a hint of bridal imagery in Amos, whereas Hosea, no less in anguish about the sins of the people, is a principal witness to the metaphor of marriage between God and Israel. The perception that the biblical literature may yield two radically different accounts of the same myth, one dominated by the masculine principle and the other by the female, is expounded by Ilana Pardes in an essay, ‘The Biography of Ancient Israel: Imagining the Birth of a Nation’, in which she 18 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God examines the contrasts between the deliverance of the children of Israel from Egypt in Exodus, and the adoption of the foundling by God in Ezekiel 16. In Exodus the bond is between a father and his firstborn son (Exod. 4: 22), while in Ezekiel the adoption is construed from the beginning as a marital bond between God and the nation. Pardes goes on to observe that ‘the representation of the nation as female introduces an erotic aspect in the relationship of God and the nation’.41 It is this ‘erotic’ aspect of the relationship between God and his people, when represented as female, which is described in sexual language, positively in some strands of the Wisdom literature, negatively in the prophets when they are inveighing against the idolatry of the people. Two examples of the latter may stand for many, the first from Jeremiah: I have seen your abominations, your adulteries and neighings, your shameless prostitutions on the hills of the land. Woe to you, O Jerusalem! How long before you are made clean? (13: 27) And the second from Hosea: For a spirit of whoredom has led them astray, and they have played the whore, forsaking their God. They sacrifice on the tops of mountains, and make offerings upon the hills . . . Therefore your daughters play the whore, and your brides commit adultery. (4: 12, 13) If the imprecations of the prophets show us the reality, the bride of the Song shows us the ideal: ‘You are all fair, my companion; there is no spot in you’ (4: 7). This ideal was to be manifested in the New Testament in the figure of Mary, the virgin daughter of Israel who would not play the whore, and whose purity is important less in the moral realm than in the theological. Thus the verse, ‘You are all fair . . . there is no spot in you’, was applied to Mary and she became central in Christian interpretations of the Song. That John the Baptist shares a place with Mary is clear from the Gospel accounts which alternate between Mary and John in their opening chapters, giving weight to the Orthodox Deeisis where Mary and John the Baptist are

41 1997: 34. I am grateful to Dr Sara Sviri for pointing me to this paper. Introduction 19 equal figures on either side of Jesus. A verse in the Gospel of John indicates the essential character of each: He who has the bride is the bridegroom; but the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly because of the bridegroom’s voice . . . (3: 29) But, on the negative side, if the tendency of the Bride is to turn harlot, the tendency of the Friend is to turn traitor: For it is not an open enemy that hath done me this dishonour; for then I could have borne it . . . But it was even thou, my companion, my guide, and mine own familiar friend. We took sweet counsel together, and walked in the house of God as friends . . . The words of his mouth were softer than butter, having war in his heart; his words were smoother than oil, and yet be they very swords. (Ps. 55: 12–15, 22. Coverdale) The Bride, then, seeks spiritual sensation, and ends up whoring after other gods; the Friend adopts a critical stance, becomes disaffected, and is finally convinced that his service to the truth consists in betraying Truth. These negative aspects have both played their part in the history of Christendom in the last few centuries, and the consequences for the Song have been to remove it from the sacred to the secular sphere where, I shall argue, in words softer than butter, smoother than oil, its truth has been betrayed in a climate of thought wholly inimical to its original inspiration. But, long before, influences, notably from Neoplatonism, wonderfully favoured the bridal response in both Christianity and Judaism.

6. Bridal imagery in the ascendant42

If the first five centuries of Christianity give an impression of being well endowed with both principles, in the second half of the first millennium the masculine principle seems to have dominated, until the all-pervasive influence of Neoplatonism facilitated a shift and created a common mood in Christianity and Judaism. In his essay, ‘Medieval Humanism’, Richard South- ern writes: In the main tradition of the early Middle Ages nearly all the order and dignity in the

42 This section draws on my1988 review article of Scholem’s Origins of the Kabbalah (1987). 20 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God world was closely associated with supernatural power. There was order in symbolism and ritual, and order in worship and sacrament, and both of them were elaborate and impressive . . . Man chieﬂy knew himself as a vehicle for divine activity . . . [He] was an abject being, except when he was clad in symbolic garments, performing symbolic and sacramental acts . . .43

Southern goes on to say that there was a sharp change of emphasis after about 1050 and that the first signs of the change were to be seen in the monasteries where ‘it took the form of a greater concentration on man and on human experience as a means of knowing God’. It was in this changed climate that the cult of the Virgin Mary began to flourish. The development of Rabbinic Judaism in the early centuries CE was marked by the dominance of the male principle which, not without exception, continued throughout the first millennium. But sometime circa the seventh century the meaning of the term Shekhinah––which had always meant simply God himself, that is, God in so far as he is present in a particular place or at a particular event––began to undergo a change. Early medieval Jewish philosophers saw a danger to pure monotheism in the concept of the Shekhinah as it had developed and they all, from Saadya to Maimonides, declared that the Shekhinah was God’s free creation, and therefore, as a creature, had no part in the divine being or unity of God. This prepared the way for the claim that the Shekhinah was feminine––the innovation of the Kabbal- ists. They thus introduced into the divine realm a power which they variously described as the Heavenly Mother, Matron, Queen, Bride and Wife of the Godhead, Princess, the Divine Daughter, and other similar titles. Devotion to Mary likewise underwent a development. Mary had been important in Christian theology from the beginning, but the controversy in the fifth century, for instance, over her title of Theotokos, Mother of God, was concerned with safeguarding the divinity of her Son and was not centred on any symbolism of her own. But now, in the monasteries, exquisite antiphons and hymns, largely drawn from the Song of Songs, were being created in her honour, while in art and architecture she becomes central, as witnessed by the great cathedrals dedicated to her which were rising in these years––Chartres, Paris, Amiens, Laon, Rouen, Rheims. If at one level the cult of the Virgin Mary expressed itself in stories of the miraculous, at another Mary emerged by the twelfth century as the symbol par excellence of the contemplative life. Similarly, in Jewish popular devotion and in the celebration of the liturgy, the Shekhinah becomes the mystical Ecclesia of Israel, identified with the Sabbath, which becomes Queen Sabbath, the symbol of the soul, the bride of

43 1970: 32ff. Introduction 21 the Song of Songs, the Virgin Israel who, at the pilgrim festival of Pentecost (Shavuot), is married to the Bridegroom God. But first and foremost the emergence of the Shekhinah as a feminine principle coincides, as with Mary, with an upsurge of desire for the contemplative life.44 In neither case does the feminine principle represent Woman: it represents the eros which is at the heart of the contemplation of God. Eros is the subject of Denys Turner’s book, Eros and Allegory: Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs. In a chapter called ‘Why Eros?’ he notes the wide range of those who have used the language of eros in preference to the language of friendship in relation to God: Nor is this the language of some secondary tradition, for among the great teachers of the Christian West there is hardly any rival, unless it be the language of friendship preferred by a minority, though admittedly that minority includes authorities of the stature of Aelred of Rievaulx and Thomas Aquinas. The language of eros is the language of Augustine and Gregory, of Bernard and William of Saint Thierry, of Alan of Lille; it is the language of Hadewijch and Mechtild of Magdeburg, of Francis and Bonaventure, but equally of Eckhart and the Rhineland School, of Jean Gerson and of Denys the Carthusian, of Nicholas of Cusa and of Catherine of Genoa. Beyond the Middle Ages proper, this language pervades the thought of Luis de Leon, of John of the Cross and Teresa.45 Among these great names, Bernard’s is the greatest in regard to his sermons on the Song in the period at which we are looking,46 though some fine commentaries were produced by a number of other Cistercian writers, notably William of St Thierry and John of Ford. With them the language of eros was safe, but it came to be used excessively in the later Middle Ages, and when the influences which had sustained such language were on the decline the whole panoply of nuptial metaphors began to evoke a reaction. In a study of the influence of the liturgy, especially the ‘Common of Virgins’, on the Middle English poem Pearl, Santha Battacharji refers to the female saints ‘whom the liturgy has depicted in such relentlessly bridal terms’,47 a description which sufficiently conveys that, like honey in the verse from Proverbs (25: 16), one should not eat too much of it. But, of the language of eros, from its most inspired to its least, the later Middle Ages did eat too much, and satiety, as Prov. 27: 7 warns it will, turned to loathing.

44 See Scholem 1987: 229–30. 45 1995: 26. 46 That William of St Thierry was arguably a greater theologian than Bernard should be noted. See Andrew Louth 1984. 47 1995: 41. 22 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

7. The rise of the ‘Friend’ psychology

That Luther represented the Friend type of response and maintained it with a rare degree of consistency, and that he abhorred with equal consistency the least taste or sign of the Bride type, is manifest in everything he wrote. He was the faithful Friend––an Amos, a John the Baptist––against the faithless Bride of his day, the Roman Church, the harlot who played under every tree (Jer. 3: 6), whose filthiness was in her skirts (Lam. 1: 9), and who, though outwardly beautiful, was all extortion and rapacity within (Matt. 23: 25). It is only necessary to read the Papal Bulls on Indulgences,48 Luther’s attacks on them, and the papal attacks on him, to be convinced that right was very much on Luther’s side, and that he had, indeed, been raised up by God to combat the corruption into which Latin Christianity had fallen. Nevertheless, the triumph of Lutheranism, and the consequent separation of the Bride and the Friend, was, spiritually speaking, a tragic loss for Western Christendom, for these two aspects of the one Body then developed separately, each generating progeny which lacked the vital element the other would have provided. During the years 1530–1 Luther gave ten lectures in Latin on the Song of Songs. In them the loss is clearly revealed. Luther begins his Preface: ‘Many commentators have produced all manner of interpretations of this song of King Solomon’s––and they have been both rather unwholesome and unnatural.’49 In his introductory chapter he specifies several of these types, though it is significant that the Church, the Bride of Christ is not even mentioned among them. Then, eschewing all previous types, he proposes to pursue a new path. The Song of Songs is, he says, like its immediate predecessor, Ecclesiastes, ‘an encomium of the political order, which in Solomon’s day flourished in sublime peace’.50 And so from this Song of Songs, which Solomon sang about his own state, there springs as it were a common song for all states which are ‘the people of God’, that is, which possess the Word of God and worship reverently, which acknowledge and truly believe that the power of governments is established and ordained by God and that through this power God preserves peace, justice and discipline, punishes the guilty, defends the innocent, etc.51 This certainly pursued a new path in Song interpretations, and justifies Anders Nygren’s claim that Luther succeeded in freeing agape from its

48 Conveniently set out in Rupp and Drewery 1970, Part 2: The Indulgence Controversy, 11–68. 49 Vol. 15, 1972: 191, except that intempestius et prodigiosas in the original seems better translated ‘unwholesome and unnatural’ instead of ‘immature and strange’. 50 Ibid. 195. 51 Ibid. Preface, 192. Introduction 23 entanglement with eros, as we saw above. But it is a striking example of the way Song commentaries reflect the times in which they are written. The godly kingdom, the ideal community, the strong state, civic peace, wisdom in rulers and obedience unbounding in the ruled, these were the ideals set forth in contemporary literature by humanists as varied as Machiavelli (The Prince, 1513, but not published until 1532), Thomas More (Utopia, 1516), and Rab- elais (The Abbey of Thelema in Gargantua, 1535), while Luther’s younger contemporary, Calvin (Institutes, 1536), wrote instructions for ‘godly magis- trates’ in terms hardly distinguishable from passages in Luther’s Commentary on the Song. So that while writers on Luther rightly maintain that he was not much influenced by Humanism, his commentary on the Song is a notable exception. Luther’s exegesis is often interesting but it does indeed lack all trace of eros, human or divine, which inevitably follows from representing Solomon as the symbol of the people, namely, the Bride, for the greater part of the work, so providing masculine pronouns where feminine ones are expected. Thus Luther’s interpretation is deprived of the interplay between the male and female figures, though there are places later on in the work where he yields to the nature of the Song itself so that the Bride is neither Solomon nor the magistrate but ‘she’. The impression left on the reader, nevertheless, is of a dominant masculine principle, in striking contrast to the Song itself. Here is the loss. The contemplative, intuitive, mystical dimension has been banished and any suggestion of it is encountered with indignation. On the verse, ‘Who is this coming up from the wilderness?’ (3: 6), Luther comments: ‘This text has been made into a hymn concerning the blessed Virgin––obviously so that there may nowhere be any lack of evidence by which to establish the incredible ignorance and blindness of our adversaries! There is no reference here to the Blessed Virgin. It is the Jewish kingdom as it existed under Solomon which is described in such elegant and poetic figures.’52 The rejection of Mary as a symbol of the people is not due to an aversion to symbols since he has made Solomon the symbol of the people. Nor is it because Luther rejects the person of Mary. As Mother he venerates her; the Magnificat inspired one of his most beautiful treatises, ‘a pearl among his interpretations of the Scriptures’.53 Like Barth, it is as Bride that Luther rejects Mary because bridal symbolism was wholly alien to his temperament.

52 Ibid. 225. 53 Bernhard Lohse 1987: 130. But even in this treatise warmth of devotion is somewhat chilled by Luther’s comment: ‘Now in all of scripture I do not know anything that serves such a purpose [to help a ruler rule] as this sacred hymn of the most blessed Mother of God’ Vol. 21, 1956: 298. 24 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God For the same reason he inveighed against religious vows. Vows belong to the bridal relationship, not to that of friends. Consequently, Luther misunder- stood the Religious Life, and his treatise, The Judgement of Martin Luther on Monastic Vows,54 clearly reveals this misunderstanding. For one thing, Luther was not, contrary to most references to him, including those to himself, a monk. He was a friar, and although the diﬀerence may seem hardly worthy of note to anyone unfamiliar with the Religious Life, and had in any case been almost wholly obscured in Luther’s day, the diﬀerence is important. Luther joined the Order of Augustinian Friars in Erfurt ‘because it represented the same method of philosophical and theological scholarship as the university’s faculty of liberal arts’.55 His rapid progress through to priesthood, and to successively important academic appointments, was that of a friar, a particularly brilliant one, not that of a monk whose life, rather, is centred on the choir, the singing or chanting of the monastic liturgy, that is, the opus Dei, to which, as St Benedict wrote in his Rule, ‘nothing is to be preferred’. That hordes of monks by the sixteenth century were nevertheless prefer- ring the life of learning in the academy to the work of God in the monastery, and were competing with friars at all the great universities, does not alter the fact that Luther himself was not formed in monastic life and tradition. But it does justify his attack which, whatever the inconsistencies in it,56 makes clear that men57 were entering the Religious Life for reasons quite other than the call of God. And when it is presumed possible to live a life vowed to God without the prior call, such a life will be barren and bear no fruit. But the negative consequence of Luther’s compelling tract was not that it emptied the monasteries but that it generated a cast of mind which rejects the possibility of a call to the creature to respond to the realm of divine eros––the realm of the Song of Songs. ‘Suddenly, while I still had other thoughts, God in a wondrous way threw me into marriage with Katharine von Bora, the nun.’58 Luther’s marriage to a nun was certainly as rich in symbolism as the action of any Old Testament prophet. It can be seen both as the end of the barren Bride and the beginning of the faithful Friend psychology throughout the Protestant world. But it was precisely this psychology which yielded to the Enlightenment and became barren in its turn. Gerhard Ebeling puts it thus: ‘The religious content [of the

54 Vol. 44, 1966. 55 Lohse 1987: 23. 56 For instance, the ‘snoring, yawning, shameful laziness’ of the monks comes under condemnation (vol. 44, 1966: 260), while some pages later (271) they are condemned because ‘day and night they wear themselves out with these works [since] they believe that by doing [them] they can attain what the saints attained by faith alone’. 57 The freedom the friars enjoyed did not apply to women religious. The friars were trained to preach. 58 Heinrich Bornkamm 1983: 406. Introduction 25 Reformation] was conserved as something historically given and remained something external and foreign to faith, instead of being speculatively tested as to its truth. As a result the germ of an unspiritual mode of comprehension entered the freedom of the spirit.’59

8. From Luther to Herder

When, in the next century, the initial impact of Lutheranism had somewhat weakened, the mystical interpretation of the Song revived and continued to be expounded on both sides of the divide, the division until the late eighteenth century being between the ‘Bride’ type and the ‘Friend’ rather than between Catholic and Protestant. In his catena of quotations from ancient and medieval sources on the Song, R. F. Littledale concludes his survey with John Cocceius (1603–69), whom he describes as a ‘German Protestant theologian of enormous learning and diligence, and of great piety [who] recalls the spirit of the best medievalists by his remarkable gift of mystical appreciation’.60 The influence of Cocceius, indeed, led to the Pietists, and it was among these, during the last half of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth, that there was a strong revival of bridal spirituality. In the same years Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was pouring forth the equivalent in the realm of music. Albert Schweitzer, in his great two-volume biography, J. S. Bach, writes that among the hymn-writers of the time were two mystics, Philipp Nicolai and Johann Franck, to whom Bach felt himself particularly drawn ‘for they, like himself, were steeped in the atmosphere of the Song of Songs’.61 In England, analogous to the German Pietists, the success of the Wesleys owed much to the bridal strand, the hymns of Charles (1707–88) especially being redolent with desire and the longing for union with the beloved Saviour. In Wales, the letters, poems and hymns of Ann Griffiths (1776–1805) are full of verbal allusions to the Song, and provide an outstanding example of a mystical response to the Old Testament from a background of that evangelical movement of the eighteenth century which in Wales took the form of Calvinistic Methodism.62 In America the Song continued to provide a favourite basis for spiritual writing by New England Puritans,63 and much more might be adduced on the Protestant side.

59 1974: 18. 60 1869: xxxix. 61 1911: 11. 62 See A. M. Allchin 1987 and 2005. 63 See Ann Matter 1990: 186, and 197 n. 33, where she points to a study on American Puritan fascination with the Song of Songs by Prudence L. Steiner, ‘A Garden of Spices in New England: John Cotton’s and Edward Taylor’s Use of the Song of Songs’. 26 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God But gradually the spiritual interpretation died, abetted by the lack of liturgical sustenance. The Bodleian catalogues leave the impression that 1750 or thereabouts was a watershed after which commentaries on the Song either took a confidently secular line or struggled ineffectually against the tide to maintain the traditional view of the Song as a prophetic account of the love between Christ and the Church. By 1611, when the Authorized Version was published, the emergence of humanism in the previous century had already produced a number of dissident voices on the meaning of the Song,64 and the revisers thought it desirable to provide running heads and short summaries before each chapter of a kind to guard the tradition for the faithful. (For example, the summaries to chapter 4: ‘Christ setteth forth the graces of the church. He sheweth his love to her. The church prayeth to be made fit for his presence.’) The continuing struggle suggests that for many they worked, but ultimately such suggestions can only be sustained if they correspond to something within, otherwise, their being imposed from without leads, sooner or later, to disbelief and rejection. The spirit of the times was, in any case, propitious to religious disbelief, and in Germany a secular interpretation of the Song was warmly welcomed.

9. From Herder to the present

In J. C. O’Neill’s book, The Bible’s Authority: A Portrait Gallery of Thinkers from Lessing to Bultmann, J. G. Herder (1744–1803) is the ﬁfth of twenty-one. O’Neill describes him as a captivating man of exceptional culture who, as a leader of the poetical movement, exercised enormous inﬂuence on Goethe. For Herder, O’Neill tells us, the Bible had to be read as a human book, for that is its purpose, to educate the human race in humanity. There is something to be said for this view in the way Herder himself puts it: So you can certainly believe that the more humanly (in the best sense of the word human) you read the Bible, the nearer you come to the purpose of its Originator, who created men in his own image; and in all works and good deeds where he shows himself to us as God, he acts for us in a human way.65 But O’Neill skilfully leads the reader to see that if Herder succeeded for

64 The best known being Sebastian Castellio (1515–63), whose humanism brought him into conflict with Calvin, notably by his rejection of the Song from the canon, and later by his condemnation of the execution of the heretical Michael Servetus, who was arrested by order of Calvin and subsequently burnt at the stake in 1553. In another context I would be thankful for those aspects of humanism which gradually brought freedom from the tyranny of the religious and social hierarchies––though other tyrannies were to take their place. 65 Cited in O’Neill 1991: 71. Introduction 27 countless people of his generation it was because those ‘who drank in Herder drank in a powerful sense that they were the elect . . . they themselves were embodiments of the ideal towards which everything tended. This sense of election gave those who possessed it a sure self-confidence which had revolutionary consequences.’ Thus, ‘Herder’s ideas produced strange results in the long run which he would not have welcomed.’66 For the present purpose, however, it is enough to quote a passage from John D. Baildam’s book, Paradisal Love: Johann Gottfried Herder and the Song of Songs: [Herder] severely shook the allegorical and mystical tradition by failing to find in the Song of Songs any meaning other than the obvious, literal one, and by denouncing the allegorizers who, in his opinion, contravened established rules of linguistic and literary analysis. Exceptionally, however, he was still able to justify the place of the Song of Songs in the Bible through his unique interpretation of it as a divinely inspired work of innocence, chastity and beauty.67 It is possible to see in this theme of ‘innocence, chastity and beauty’, epit- omizing the ideal of womanhood that would dominate––indeed, tyrannize–– the nineteenth century, that the repression of divine eros, contrary to what is widely thought, leads to the repression of human eros, and consequently to reactions which in their turn exercise an influence no less tyrannical. A writer who cunningly provoked a reaction to the interpretation of chaste love was Renan, who wrote a commentary on the Song68 which, in titillating tones, tempted the next generation to bring to the work an altogether bolder mind. His style is well conveyed in the opening paragraph of the boldest of his successors: Renan says that Canticles, commonly known as the Song of Solomon, and Ecclesiastes are a few profane pages which, by some curious accident, have found their way into ‘that strange and admirable volume termed the Bible’; they are just like a love-ditty and a little essay of Voltaire which have gone astray among the folios of a theological library.69 The writer of this passage, Paul Haupt, pioneered a sexual interpretation which for graphic, physical detail has not been surpassed, as far as I am aware.70 His rearrangement of the order of verses, for the purpose of facilitating the

66 Ibid. 77. 67 1999: 128. This passage echoes a similar one in Pope 1977: 131–2. 68 On Renan’s Le Cantique des Cantiques (1861) Joüon, in his commentary on the Song, writes: ‘La traduction est élégante et infidèle’ (1909: 105. All references to Joüon are to this work). 69 Paul Haupt 1902: 17. 70 Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams had been published in 1900 but was virtually ignored for several years. It is not clear that Haupt could have been influenced by Freud. Reaction to Victorian repression was in the air, and Freud, in any case, had several notable predecessors. 28 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God sexual interpretation, drew from Pope the comment that ‘Haupt was obviously concerned lest the unimaginative reader miss some of the erotic allusions’ (41). Haupt was prodigiously learned, but often to little point. For instance, on the word ‘purple’ in the Song (3: 10 and 7: 5) he writes that the colour is often used for black in Greek; that Anakreon and Lucian––cited in Greek––speak of purple hair; that the famous Tyrian purple was a dark dusky colour; that Pliny––cited in Latin––quotes Homer on the subject; and that Homer, therefore, calls the blood ‘purple’, for which he gives a reference to the Iliad. But on what the word is doing in the Song he has nothing to say. That the secular interpretation of the Song has escaped being read critically in regard to the basic assumption that it concerns human lovers, which has held sway since Herder, is particularly striking in S. R. Driver’s An Introduc- tion to the Literature of the Old Testament in its 1897 edition. Driver waxes lyrical about the advantages of the critical approach and he rejoices at its remarkable progress, noting that ‘the cogency of the reasonings upon which at least the broader and more important critical conclusions rest, are seen to be irresistible’ (xv). But when he comes to the Song he espouses the then current romantic view, according to which there are not two protagonists but three, the wicked Solomon, the Shulamite maiden––‘a paragon of modesty and beauty’ (447)––and her faithful shepherd lover. The advantage of this view, Driver claims, is that, if the poem exhibits only two principal characters, it is destitute of ethical purpose and a hidden meaning has to be postulated in order to justify its place in the canon (451). However, if the theory has advantages on that score it has problems on others, and Driver himself expects that some surprise may be felt at the amount which has, ‘as it were’, to be read between the lines (438). What may be deduced from this work is the assumption that, providing the Song (and not only the Song, of course) is treated in secular terms, then the treatment may be regarded as ‘critical’. And this is the assumption on which commentaries, introductions, articles, and so on, have been based throughout the Continent and the English-speaking world since the rise of historical criticism. But the Song is not a secular work and does not yield its meaning to a secular interpretation. And yet ‘religious’ interpretations of the Song have in recent centuries, until the secular one took over, been among the most death-dealing of all, which brings me to Marvin Pope’s magnum opus on the Song, published in 1977, a work to which I have had constant recourse––as the following pages bear witness––and, reservations notwithstanding, have come to appreciate for the thoroughness of its discussions on individual words. Pope was himself a Christian who departed this life in the very place he Introduction 29 would have wished to be, in church. But his animadversions against religious interpretations of the Song provide very nearly the chief characteristic of his commentary. He was a man of his time, with a bawdy and irreverent humour, at his happiest (though not at his best) drawing out obscene meanings from the text, and who embraced the Zeitgeist with gusto but with blinkering effect on himself and on the reader. However, long acquaintance with the work reveals an underlying ambivalence, a capacity for religious perception which is only permitted expression once he has blown to bits any possibility of a ‘religious’ or, as I prefer, a mystical interpretation. This ambivalence is nowhere revealed more clearly than in the opening two paragraphs of his commentary. In the first he denies the necessity of finding the key to a work which was long ago likened to a lock for which the key had been lost, for, he goes on, ‘the door to the understanding of the Song was not locked, nor even shut, but has been wide open to any who dared to see and enter’. The problem, he writes, has been a psychological aversion to the obvious, and interpreters who dared to acknowledge the plain sense were assailed as enemies of truth and decency. Thus, he concludes this first paragraph, ‘the allegorical charade persisted for centuries with only sporadic protests’. Having laid out his primary position, Pope then goes on to undermine it. He notes the growing tendency to reject allegory and freely to admit the application of the Song to human physical love, and he reports a conversation with ‘that learned and devoted churchman’ Père de Vaux, who confided he had just revised the captions of the Song for the new edition of La Bible de Jérusalem, eliminating allegorical interpretations in favour of human love. This, writes Pope, is admittedly a move in the right direction. But he goes on:

Nevertheless, the instincts and insights that from the beginning led both Christian and Jewish exegetes to relate the language of the Song to divine and superhuman love were based on internal evidence largely ignored by recent interpreters. The many years Pope spent working on the text of the Song revealed to him that the internal evidence pointed in precisely the direction his opening paragraph derides. But the scorn Pope, and others, have poured on religious interpretations of the Song will bear fruit if in consequence future interpretations are wrung from internal evidence by textual work, aided by ‘instincts and insights’, and not imposed according to the fashions of the day, whether religious or secular. If we look at trends in works from the Continent we will see that, at least in those countries with a Catholic background, there are signs in some writers on the Song of another dimension emerging. There is not much evidence of anything similar emerging in German scholarship on the Song, which I will look at first because it is regarded as de rigueur on the Song as on the books of 30 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God the Bible generally. But what does it mean to regard as de rigueur a hermeneutical approach to the Song which, at least since Herder, has been wholly humanistic? The Hebrew text is thus necessarily subordinated to a weight of assumptions consequent upon a historical process, rendering the text even more opaque and difficult to read than it already is. Thus, to favour German commentaries as a key to engaging with the Song means little less than to disempower the original text by reading it in the terms of a culture which, since the Reformation, and especially over the last three hundred years or so, has become, in my view, inimical to a true understanding of the nature of the Song. That an occasional commentator, concerned to find a deeper meaning in a biblical book, attempts to see something more in the Song is as true in Germany as elsewhere, but such efforts hardly touch the homogeneity of German exegesis on the Song. A commentary which decisively reinforced this homogeneity is the particularly influential one by Gillis Gerleman, published in 1965. In it he affirms the view of the Song as being a collection of love lyrics written with erotic intent from within a high cultural milieu. His acceptance of a Solomonic authorship has not been widely followed, notwithstanding the plausible case he makes for it, especially in regard to Egyptian influence, but otherwise the commentary has been criticized on details only. A second edition, published in 1981, doubtless takes these criticisms into account.71 Othmar Keel contributed a major commentary on the Song in 1986, and a second edition in 1992, quoted here in Chapter 1, where a footnote (20) indicates both the considerable interest and, from my standpoint, the serious shortcomings of his approach. Hans-Peter Müller has written extensively on the Song from the 1970s until his death in 2004. The Introduction to his 1992 commentary contextualizes the Song in the urban elite of third-century Hellenistic Jerusalem, and even if the origin of the Song was earlier––a possible nod to Gerleman––the final collecting and editing of the individual texts was probably, Müller thinks, indebted to the stimulus of powerful Egyptian Alexandria, in particular to the cultured and pleasure-loving court of Diadochus Ptolemaios II. Thus, ‘there is also the profusion of a vocabulary of prosperity and luxury distributed over nearly the whole collection, which points to centuries-long world trade relations and a relaxation of religious/ethical commitment’.72 An influence from Alexandria on the poet seems very probable, affinities with the Idylls of

71 This edition has not been available to me, but I understand it contains some significant modifications. 72 ‘kommt die Fülle eines Wohlstands- und Luxusvokabulars, verteilt auf fast die ganze Sammlung, was auf jahrhundertelage Welthandelsbeziehungen, dazu auf eine Lockerung religiös-ethischer Bindungen’. Hans-Peter Müller 1992: 3. Introduction 31 Theocritus, to mention only one influence, having long been noted. That the Song manifests any relaxation of religious/ethical commitment can only in my view be postulated as a consequence of reading it through modern spectacles. The most recent major work on the Song in German is by an Israeli scholar, Yair Zakovitch (2004), and is an enlarged version of his commentary in the Hebrew series ‘Mikra le-Yisrael’ of 1992. In the intervening twelve years Zakovitch has augmented his original study and produced a book which engages with every aspect of modern interpretations except, significantly, modern Jewish on ancient Jewish mystical literature. At a rough count, the bibliography lists about 500 items, articles, and books on the Song, mostly in German, but also in English, French, and Italian. Section 1 of his Introduction, ‘Das Hohelied––eine Sammlung von Liebesliedern’, shows the Song to be a collection of love lyrics, while in Section 32, ‘Die Voraussetzungen für die allegorische Deutung’ (‘Preconditions for the allegorical interpretation’), Zakovitch sets forth with exemplary thoroughness all the biblical texts which justify an allegorical reading of the Song but from the standpoint that such a reading is a misreading. With the same thoroughness he sets forth the Rabbinic texts but without deriving any illumination from them or, indeed, providing any. Recent years, especially in France, Italy, and Spain, have shown a general trend towards interpreting the Song on both levels, human and divine. I am inclined to view this trend as the attempt to have it both ways, but it does at least show some response to the ‘internal evidence’. It may also show a response to that most beautiful but disastrous document, Humanae Vitae. An early example is provided by Raymond Jacques Tournay, who, with André Feuillet, first collaborated with André Robert in a major commentary on the Song based largely on the Targum.73 Subsequently Tournay has written several important biblical studies, a number of them on the Song, and in 1982 he published a commentary, Quand Dieu parle aux hommes le langage de l’amour which, in the words of the blurb to the English translation (1988), ‘brings together two formerly divergent interpretations of the Song of Songs, one emphasizing eroticism and the other allegory’. The ‘eroticism’ is that of a Catholic cleric having become aware of the damage hard-line Catholicism on sex has wrought. But Tournay is full of insights into the biblical nature of the Song, some of which I have been very glad to use. At the present time the Theology Faculty of the University of Louvain is, I believe, foremost in showing a sustained interest in the Cantique des

73 Robert, Tournay, and Feuillet 1963. References to this work are as follows: RTF followed by page number. 32 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God cantiques, notably Jean-Marie Auwers, whose work is of particular importance for the extent to which he has written continuously on the Song and encouraged others to do so. To give only one example, the collection of essays he has edited entitled Regards croisés sur le Cantique des cantiques (2005) covers the range of interpretations, beginning with an essay he has written with William Gallas, ‘Les Pères devant le Cantique des Cantiques’. Auwers himself remains open to the anthropological approach, but he nevertheless regards the allegorical interpretation as expressed by the Fathers as being of far too great an interest and beauty to be lost, and he is thus keeping alive an understanding of the Song which, in the academic world, is otherwise dead.74 Anne-Marie Pelletier’s Lectures du Cantique des Cantiques should also be mentioned, but she is dealing rather with the history of interpretation than with the text of the Song itself. Nevertheless her work on the Song in lectures and articles, one of which is included in Regards croisés sur le Cantique des cantiques, as also in an earlier collection of essays,75 continues to be inﬂuential.76 Another contributor to the collection Regards croisés is Jean Emmanuel de Ena OCD, whose doctoral thesis, Sens et interprétations du Cantique des Can- tiques, was published in the previous year (2004). In this work de Ena studies the very diﬀerent interpretations of Origen, William of Saint-Thierry, and John of the Cross among the earlier interpreters, and André Robert, Othmar Keel, and Gianfranco Ravasi among moderns. But, as the blurb rightly informs the reader, this author analyses both text and commentators ‘à la lumière de l’herméneutique contemporaine’ and does not, consequently cast the kind of light this commentator regards as essential. Of works on the Song from Italy, that by the biblical scholar Gianfranco Ravasi in three volumes, Commento al Cantico dei Cantici (1992), is evidently extremely impressive. He has also, it appears, written two further works on the Song, both in 2004. But none of these have been available to me, and I am thus grateful to de Ena’s book which describes Ravasi’s approach to the Song in detail. For Ravasi, the Divine Canticle is indeed divine in the sense that he sees the love between the male and the female as symbolizing divine love. De Ena’s account suggests to this reader that Ravasi is another Catholic cleric

74 This statement needs qualifying. There is a lot of fine work going on in the academic world on the interpretation of the Song by the Fathers but it has for aim the elucidation of the thought of the Father studied and is not regarded as throwing any light on the Song itself. Auwers reads the Fathers on the Song because he is interested in the Song. 75 Les nouvelles voies de l’exégèse: en lisant le Cantique des cantiques (2002) being the papers given at a conference organized by the ACFEB (Association catholique française pour l’étude de la Bible). This book has not been available to me, though the list of contributors was obtained for me, with a description of each chapter, by kindness of the Bodleian staff. 76 On Paul Ricoeur, for instance. In his chapter, ‘The Nuptial Metaphor’, discussed above, he acknowledges the influence of her major work on his thought about the Song. Introduction 33 who is anxious to do justice to human love in the most exalted terms and to relate it to divine love.77 But since Catholic clerics are not, by definition, married, their exaltation of human love introduces a level of unreality into their exposition of the Song. In 1993 Giovanni Garbini published a commentary, already mentioned (Introduction §1). After reading the blurb, which concludes that the Song is ‘the most recent but also the most important of the books of the Hebrew Bible’, I approached it with considerable expectations which, however, soon became confused, and finally dashed. That Garbini exemplifies the term ‘maverick’ does not, in my view, weigh against him. But his bizarre conclusions do. For instance, he interprets the links with Proverbs 1–9 as the polemic of ‘love’ against ‘wisdom’. The female speaker he divides among three: first a member of Solomon’s harem, second a ‘free woman’, and third a prostitute. About this last he observes that only prostitutes have the capacity to love (‘soltanto le prostitute sono capace di amare’, 332). And yet, in a section of the final chapter, Garbini makes a number of interesting links with the Gospel and First Letter of John, showing the influence of the Song on these works. There is certainly wheat in his commentary, but the weeds, as in the parable (Matt. 13: 24–30), are overwhelming. A more recent major work from Italy is by Gianni Barbiero (2004). Again, this book has not been available to me, but the combination of the publisher’s print-out and a long review in Spanish indicates Barbiero’s approach. The principal characteristic of his commentary is a concern with structure (a characteristic already seen in an article written earlier in German, ‘Die “Wagen meines edlenVolkes” (Hld 6: 12): eine strukturelle Analyse’), with which the reviewer (Victor Morla Asienso 2006), otherwise enthusiastic, cannot agree, as he understands the Song as love lyrics stuck together. Barbiero posits a single author, the cultural background the love poems of Mesopota- mia, Egypt, and Greece, and the historical background the Hellenistic period, but not earlier than 220. He favours a literal reading, while insisting on the necessity of recovering the theological dimension of the Song, for which the poem must be read against the backdrop of the whole Bible, especially the First Testament. In Spain, the University of Navarra has produced a translation and commentary on the Song (2001) which is a particularly attractive example of having it both ways. The basic assumption is that the Song concerns human love, but the spousal covenant between God and Israel is so fully expounded

77 It seems probable that Ravasi is behind a passage in Pope Benedict’s Encyclical Letter Deus Caritas Est (2006) in which the Pope uses the Hebrew word dodim––for which see §2.4 (namely, Chapter 2, Section 4), ‘The pre-Masoretic evidence’. 34 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God that the reader cannot fail to pick up the vertical dimension quite as much as the horizontal. The writer of the review of Barbiero mentioned above, Victor Morla Asen- sio, has written a major commentary, Poemas de Amor y de Deseo: Cantar de los Cantares (2004) which, as the title indicates, focuses on ‘las excellencias del amor humano en todas sus manifestaciones’. Another major work by Jesús Luzarraga, Cantar de los Cantares: Sendas del amor (2005), expounds the Song as being a sapiential work about love between a male and a female, though the author, in common with the general trend, does allow, towards the end of a long book, that there is also a transcendent dimension. This necessarily incomplete survey of works from the Continent shows that in many cases a divine as well as a human dimension is being propounded on the Song. And certainly, those commentators are unquestionably right who make the point that every human experience of love is an experience of God. For, as the First Letter of John tells us, ‘God is love’ (4: 8). Nevertheless, it seems to me to be dangerously misleading to equate the love of two humans with the love which draws the soul to God. Humans may experience a similar ecstasy in the early stages of a relationship but, if the relationship is to last, the problem of two different psychologies adjusting to each other becomes the major factor, and it is in this adjustment, which is a lifelong matter, that the soul is purified and perfection may be gained. A remarkable corrective to the well-intentioned but unrealistic exaltation of married love which is being promoted, particularly in Catholicism, is provided by a book entitled, in its English edition, Variations on the Song of Songs. The author, Christos Yannaras, knows all about the early ecstatic stages of love, the first glance, the first touch, the first full physical engagement, but he goes on to analyse, with a relentless self-knowledge, what it is in the human person which begins subtly to spoil the relationship. He is particularly devastating when he comes to discuss the role of religion in relation to marriage: And in the service of nature is religion. It desperately latches onto the institution, hoping to be saved by it. It showers blessings on the legal ‘lifelong bond’, frantically playing nature’s game, and demanding submission to the perpetuation of the species, to the physical necessity of reproduction. Religion has never been concerned about the motivation behind the marriage union, nor has it examined it. Whether it is erotic love, or whether it is commercial exchange, or whether there is an ulterior motive of social climbing, a poisoned submission to parental choice, the marriage is blessed blindly.78

78 2005: 117–18. Introduction 35 Yannaras does, on the next page, allow that ‘Even in the most conventional marriage a mutual and spontaneous trust can grow imperceptibly––a stalac- tite and stalagmite––a discerning and alert tenderness, and ultimately love’ (119), but there is not much of such a hope to be found in this book. Why was it written? There is no prefatory material to indicate what was in the author’s mind. The book begins at once with: ‘We come to know love only in the context of failure.’ That the author is a passionate lover of God emerges in the course of the work, but is unrelated to his use of texts of the Song for chapter headings.79 It seems, then, to this reader, that Yannaras is reacting precisely to the Western interpretation of the Song now prevailing, not because it is secular but because he is concerned to show that, given the nature of fallen humanity (though he does not use that phrase), there are no grounds for arousing expectations of connubial bliss by means of the Song but, on the contrary, an urgent necessity to disabuse men and women of their illusions about themselves and about their capacity to sustain love, for which he uses the same means, the Song interpreted negatively. But, much as I should like to see this book made obligatory reading in Purgatory for modern commentators on the Song, Yannaras is even less justified, in my view, in using the Song to discuss the difficulties of human relationships than commentators are justified in using the Song to idealize human relationships. I return, then, to what I believe the poet himself intended.

10. The question of provenance

In the Western Christian tradition it is significant that, until a secular interpretation became dominant, the majority of expositors have been vowed to the celibate life,80 whether priestly or monastic. This, however, is a fact I had not expected to find reflected in the Song itself. But when I pondered the implications of the verse ‘I have taken off my tunic, how shall I put it on?’ at 5: 3, it seemed to me that only an ascetic milieu could explain it (see §7.9). Can we edge our way to a position where the likelihood of some kind of ascetic Sitz im Leben should be considered?81

79 Doubtless due to the fact that the Orthodox East, unlike the Latin West, has never used the Song liturgically. Thus there is no tradition of worship associated with the Song. 80 Gregory of Nyssa is an important exception. 81 I am aware that, as a member of a monastic community, I lay myself open to the charge I have heard made against Roland de Vaux, who was a Dominican, and the ﬁrst to propose the view that the Qumran site had been occupied by a religious community, the charge being––to borrow a famous line from another context––‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’ But it is precisely recognition which enables discoveries. 36 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God First, an essay by Robert Murray, which begins:

We all laugh at 1066 and All That, but every historian knows . . . that its playfulness is only superficial; beneath the fun lies the cast-iron cage of a nation’s mythology––the limits within which a historian will be ever audible to the public. It is no different with the history of monasticism; the public may be smaller, but the cage is no less constricting. The monastic 1066 and All That is firmly based in Egypt.82 Murray goes on to say that an ascetical life of consecrated celibacy first developed in Christianity in the Syriac-speaking Judaeo-Christian communities of Syria and Mesopotamia. Later in the essay he writes:

Though it may seem at first sight surprising to relate the origins of celibate asceticism to Judaism, what we now know of sectarian movements such as that of the Essenes in fact allows us to find an entirely credible background in the highly variegated Judaism of the period in which Christianity first spread (74). Murray here points to an article by M. Black, ‘The Tradition of Hasidaean- Essene Asceticism’ (1965), which takes us further back into the evidence for Jewish asceticism, as does an even more important study by Steven D. Fraade, ‘Ascetical Aspects of Ancient Judaism’.83 Another article, ‘The Origins of Monasticism’ by J. C. O’Neill, specifically attempts to break out of the cast-iron cage of the mythology of monastic history:

I want to argue that monasticism did not begin with Antony and Pachomius, did not begin with their allegedly less-well-organized predecessors. I want to argue that monasticism was always simply there in the life of the Church. More than that, I want to argue that Christian monasticism was a continuation of Jewish monasticism, and that Jewish monasticism reached back to the communities of the sons of the prophets. The Carmelites, who traditionally claimed to live in unbroken continuity with the prophet Elijah, had a point.84 O’Neill’s reading of the evidence provides an explanation for the preservation of more than sixty diﬀerent classical Jewish writings,85 together with all the works of Philo, while the implications of his study are particularly illuminat-

82 1975b: 65. 83 1985. This learned study makes all the points I could wish and provides support for the suggestions I am making in this section and the next. See also the section, ‘Rules of Religious Association’ in Philip Alexander’s magisterial survey ‘Post-Biblical Jewish Literature’, 2001: 804–5. The section begins: ‘Another feature of late Second Temple Judaism was the growth of private religious associations’––though what follows does not describe what is envisaged here. 84 1989: 270–1. 85 Among them the Ascension of Isaiah, the Testament of Abraham, the Assumption of Moses, the Books of Adam and Eve, the various books of Enoch and of Baruch, Joseph and Asenath, the Psalms of Solomon, The Odes of Solomon, and a host of others. Introduction 37 ing in relation to the Rabbinic emphasis on the duty to procreate. But the point I want to pick up is the view: ‘Jewish monasticism reached back to the communities of the sons of the prophets’ (2 Kgs. 2: 3). The Pietists (Hasidim, as they called themselves), or Jewish Sufis, as they ˙ have come to be called since Naftali Wieder first used the term in 1947,86 who flourished in Egypt in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, held a view of this sort. They did not, like their contemporaries, the Carmelites of Mount Carmel, claim an unbroken line from Elijah, but they did claim that what they found in Sufism was what had been practised by the prophets of Israel. Abraham Maimonides, the son of Maimonides, writes about the ways of the ancient saints of Israel ‘which are not or but little practised among our contemporaries, that have now become the practice of the Sufis of Islam, on account of the iniquities of Israel’. And again: ‘Observe then these wondrous traditions and sigh with regret over how they have been transferred from us and appeared amongst a nation other than ours whereas they have disap- peared from our midst.’87 The article by Paul Fenton, in which both passages are cited, goes on to describe these ‘wondrous traditions’: ablutions, prostrations, kneelings, sitting on mats or standing in rows during prayers, fasting, weeping, solitary retreats, celibacy, and the wearing of special woollen garments. The intense asceticism of these Jewish Sufis can be seen as an eruption of a strain in the Judaic soul which had largely lain dormant since Rabbinic Judaism effectively brought it into line to serve the purposes of procreation, as well as, if O’Neill is right, to exclude that strain which tended to defect to Christianity.88 What is of particular interest in the present context is the role of the Song of Songs in the life of these Jewish Sufis. Paul Fenton writes: ‘the Song of Songs rose to a pre-eminence in the exegesis of the Pietists, and as late as the fifteenth century a Jewish Sufi was still considering it as the most elevated path to Divine love [which no doubt] prepared the way for the immense prestige the book was to enjoy among the Qabbalists of the East’.89 This anonymous Jewish Sufi is studied by Franz Rosenthal in ‘A Judaeo-Arabic Work Under Sufic Influence’, from which comes the following:

86 See Paul Fenton 1997a. For a full account of the Jewish Suﬁs see the Introduction by Paul Fenton to his translation of Obadyah b. Abraham b. Moses Maimonides, 1981a. I am very much indebted to Dr Sara Sviri for introducing me to these Jewish Suﬁs. 87 Cited in Fenton 1997a: 90. 88 See O’Neill’s ‘Origins of Monasticism’ quoted earlier in this section. His view that communities of Jewish ascetics became Christian suggests a possible consequence of the Rabbinic emphasis on the command at Gen. 1: 28 to ‘be fruitful and multiply’, that is, to marry. 89 1981b: 50. 38 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

The pole of this book [Song of Songs] revolves about the stations and the states of the soul when it is walking in the way of God and reaches the highest level of the love of God, the Light of lights and the Secret of secrets, and when it is longing for this goal. And because this is a subtle subject and a noble matter, the Wise One (the author of Canticles) produced this in an enigmatic manner which the prophets and the wise men used to employ for important and concealed subjects and obscure and sublime matters . . . There is no doubt that the author of Canticles wanted to reach, through the self of his soul and reason, the self of the real Beloved whom the reason and the soul desire and love . . .90 The mixture of Sufism, mystical Jews and the Song of Songs is not at all surprising, on the contrary. That the Song and Sufism partake of similar characteristics has often been noticed, and a passage in the Introduction to Il Cantico dei Cantici in an Italian Bible provides an excellent example: An interesting comparison can be made with that mystical movement of Islam which was Sufism. A common theme which developed for those mystics was to celebrate the union of the soul with God under the allegory of matrimony and in terms so human as to give the impression that one deals with compositions truly erotic . . . He would make a mistake who proposed to interpret these poems independently of their context, asserting only the external appearance; as they erred all those who used them as an erotic collection.91 The Jewish Sufis, then, provide an important clue to the provenance of the Song. I envisage an ascetic community, established some time around the late second century BCE,92 to which belongs a rich collection of religious writings,93 and a tradition of practices which point to some form of proto-Merkava mysticism, links to which we shall see especially in Chapters 5 and 6; and, among the members of this community, a theological and poetic genius who is, not least, a master of mystical prayer. What more can we deduce about this hasid, as we might call him? ˙

90 1940: 446. 91 ‘Un interessante raffronto possiamo averlo in quel movimento mistico dell’Islamismo, che fu il Sufismo. Per quei mistici era divenuto tema commune celebrare l’unione dell’anima con Dio, sotto l’allegoria matrimoniale e con termine cosi umane, da dar l’illusione che si tratasse di vere composizioni erotiche . . . Sbaglierebbe chi pretendesse interpretare quei carmi fuori dai loro ambiente e solo nella veste esterna; come sbagliavano coloro che li usavano per repertorio erotico.’ La Sacra Bibbia, 1958, Rome: Edizione Paoline, 715. 92 Fraade’s account of Yitzak Fritz Baer’s ‘radical thesis’, that ‘the hasidim rishonim (“early pietists”) of Rabbinic literature were a circle of Jews who in the early Hellenistic˙ period forged a religious ideology based on the social and spiritual ideals of Israelite prophecy plus the Greek ascetic ideals of Plato, the Cynics, the Stoics, and the Pythagoreans’, might well fit (258). 93 S. Dempster has a brief but illuminating section on ancient libraries, 2001: 49–51. Introduction 39

11. The author

If I refer to a single author (with accompanying masculine pronouns as being, in the matter of gender, historically more probably a male rather than a female writer 94), this is not because I am certain concerning a single author, only that I recognize a unity in the Song which suggests a unifying mind. What he is unifying may be––indeed, is––quite diverse: teachings from various sources, Israel primarily, but also from the neighbouring countries of Egypt and Mesopotamia. But he writes, or selects, it seems to me, within a framework of established traditions, especially wisdom traditions, his aim being to weave a network of allusions in order to convey a picture opposite to that so relentlessly portrayed by the prophets, or wherever Israel comes under condemnation. His purpose is encouragement, to inspire by depicting the ideal against the discouraging reality. Like the prophets he conveys the eros of God for ‘the people he has chosen for his own possession’ (Ps. 33: 12), but unlike them he portrays the eros for God of his chosen people at its most sustained, unfaltering and faithful. In the same spirit of encouragement, consonant with the probable years of the Song’s composition/ﬁnal redaction, the poet gives prominence to a messianic element, of the kind William Horbury, citing Wellhausen, describes: ‘He [Wellhausen] justly stressed that messianic prophecies are not simply predictions of deliverance, but aﬃrmations of the ideal of the Israelite state as it should be.’95 This description perfectly chimes with the manifest intentions of our author. He is also, I believe, wholly supportive of the cult and, unlike the sectarians of Qumran, regards the Second Temple as possessing its own validity––if my interpretation of certain verses (notably 8: 8: ‘We have a younger sister, and she has no breasts’) is correct. It may, indeed, have been the recognition of the Song’s validation of the Second Temple which secured its place among the sacred scrolls. Thus understood, the Song manifests an allegiance to tradition. But if our author is traditional he is also highly original, notably in the way he conveys his understanding of God. The absence of a fully explicit reference to God is made much of by modern commentators and is indeed unusual, Esther being the only other biblical book which similarly lacks an explicit reference. But it has always been the way of poets to avoid explicit reference to their subjects, and the poet of the Song uses every device, known and unknown, to keep his

94 But see Athalya Brenner 1989: 33, 65, and 89–90, who suggests a female author. André LaCocque similarly contends for a female author in his Romance She Wrote, 1998, as his title indicates. 95 William Horbury 1998: 14. 40 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God meaning hidden from easy observation. Thus the principal clue to the meaning of the Song has, to the best of my knowledge, never been noticed, namely, that there are twenty-six occurrences of the term ‘my beloved’ in the Song, and that twenty-six is the numerical value of the divine Name, YHWH.96 But if the poet has cunningly hidden the meaning YHWH in the use of dôdî distributed twenty-six times in the Song, there is one verse in another biblical book which he would have expected the reader to know and which, so to speak, hands the meaning to the reader on a plate. At Isa. 5:1 we read: Let me sing, I pray, to my beloved, a song of my beloved concerning his vineyard . . . The whole passage is a song to God, as the following verses make clear,97 and uses forms of shir, ‘song’, as in the title of the Song. It is moreover the only biblical verse outside the Song which uses the form dôdî, ‘my beloved’. The first ‘beloved’ in this verse uses the form yedidi, which is very close to ‘beloved of Yah’, yedidyah, the name given by Nathan the prophet to Solomon (2 Sam. 12: 25). The second ‘beloved’, dôdî (namely dôd plus first person suffix), which comprises the same three letters as the name David, is the one applied to the male figure in the Song when he is called ‘my beloved’. In a chapter called ‘The Davidic-Solomonic Messiah’, Raymond Tournay writes: ‘The word dôd with or without a suffix occurs thirty-three times in the Song.’98 And he points to 1 Kgs. 2: 11: ‘and he [David] reigned thirty-three years in Jerusa- lem’, and to 1 Chron. 29: 27, which gives the identical verse. The messianic figure of David is central to Tournay’s understanding of the Song, and this link between the thirty-three occurrences of dôd seems to me to be as important as the link between the twenty-six occurrences of ‘my beloved’ and the divine name. More problematic to articulate is the way the author expresses a theology which favours the ‘female principle’, as I am calling it. What, if anything, he might have called it we do not know, but its presence pervades the work, and is what makes it so attractive to feminists at the present time, many of whom see the Song as ‘the most startling countertext in the Bible’.99 Yes, but feminist interests are focused on gender and, in the realm of male and female principles,

96 I owe this insight to Rabbi Marc Solway, who, after I had mentioned the twenty-six occurrences of dôdî, ‘my beloved’, ventured the information that the numerical value of the divine name is twenty-six! It is astonishing that this has not been noticed, but it is not gematria (a method of exegesis based on the numerical value of Hebrew words), and thus even the Kabbalists seem not to have noticed the twenty-six occurrences of ‘my beloved’. 97 Though not to everyone. Francis Landy, after regretting that nothing survives of ancient Persian love poetry, goes on: ‘Equally distressing is the loss of the entire native erotic tradition. Of this all that remains is the snatch of a love song in Is. 5: 1.’ 1983: 28. 98 1988: 119. 99 Alicia Ostriker 2000: 37. Introduction 41 gender is not the issue. Rather, if I have understood our author, his use of the word te¯shûqâ in the sentence: ‘I am my beloved’s, and upon me is his desire’ (7: 11), is intended to convey the eschatological reversal of the curse pronounced, not upon a woman but upon the female principle at Genesis 3: 16 (where the unusual word te¯shûqâ is first used; see §7.7). It is the restoration of everything properly belonging to the female principle which concerns our author: the intuitive, contemplative, and mystical life of the soul which yearns to be drawn by the eros of God into union with him. The Song is, indeed, unique among the books of the Bible in being wholly ‘bridal’––the reason for its vulnerability to misinterpretation. Other occur- rences100 of the female principle are protected from total misunderstanding by context, as in the Sirach poem, which is safely anchored in a male context (see §7.10). Only the Song casts off all male moorings and stands alone––to be embraced or abused, or both, according to the temperament of the reader and the trends of the times. And the trends of these times which have been particularly inimical to insight into the Song are, first, the long-standing anti-mystical forces which have developed in recent centuries with ever more stultifying effect on the ‘bridal’ type of response, depriving the Hebrew Bible of its most sublime expression of the nature of God’s love, and leaving a void into which the spirit of Marcion has inevitably stepped, with disastrous consequences for our understanding of the Old Testament.101 In the last fifty years or so these anti- mystical forces have become quite aggressively iconoclastic, derisive in all art of whatever was formerly venerated as sublime. In this light, the sexual interpretation of the Song is not as innocent as it appears. The underlying motive of many modern works on the Song is an evident desire to evacuate it of the meaning it once enjoyed. Typical of this trend is Michael Goulder’s The Song of Fourteen Songs (1986). An apparently naive application to the text of Freud- ian methods of free association, it is a highly sophisticated attempt to render nugatory any vestiges of significance yet remaining in Song interpretations. Second, the emphasis on gender, indeed, the obsession with gender, combined with the loss of the concept of the soul, that is to say, of that element of the human person which not only animates the body––the limited role Freud gave to the soul––but connects the creature to its Creator,102 has resulted in the

100 With the exception of Psalm 45, which, like the Song, is messianic and wholly ‘bridal’ and has, consequently, suffered the same fate. I regret that I have failed to include a comparison between this Psalm and the Song, but see R. Tournay 1963. 101 The book Agape and Eros by Anders Nygren, discussed earlier, has been damaging not only to the eros motif but also in its reinforcement of a ‘law and gospel’ dichotomy, thus effectively promoting Marcionism and, as an inevitable by-product, anti-Semitism. 102 See (Sister) Edmée SLG 1998, for a fuller discussion. 42 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God perspective which sees the relationship between the Creator and the creature as between a gendered person and a definitively gendered God. This gives rise to imaginary problems, such as concern felt by a man about the nature of his love for a male God, for which terms such as ‘homoerotic’ are coined and thought appropriate103 ––a far cry from Gregory of Nyssa’s, ‘There is neither male nor female in God.’104

12. Some clariﬁcations

Finally, there are three points of clarification I should like to make: (1) my use of the word ‘metaphor’ in preference to ‘allegory’; (2) exegetical principles; and (3) the question of ‘Tendenz’. First, my understanding of the term ‘allegory’ has, over the years, suffered a loss of its correct sense, precisely because of how the term is applied to the Song. For instance, the discovery of the four scrolls of the Song at Qumran has not, as far as I am aware, caused any scholar to wonder whether the presence of these scrolls in the library of an ascetic community reveals to us that the work was written as an allegory. The editors of the Dead Sea Scrolls Bible are unable, as we have seen, to think any further than the modern interpretation of the Song. Similarly, E. Tov asserts, ‘The biblical book of Canticles contains a conglomeration of love songs . . .’,105 and he has nothing to say on how their presence at Qumran is to be explained. A more thoughtful approach is to suppose that the Community must have applied an allegorical interpretation to these ‘love songs’, D. Barthélemy providing an early example of this line of thinking.106 We will meet it in Chapter 3, ‘Symbols of Israel’, in relation to 4 Ezra, where links to the Song are explained as showing that the Song had been subject to allegorization and thus made fit for use in so intensely religious a work. Consequently I have come to view allegory as a term applied to a text by others, not as describing the nature of the work, and I have therefore eschewed it altogether in favour of ‘metaphor’, namely, that which may be imputed to the author. Thus the word ‘breasts’ in the Song I understand as a

103 See, for instance, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, God’s Phallus and Other Problems for Men and Monotheism (1994), which exemplifies the extent to which the focus on gender in place of the soul has hindered the full development in this author of many brilliant flashes of insight. 104 McCambley translation 1987: 145. 105 Ulrich et al. 2000: 196. 106 ‘Quant au Cantique des Cantiques, on est surpris d’en trouver quatre exemplaires à Qumrân. La pseudepigraphie salomienne suffit-elle à expliquer cet intérêt? On imagine mal en effet que ces ascètes se soient attachés à cet écrit s’ils le lisaient en son sens naturel. Il est donc vraisemblable qu’il faisait déjà à Qumrân l’objet d’une lecture allégorique . . . ’ 1984: 17–18. Introduction 43 metaphor for nourishment by the Law. And when the author, or poet as I shall call him, refers to two breasts he is signifying, I believe, the two tablets of the Law, an interpretation to which the Targumist is a witness, if an unwilling one (see §2.3). An example of ‘allegory’ is found in the Christian interpretation, which became current from Hippolytus onwards, when he allegorized the two breasts as representing the Old and the New Testaments––which could not have been in the mind of the poet, although it is extremely close to the two tablets of the Law. It was, then, a moment of illumination, and a recovery of memory, when I was reminded of such allegories as Pilgrim’s Progress, Plato’s Timaeus, Phaedrus, and Symposium, and, not least, the allegory of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius’ Golden Ass, which reads just like the Song in the hands of a Greek. In the light of these examples I am able to agree that I understand the Song of Songs to have been written as an allegory of the love of God for his creation and particularly, from the perspective of the poet, for the land of Israel, Jerusalem, the Temple, and the people God chose to be his own possession (cf. Deut. 7: 6). Second, my exegetical principles are primarily concerned with semantics. In his book The Nature of Biblical Criticism, John Barton has a particularly important chapter called ‘The Plain Sense’, in which he argues that ‘Biblical criticism is a semantic operation in that it is concerned with the meaning of words and phrases.’107 Moreover, he goes on, ‘words have meaning only in a particular context’, and they change over time (see page 80 for an amusing example from Trollope). Thus the exegetical principle I have consistently pursued is the fundamental one of studying every occurrence of a word in its context, both to gain a sense of its resonances for the biblical writers and to lose, or at least to weaken, the resonances of the accepted English translation. For instance, the adjective ‘pleasant’, ‘sweet’ (na¯ îm), occurs in the Song at 1: 16 when the female addresses the male: ‘Behold you are fair, my beloved, pleasant indeed.’ The study of the eleven other occurrences of the word ‘pleasant’ reveals meanings neither the English translations nor the use of the word in modern Hebrew come anywhere near. But whether it is possible to convey the plain sense of the biblical word plainly (see §1.12 for an attempt) so that its meaning is not disputed is, to say the least, doubtful. We have already seen that one commentator on the Song can interpret Isaiah 5: 1 as the ‘only remaining fragment of the entire erotic tradition’, which brings us up against the problem of ‘the plain sense’. For what constitutes the plain sense for one reader is quite hidden to another. A closely related principle of exegesis is that of interpreting scripture by scripture, an ancient way of studying the sacred texts employed by the Fathers

107 2007: 102. 44 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God of the Church and the Sages of Judaism, but much more systematically, consistently, and continuously by Jews than by Christians. In his fine article on ‘Midrash’, Philip Alexander writes that an axiom of the early Jewish exegetes is ‘that scripture is a totally coherent and self-consistent body of truth. This means’, he goes on, ‘that what it says in one place may be interpreted in the light of what it says in another.’108 And certainly, when I first embarked on a study of every occurrence of the verb ‘to kiss’ (Cant. 1: 2), I was overwhelmed by the impression that the biblical literature, for all its diversity, is precisely ‘self-consistent’, and this impression was confirmed when I went on to gather all the examples of ‘name’ in direct address. Thus the linguistic evidence which the study of biblical usage provides suggests at the same time both the plain meaning and the hidden meaning. Plain because the reader familiar with biblical conventions would know to whom the text most probably refers, or to what the text is alluding; and hidden because the meaning is concealed from those who read the text in isolation from the Bible as a whole. The passage from René Bloch, quoted earlier, exactly expresses my own discovery, that ‘the vocabulary of the poem [i.e. the Song] is directly and consistently biblical’. Third, the question of Tendenz. In his book referred to above, John Barton, citing the view of critics in general, writes: ‘any writer has a Tendenz, something he or she is attempting to persuade the reader of, and this should be allowed for and discounted’ (45). Yes, indeed. We know exactly what he means. But should a Tendenz be discounted which enables its possessor to recognize something in the text not easily seen by those without it? It is my Tendenz, that is to say, my formation in a contemplative community, which has enabled me, for instance, to make sense of the line at Cant. 5: 2: ‘I sleep, but my heart is awake.’ And once this line is understood (see §7.6) a great deal in the rest of the poem falls into place, all of which agrees with the view held in pre-modern times, that the Song is the contemplative text par excellence.

Conclusion

But it is precisely the use of the Song by those living the celibate life which is now seen as having contributed to a negative attitude to sex from which countless numbers have suﬀered. It has seemed, therefore, that one way of redressing the balance is to claim that the collection of love poems at the heart of the Old Testament concerns human love and not divine. But the resistance this has represented to the divine nature of the Song has been due to an idea

108 1990: 451. Introduction 45 that divine love has no implications for human love, that indeed, the two are not only separate but even in some sense opposed, whereas, on the contrary, human love, if it is to last, if, that is, it is to have an eternal dimension, depends utterly on the sustaining love of God. And it must surely have been such an understanding which in the early Middle Ages introduced the liturgical practice among Sephardic and Oriental congregations of chanting the Song entire in the synagogue each Friday evening, that is to say, on the Sabbath eve when the Law requires the fulfilment of the conjugal obligation. Of course, this very practice has been adduced in our day as evidence of the erotic character of the Song which, according to this view, is recited for the purpose of sexual arousal, a view it would be difficult to controvert were it not that it overlooks the laws of purity which supersede the conjugal obligation and render a husband and wife forbidden to each other nearly as often as not. But it is not sexual desire which the Song intends to arouse but love, a love which on the one hand hallows the sexual act and enables it to be approached, in the words of an ancient writer, as ‘the most sacred of all sowings’,109 with consequences for the future of the race we are unable to estimate, while on the other hand it makes joy in companionship possible and provides that restraint which is both the mark of true love and its ennobling element.110 Thus, we see that the Song can inspire and sustain both types of life. But the Song is about God’s love for all his creatures and is surely intended to reach the many who are called neither to marriage nor, by choice, to the celibate life, among them the physically or mentally handicapped, and those suffering every type of disability in between. If the Song is about a pair of lusty lovers, its relevance is confined to the relatively few in this category, and for them only as long as the senses retain their vigour (though the imagination, of course, seems to retain its vigour for as long as life lasts). But the Song of Songs tells us about the eros of God, available to each one of us who desires it, however wounded, however wretched, however old. For reasons I have suggested in the Bride and Friend distinction, not everyone does desire to be enveloped in God’s eros. But for those of us who do, I hope the present times will bring a renewed understanding of this ‘sublime song’, as it was once commonly called, and, consequently, a renewed understanding of the nature of our Creator.

109 Plutarch, Praecepta conjugalia, cited in Peter Brown 1988: 18 n. 65. 110 This and the previous paragraph draws on my 1993 article on the Song. 1

The Eros Strand in Wisdom

1.1. . . . which belongs to Solomon

The ascription following the title to Solomonic authorship: ’a˘sˇer lisˇlo¯mo¯ = ‘which belongs to Solomon’, or ‘by/to/for Solomon’, is now generally, and probably correctly, taken to be an editorial addition on the basis of its use of the relative particle a˘sˇer in contrast to the rest of the book in which only the proclitic form, sˇe, is found. But, unlike two other evident additions of the form lisˇlo¯mo¯ to the headings of Psalms 72 and 127, which are lacking in a number of manuscripts and old translations,1 there is no external evidence that the superscription to the Song was ever lacking, which suggests that the addition was made at an early stage of the Song’s transmission. In any case, its importance should not be dismissed2 since, precisely for the reason that it has been supplied, much might be expected from it. For if it is an addition, it must be the earliest commentary on the Song, and whether it was added before its inclusion among the sacred scrolls or after it was established among them, the superscription declares that the work surpasses all other songs and, being recognizably sapiential, is, consequently, to be ascribed to Solomon. The Song of Songs may, moreover, be attributed to Solomon because he was the builder of the Temple, where hymns of praise might be oﬀered continually. In addition to Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song, a number of other writings were attributed to Solomon, notably, the Wisdom of Solomon, the Psalms of Solomon, and the Odes of Solomon.3 Brevard Childs, in his Intro- duction to the Old Testament, describes succinctly the position of Solomon in relation to wisdom: ‘As Moses is the source of the Law, and David of the Psalms, so is Solomon the father of sapiential writing.’4 And so, Childs goes on to say, ‘the Song is to be understood as Wisdom

1 See S. Mowinckel 1967: vol. 2, pp. 102f. The LXX has as the heading for Ps. 71 (72) Ε Σαλωµν but not for Ps. 126 (127). 2 Marvin Pope 1977: 295 may stand for many: ‘The entire superscription, along with its singular use of the particle a˘sˇer, may be dismissed as secondary.’ But his discussion of it is, nevertheless, excellent. All references to Pope are to this work. 3 See D. C. Duling 1983 for a full account of works attributed to Solomon. 4 1979: 574. The Eros Strand in Wisdom 47 literature’. This statement suggests that we are on the way to a recovery of the understanding which first placed the Song of Songs in the Bible. But Childs’s own conclusion, that ‘the Song is wisdom’s reflection on the joyful and mysterious nature of love between a man and a woman within the institution of marriage’,5 equally suggests that there is still some way to go. The title of his next section, ‘Wisdom and erotic language’, momentarily revives the sense of being on the right track again but, after taking issue with a hint given by von Rad,6 from which Childs deduces––rightly, as any reader of Wisdom in Israel would agree––that von Rad ‘has reflected on whether Israel read the Song of Songs as an allegory on the search for wisdom’, the section concludes: ‘The wisdom context never functioned to shift the semantic level of human love to become a metaphor, but rather it sought to probe the mystery of human love within the creative order’ (576). This is precisely the view of the consensus on the Song, but it derives from a post-Reformation, post-Enlightenment epistemology from which mystical theology has been banished.7 Childs does not, then, understand the Song as wisdom literature. His summary of the history of interpretation is masterly, but in regard to meaning there is a dimension lacking. The question is: can this dimension be demonstrated? Von Rad himself suggests both the problem and the possibility when, at the conclusion of his Preface to Wisdom in Israel, he asks the reader ‘to expose himself to the tensions within which the teachings of the wise men operate and to bring with him a readiness for contemplation.’

1.2. A wisdom book

The term ‘wisdom literature’ describes a style of writing which is recognized as a distinct category among the books of the Old Testament and Apocrypha, and it is usually applied to: Job, Proverbs, Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes), the Wisdom of Ben Sira, the Wisdom of Solomon, parts of the books of Tobit and Baruch, and certain of the Psalms. The Introduction to the Wisdom Books in the Standard Edition of the Jerusalem Bible (1966) adds: ‘With these is grouped, somewhat unaptly, the Song of Songs’ (723). That the Song was anciently regarded as a wisdom book is known to us

5 Ibid. 6 In Wisdom in Israel 1972: 168, von Rad cites in a footnote three references in the Song to the term ‘sister’. It is from this minimal reference that Childs has inferred reflection on the Song by von Rad. I am very grateful to Professor Childs who, in response to a query from me, clarified this point in a letter (dated 27 February 2006) with much patience and kindness. 7 Counter-Reformation Catholicism also cut itself off from the mystical element in certain important respects. Nevertheless, it is the Protestant side of the divide which has, from the eighteenth century onwards, increasingly insisted on a secular reading of the Song. 48 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God principally by the fact of its being placed in the Septuagint and Christian Bibles third of the Solomonic books in the order Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs. In Hebrew Bibles the Song is placed first of the five Megillot (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther) being read on the Sabbath during Pesah. Although on the Christian side it is, in our ˙ day, categorized as a wisdom book, this categorization is more by default than by judgement. There is, however, an increasing recognition of wisdom elements in the Song which is producing a shift––already seen in Childs––from it being impossible to categorize the Song as a wisdom book on account of it being understood to be a collection of love lyrics, to attempts to accommodate these two contraries. This trend is becoming fairly widespread, although recent examples are not producing very happy results.8 But an essay by Katharine Dell explores the clear links between wisdom literature––especially Proverbs––and the Song, in the course of which she decides that there are more of such links than were noticed by Roland Murphy when he declared: ‘Needless to say, the Canticle is not a wisdom book; it is a collection of love poems.’9 Dell opens the subject up to the possibility of a contrary view while remaining constrained by the consensus that human love is the subject of the Song. And yet, if the Song is a wisdom book in any sense it must be speaking about a quite other kind of love, that love in which wisdom is not endangered by passion but is, on the contrary, promoted by it. Wisdom writing, for all its variety, displays the distinction I have labelled ‘Friend’ and ‘Bride’. Von Rad has a passage which, in different terms, comes close to saying the same thing. After quoting a long extract of the ‘Friend’ type of wisdom, Sir. 39: 1–11, he writes:

If this text, on the whole, shows us rather the outward range of the intellectual preoccupation of a wisdom teacher, Sirach 14: 20–27 leads us into the heart of the matter, for this didactic poem reveals something of the internal dealings of the wise man with that truth to which he has devoted himself. This incomparable description of an academic eros is the sign of a high, intellectual culture. The description of a lover who pursues the beloved and encamps near her house begins very cautiously, for this is certainly not a developed comparison. The approach is described in a very restrained manner, as is also the fulﬁlment with which the search for wisdom is rewarded. A glance through her window, listening at her door, settling in the environs of her house, resting in her shade––that is all, but it is much (23).

8 For example Martin Paul (2001), who relates the Song to the fremde Frau of Proverbs 1–9, and who uses the kind of anachronistic sexual language which, in my view, renders any discussion of biblical texts meaningless. 9 Dell 2005: 8. The Eros Strand in Wisdom 49 It is much, but not yet enough. Von Rad stops short, on the brink, indeed, of making connections with the Song and of applying his insights to a biblical book which goes well beyond ‘academic’ eros.10 Nevertheless, his Wisdom in Israel is a lovely stepping-stone to the subject of eros in the wisdom literature, and one which makes it more possible for those who follow him to take a further leap into this little-understood terrain.

1.3. Correspondences with the book of Ben Sira (i) 14: 20–7

Sirach 14: 20–7, cited above in the quotation from von Rad, certainly yields a clear connection with the Song at 2: 9, and is a good place to start in making comparisons between the two works. Blessed is the man who meditates on wisdom, and gazes [on her] with understanding. He who sets his heart on her ways, and shows himself attentive to her faculties; who goes out after her in search, and stealthily observes all her comings in; who peers out through her window, and listens at her doors; who encamps round about her house, and puts his cords into her wall; who stretches out his tent by her side, and dwells in a good dwelling; who establishes his nest in her foliage, and lodges in her branches; and who seeks refuge in her shade from the heat; and dwells in her habitations. This picture is either a lovely expansion of Cant. 2: 9, or, as I am inclined to think (see Introduction §1), Cant. 2: 9 is an allusion to it: Behold him, standing behind our wall, gazing through the windows, peering from the lattice. The Greek of this line translates similarly: ‘Behold, he is behind our wall, looking through the windows’, and the Greek of Sir. 14: 23a is close: ‘The one looking through her windows.’ In the next chapter of Ben Sira, which continues the same theme, there are

10 In the correspondence referred to at n. 6, Professor Childs mentioned that von Rad had received massive criticism from his German colleagues for his use of the term ‘allegory’ in his famous 1952 article ‘Typology’, and in later years, Childs wrote, von Rad always backed away from using the term. 50 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God further similarities: ‘She will come to meet him like a mother, and like the wife of his youth she will welcome him’ (15: 2; cf. Prov. 5: 18), and at v. 6: ‘He will ﬁnd gladness and a crown of rejoicing’, to which Cant. 3: 11 alludes: ‘behold King Solomon with the crown wherewith his mother crowned him in the day of his espousals, and in the day of the gladness of his heart’.11

1.4. Ben Sira (ii) 24: 13–21

Another passage in Sirach, from chapter 24, of which the Hebrew is altogether lost,12 is full of Song language. The greater part of it is a poem spoken in the first person by Wisdom, and the similarities to the Song are in verses 13–21: I was exalted13 like a cedar in Lebanon, and like a cypress on the heights of Hermon. I was exalted like a palm tree in En-gedi, and like rose plants in Jericho; like a beautiful olive tree in the field, and like a plane tree I was raised up. Like cassia and camel’s thorn I gave forth the aroma of spices, and like choice myrrh I spread a pleasant odour, like galbanum, onycha, and stacte, and like the fragrance of frankincense in the tabernacle. Like a terebinth I spread out my branches, and my branches are glorious and graceful. Like a vine I caused loveliness to bud, and my blossoms became glorious and abundant fruit. Come to me, you who desire me, and eat your fill of my produce. For the remembrance of me is sweeter than honey, and my inheritance sweeter than the honeycomb. Those who eat me will hunger for more, and those who drink me will thirst for more. In these eight verses, which describe the glory of Sophia, there are twenty- seven words which occur also in the Greek of the Song: ‘cedars’; ‘Lebanon’;

11 That a crown represents the glory of wisdom is noted by John J. Collins 1998: 48. For the numerous links to Jewish mystical texts of the two Hebrew words for ‘crown’, RTK and HRUE (the word used in the Song), see Arthur Green 1997. 12 For a full discussion of the complicated textual history of Sirach see Alexander Di Lella in P. W. Skehan and Alexander Di Lella 1987: 52–62. 13 The verb α νυψθην, which occurs three times in vv. 13–14, is a passive form and is better translated ‘I was exalted’, or ‘I was raised up’ than RSV/NRSV, ‘I grew tall’. Otherwise I have used the RSV translation. The Eros Strand in Wisdom 51 ‘cypress’; ‘mountain’; ‘Hermon’; ‘palm-tree’; ‘En-gedi’; ‘field’; ‘cinnamon’; ‘spice’; ‘scent’; ‘myrrh’; ‘chosen’; ‘graceful’; ‘stacte’; ‘frankincense’; two similar words for ‘tent’ or ‘tabernacle’, the first in Sirach, the second in the Song; ‘vine’; ‘young bud’ or ‘flower’; ‘fruit’; ‘desire’; ‘product’ or ‘fruit’; ‘honey’; ‘sweet’; ‘honeycomb’; ‘to eat’; ‘to drink’. Between descriptions of Wisdom as being like different kinds of trees, recalling the garden of Eden in which ‘the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food’ (Gen. 2: 9), the imagery in Sirach moves to the constituents of the holy anointing oil and of the holy incense of Exod. 30: 23–4 and 34. The vocabulary of Sirach is a little closer to the Exodus verses than that of the Song, but not much. At Exod. 30: 23 Moses is commanded to take the chief spices, flowing myrrh, cinnamon spice, and calamus spice for the anointing oil. And at 30: 34, sweet spices, stacte, onycha, galbanum, and frankincense for the incense. Later in this chapter, Sir. 24: 30– 1, there are two verses, as follows: I went forth like a canal from a river and like a water channel into a garden.14 I said, I will water my garden, and drench my garden plot. In the Song, at 4: 13–15, the language of the holy anointing oil and incense, the themes of gardens, trees, and water all come together: Your shoots are a garden [pardes] of pomegranates with pleasant fruits, henna with nard, nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense, myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices. A spring of gardens, a well of living water, and flowing streams from Lebanon. Passing over Sir. 24: 16–17, which include such ‘Song’ words as ‘vine’ and ‘fruits’, there is a striking similarity between Sirach 24: 19–21: Come to me, you who desire me, and eat your fill of my produce. For the remembrance of me is sweeter than honey, and my inheritance sweeter than the honeycomb.

14 The word used here for ‘garden’ is παρα´δεισο . See §5.8, ‘The Four Who Entered Pardes’, for a discussion of this word. 52 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

Those who eat me will hunger for more, and those who drink me will thirst for more. and Cant. 5: 1: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice, I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey, I have drunk my wine with my milk. Eat, friends! Drink and be drunk, beloved ones! The Sirach text takes us forward to John 6: 35: I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst.’ While the text from the Song leads back to Isa. 55: 1, 2b: Ho, every one who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price . . . Hearken diligently to me, and eat what is good, delight yourselves in fatness.

1.5. Ben Sira (iii) 24: 8–12

The parallels between Sirach 24 and the Song are remarkable and merit attention, though they receive little, even from those who have made a special study of this particular chapter in Sirach. Gerald Sheppard, in his book Wisdom as a Hermeneutical Construct, is an exception: in Song of Songs 4–6 . . . a young woman appears in a garden (4: 12, 15; 5: 1) rich with the same kinds of vegetation like that in Sirach 24 (4: 15; 6: 2; 7: 8, 13). The garden is filled with costly perfumes and spices (4: 6, 14; 5: 1); in its center a fountain is fed by the plentiful streams of Lebanon (4: 12b, 15). Either at the close or periodically within the different garden scenarios of Song of Songs the lover offers a summons to partake of the produce of her garden (e.g. 4: 16). Sir. has these same motifs of flora (vv. 13–14, 15–17), spices (v. 15), garden rivers (vv. 25–7) and a call to indulge in the lavish fruits of the garden (vv. 19–22). Nevertheless, the more important question concerns how this imagery of Eden-like splendour relates to the overriding theme of Wisdom’s journey, like Israel, to Zion.15 Sheppard’s last sentence leads back to an earlier footnote on the possible influence of the imagery of Cant. 3: 6–11 on Wisdom’s account in Sirach 24

15 1980: 53. The Eros Strand in Wisdom 53 of her journey from ‘the mouth of the Most High’ to her resting-place in Zion, part of which should be quoted first: [I] covered the earth like a mist. I dwelt in the highest heavens, and my throne was in a pillar of cloud . . . In the holy tabernacle I ministered before him, And so was I established in Zion. In the beloved city likewise he gave me rest and in Jerusalem was my power. (Sir. 24: 3b-4, 10–11) Cant. 3: 6–11 begins: Who is this coming up from the wilderness like columns of smoke, being censed with myrrh and frankincense . . .? The next verse goes on: ‘Behold his bed, which is Solomon’s.’ Sheppard comments: ‘If one identifies Solomon with Wisdom, some interesting correspondences to the Sirach Song emerge.’ And he continues: In Sirach 24, instead of Solomon, the alleged author of the wisdom books, it is Wisdom who comes ‘circling’ (v. 5a) and ‘walking’ (v. 5b) through the cosmos in search of a resting place and an inheritance, as did Israel and the tabernacle in the wilderness. Just as Solomon’s royal litter appears as a ‘column of smoke,’ her throne is in a ‘pillar of cloud.’ Both are destined for the elect city of Zion. While Solomon rides on a portable throne, Wisdom is, likewise, carried on her throne in the transient pillar of cloud. With Solomon, the smoke is fragrant with ‘myrrh and frankincense,’ two of the elements which compose the sanctuary’s perfumed holy incense with which Wisdom is intimately related in Sir. 24: 15. (33 n. 42) If the identification of Solomon with Wisdom is intended by the poet, the problem caused by the verse at Cant. 3: 6 beginning mî zo¯ t, ‘Who is this (female)?’,16 would be resolved, for the question would then properly be answered by an (implicit) feminine noun, hokmâ, Wisdom, namely, that ˙ which is symbolized by Solomon. This would be wholly consonant with the cryptic language in which the poet writes. There are two other verses in the Song which begin mî zo¯ t, and it seems that the poet intends the same answer to be understood for all three. At 6: 10 the question is:

16 YM could, if unusually, mean ‘What?’ here and refer forward to the bed, HUM, a feminine noun, in the next verse. See BDB 566 under YMa, where the examples include this verse. But commentators generally seem to reject this possibility. 54 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

Who is she who looks down like the morning star, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, and terrible as the bannered hosts? And at 8: 5 it is: Who is this coming up from the wilderness, leaning upon her beloved? If it is possible to give the answer ‘Wisdom’ to the ﬁrst occurrence of ‘Who is this?’, the same answer may be given for the other two.

1.6. Correspondences with the book of Proverbs (i) 5: 18–19

The correspondences between the Song and Sirach––by no means exhausted––are relatively straightforward. Those between the Song and Proverbs 1–9 are more complex due to the presence of elements in Proverbs vulnerable to the same misreading as that to which the Song is subject. The two metaphorical women, Wisdom and Folly, are, whenever the text fails to ﬂag their identity, taken literally and, in one example, 5: 18–19, support for such literal interpretation is adduced from the Song: Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice on account of the wife of your youth. A loving hind and a gracious doe, let her breasts ﬁll you at all times, that with her love you may be intoxicated continually. The similarity of language of these two verses with that of the Song is noted by commentators, and interpreted accordingly, that is to say, ‘the wife of your youth’ is understood literally, in spite of it being a recognizable wisdom phrase (e.g. Sir. 15: 2 and Wisd. 8: 2), and the joys of legitimate sex expatiated upon.17 Among recent commentators, none expatiates more enthusiastically than Bruce K. Waltke, who translates the above verses as follows: 18. May your wellspring be blessed, and get pleasure from the wife of your youth. 19. [May she be] a lovingmaking doe, a graceful mountain goat; may her breasts drench you at all times; and with her caresses may you always be intoxicated.18

17 Not supported by later references to literal women and wives. See Prov. 19: 13; 21: 9, 19; 27: 15–16; 30: 23; etc. 18 Bruce K. Waltke 2004: 304. The Eros Strand in Wisdom 55 In the second line, ‘get pleasure from’ is suggested by BDB though, as we shall see, BDB should invariably be regarded with suspicion when it proposes a sexual interpretation for a word not otherwise used with sexual connotation. ‘Lovingmaking’, apart from being an impossible word, cannot be justified for a˘ha¯vîm, a rare plural form of the noun ‘love’. ‘Drench’ is not incorrect for ra¯wâ, but in conjunction with ‘breasts’––understood in an erotic sense and not as source of nourishment––boggles the imagination; while neither can ‘caresses’ for ‘with her love’ be justified. A closer look at the verbs in relation to ‘her breasts’ indicate what we will see in the next chapter on ‘Breast Imagery’, namely, that ‘breasts’ in the Bible function at their primary level of providing nourishment. Thus the word translated ‘fill’ (ra¯wâ) means, ‘be saturated, drink one’s fill’, while in the last line sˇa¯gâ, translated ‘intoxicated’, means firstly ‘go astray, err’, and secondarily ‘swerve, reel or roll with drunkenness’, from which is derived the idea of being intoxicated. In contrast, the next word, ta¯mîd, denotes order, continuity, regular repetition, ritual, a ‘continual burnt-offering’ (Num. 28: 3 and 6). The juxtaposition of sˇa¯gaˆ˙ and ta¯mîd might be understood as analogous to Philo’s oxymoron, ‘sober drunkenness’.19 The verse is, in any case, remarkable for the sense of tempered ecstasy it conveys, usually obscured by the translations and even more so by the assumptions of the commentators, for which BDB’s ‘sexually’, against Prov. 5: 19 under ra¯wâ, provides authority to streak off on the wrong interpretative track. Who, then, given the high religious tone of the first nine chapters of Proverbs, is ‘the wife of your youth’ at 5: 18? There are two contenders for the ‘son’s’ devotion, Wisdom and Folly, the language used of Wisdom being that of love and the language of Folly that of sexual entanglement. Thus, the language used of Wisdom at, for instance, Prov. 4: 6–8, ‘Do not forsake her, and she will keep you; love her and she will guard you . . . she will honour you if you embrace her’, is the same as that at Prov. 5: 19 where the neophyte is instructed to drink his fill from the breasts of the ‘wife of his youth’, ‘wife’ being a metaphor for that to which he has committed himself, namely, Wisdom. Several passages from the Wisdom of Solomon bring out the nuptial imagery even more clearly: ‘I loved her and sought her from my youth, and I desired to take her for my bride’ (8: 2). Similarly, Sir. 15: 2: ‘She [Wisdom] will come to meet him like a mother, and like the wife of [his] youth she will welcome him’, while, in the next verse, she will ‘give him the water of wisdom to drink’ (15: 3b). This ‘wife’, then, cannot be other than Lady Wisdom

19 For instance: ‘to him who makes the confession of praise the hue of the ruby belongs, for he is permeated by fire in giving thanks to God, and is drunk with a sober drunkenness’. Leg. All. i. 82: Translation in Andrew Louth 1981: 34. 56 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God herself. In an extensive survey of commentaries on Proverbs, from Toy in 1899 to Waltke in 2004, I have encountered only one, the notes to the Jerusa- lem Bible (1966), which hints at this level of interpretation: Perhaps here too, as in 31: 10ff., behind the characteristics of the lawful wife we should see a symbolic picture of Wisdom personified. In the context of chapters 1–9, adultery and married faith would, according to the prophetic tradition, cf. Hosea 1: 2+, stand respectively for religious apostasy and faithfulness to God and his Law as a source of wisdom. (939 note c.) On the subject of the animals, the first of these, the hind, occurs in the Song in identical verses at 2: 7 and 3: 5, paired with gazelles, in the context of adjuration: ‘I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles, and by the hinds of the field, that you do not stir up nor waken love ‘til it please.’ On these verses in the Song, Othmar Keel writes: To obligate oneself or another through a solemn oath is a frequent OT occurrence; the God of Israel is regularly called on as guarantor in such a case. To call on another deity in this way would be idolatry (Jer. 5: 7, 12: 16). What does it mean here in Cant. 2: 7 or in 3: 5 when gazelles and does take the place otherwise reserved for God?20 The second animal in the Proverbs verse, yaa˘lâ, literally a ‘mountain goat’, does not occur in the Song but is similar to the hind, aye˘lâ, which occurs at 2: 7 and 3: 5, as we have just seen. They share, moreover, the same symbolism: fleet and sure-footed on mountains (‘He made my feet like hinds’ feet, and set me secure on the heights’, Ps. 18: 34), and they are allowed for food.21 These creatures then, who symbolize the ‘wife’ in the Proverbs passage, are, I believe, in their various characteristics, especially the last, to be understood as symbolic of wisdom. And this understanding would in turn throw light on their function in the Song, and especially on their role in the adjurations at 2: 7 and 3: 5 where, as Keel has observed, they take the place otherwise reserved for God. Keel provides two references from Jeremiah of which the first is the most significant: ‘How shall I pardon you for this? Your children have for- saken me, and have sworn by those who are not gods’ (5: 7). The author of the Song frequently shows himself aware of Jeremiah, as we shall see, and it would seem that in the light of this verse he intends these animals to be understood as representing God because they represent wisdom, and Wisdom, whenever it can, in our terms, carry a capital letter, is representative of God.

20 Othmar Keel 1994: 92. However, Keel slithers off the implications of his important question and ends up by offering the notion that ‘these shy and easily frightened creatures . . . are related to the goddess of love’, followed by a long passage about naked goddesses and copulating deer, lightly illustrated with line drawings. 21 For the necessary qualifications see Deut. 14: 6. The Eros Strand in Wisdom 57

1.7. Proverbs (ii) 7: 12–18

The scene depicted in Prov. 7: 6–23, to cite the whole passage, reads like a travesty of Cant. 3: 1–4, although since chapters 1–9 of Proverbs are reckoned to be earlier than the Song it is, rather, that the Song is ‘redeeming’ Proverbs. The scene describes a young man lacking in sense who is beguiled by Lady Folly, and it bears resemblances to the Song passage in situation and in vocabulary, as well as to vocabulary elsewhere in the Song: a street, night; broad places; a woman meeting a man, seizing him, kissing him; she has peace offerings, and she says: ‘Therefore I came forth to meet you, diligently to seek you, and I have found you. I have decked my bed . . . and sprinkled it with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon . . . let us drink our fill (ra¯wâ) of love (do¯dîm or daddayîm––“breasts”? cf. Prov. 5: 19), until morning; let us delight ourselves with loves.’ But here, first, is the Song passage, 3: 1–4: By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loves; I sought him, but I found him not. I will rise now and go about the city; in the streets and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loves. I sought him, but I found him not. The watchmen who go about the city found me. ‘Have you seen him whom my soul loves?’ Hardly had I passed from them when I found him whom my soul loves. I held him and would not let him go until I had brought him into my mother’s house, and into the chamber of her who conceived me. And here is the central part of the Proverbs passage, 7: 12–18: now in the streets, now in the broad ways, and at every corner she lies in wait. She seizes him and kisses him, and with a bold face she says to him Peace offerings were due from me, today I have fulfilled my vows. Therefore I have come forth to meet you, diligently to seek your face, and I have found you. I have spread my couch with coverings,22

22 OYDBRM, ‘coverings’, only occurs otherwise at Prov. 31: 22 in the passage on the ‘valiant woman’, which gives support to those who take that passage to be a panegyric in praise of Lady Wisdom––the opposite of Folly here. 58 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

with wrought linen from Egypt. I have sprinkled my bed with myrrh, aloes and cinnamon. Come, let us drink our fill of breasts [?] till morning, let us delight ourselves with love(s). This passage is rich in word-play and allusions, but I will touch mainly on those points which have some bearing on a comparison with the Song. The similarity of the first four lines with the Song passage is obvious, as is also the contrast in tone. The verb na¯sˇaq, meaning ‘to kiss’ or ‘to touch’, together with two occurrences of the noun, occurs thirty-one times in the Hebrew Bible, all in poetical and metaphorical contexts, except for one occurrence in narrative when Jacob gives Rachel a kiss of greeting on first meeting her (Gen. 29: 11). The seizing and kissing here of the youth by the ‘strange woman’ depicts the seductive powers of idolatry––the concern of Proverbs no less than of the prophets. In the next verse, 7: 15, the word sˇa¯har˙, meaning ‘look early, diligently’, ˙ usually, BDB notes, ‘of seeking God earnestly’, here followed by the verb ‘to find’, is repeated in similar words at Prov. 8: 17, where Wisdom declares: ‘those who seek me early shall find me’, confirming for this reader that Prov. 1–9 concerns the conflict between true and false worship. In the next line the word for ‘coverings’ only occurs otherwise at Proverbs 31: 22, as we have just seen. The first word for ‘couch, divan’, eres´, occurs at Cant. 1: 16 in a passage redolent of the Temple. The second word for ‘couch’, here translated ‘bed’, which follows in the next verse, is the same as that used in the Song passage at 3: 1, misˇka¯b. It is followed in Proverbs by three words which link it clearly with the Song, myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon, three spices found together only in the Song, at 4: 14, and in the Proverbs passage. Myrrh is a key word in the Song, occurring eight times, and is, together with cinnamon, an ingredient of the holy anointing oil (cf. Exod. 30: 23). Aloes occurs otherwise only at Num. 24: 6 and at Ps. 45: 8 (Hebrew 9), both times also with myrrh. The ‘couch’ thus perfumed may be figurative both of the fascination of false worship and of the ‘death’ which inevitably follows, in which case it would also represent a funeral bier, while the linen and the spices would stand for those funerary items in which the dead body would be wrapped and perfumed.23 Apart from a rare verb, which occurs otherwise twice in Job, the last line at Prov. 7: 18 can hardly be other than a play on Prov. 5: 19 where the neophyte is exhorted to drink his fill of the breasts of wisdom under the figure of the wife of his youth. Here the exhortation comes from the ‘strange woman’. Do¯dîm is juxtaposed with the verb ra¯wâ, ‘to drink one’s fill’––cf. 5: 19––and

23 See Robert H. O’Connell 1991, who proposes the idea that the fool is being lured by the woman to his burial, and supports it with some interesting detail. The Eros Strand in Wisdom 59 must, I believe, be daddayim, ‘breasts’ rather than ‘love’, a reading supported by the Vulgate, Veni, inebriemur uberibus, ‘Come, let us be drunk with breasts’, which suggests that the term ‘breasts’ or ‘teats’ may, at some period in the history, have been used in the vocabulary of worship.24 A form of the word for ‘love’ follows at the conclusion of 7: 18, but in a rare masculine plural ( o˘ha¯bîm) for which the Dictionary of Classical Hebrew gives ‘let us delight ourselves with displays of love’ (my emphasis), the only other reference under the form being to Hos. 9: 10 where it is used similarly, that is, in the context of idolatry. In this passage from Proverbs we see the eros strand in its dangerous aspect, unlike the passages relating to Lady Wisdom which reveal it as a means of salvation. These similarities between the Song and Sirach and between the Song and Proverbs reveal that the tradition which regards the Song as a wisdom book is well based, and deserves to be reclaimed. The next task is to consider the function of some individual words and phrases in the Song which further link it with those books recognized as ‘wisdom literature’. But ﬁrst it is necessary to enter the lists against some prevailing views on this subject.

1.8. The question of wisdom vocabulary

R. N. Whybray, in his book The Intellectual Tradition in the Old Testament, writes: ‘wisdom’ in the Old Testament is a general term denoting superior intellectual ability whether innate or acquired, in God, men or animals. It is therefore natural that the words ‘wise’, ‘wisdom’ should also have been used, in appropriate contexts, to refer to particular spheres in which human ability most clearly manifested itself.25 The consequence of this outlook, which has been common to writers on the Wisdom literature throughout the twentieth century, justifying the comment that ‘the Wisdom literature is the least understood type of biblical literature at the present time’,26 is that the choice of terms recognized as signals of the presence of a ‘wisdom’ influence are confined to the human possession of wisdom or to its lack. Thus Whybray offers, in a section called ‘Words Apparently Exclusive to the Intellectual Tradition’, nine terms ‘whose

24 The word daddayim for ‘breasts’ will be discussed in the next chapter at 2.§4. 25 1974: 11. 26 Made by Gerald Bray in the course of a lecture on ‘Biblical Interpretation’ in Oxford, 1998. Now see Timothy J. Sandoval, in which a greater understanding is shown to be emerging. For instance: ‘It is best to regard the material in the book of Proverbs to be doing significantly more than offering the hearer a guide to worldly or material success’ (2006: 45). 60 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God attachment to the intellectual tradition is certain or where such an attachment cannot be ruled out a priori’.27 These are: ‘understanding’; ‘stupid, brutishness’; another word for ‘stupid’; ‘scoffer, arrogant man’; ‘understanding, teaching, persuasiveness’; ‘intelligent’; ‘senseless, foolish’; ‘prudent, shrewd, cunning’; ‘wisdom, success’. None of these words are found in the Song. In addition, Whybray considers a large range of similar terms in the chapter, ‘Other Characteristic Terminology’, and although he excludes most of them on the grounds that their use is not confined to the intellectual tradition, their choice for consideration reveals that his principle of selection is based on a narrow range of terms, derived exclusively from the paideutics of Proverbs, understood as providing guidance for the young in particular in living wisely, with the consequence that the treatment of ‘wisdom’ never rises above the lower slopes of the subject. The poetry of Proverbs, especially 1–9, its symbolism, its metaphors, its soaring descriptions of Wisdom herself, find no place among the signs which might indicate a ‘wisdom’ influence. For the higher slopes we must turn to Origen: This, then, was the reason why this master [i.e. Solomon], who was the first to teach men divine philosophy, put at the beginning of his work the Book of Proverbs, in which, as we said, the moral science is propounded, so that when a person has progressed in discernment and behaviour he may pass on thence to train his natural intelligence and, by distinguishing the causes and natures of things, may recognize the vanity of vanities that he must forsake, and the lasting and eternal things that he ought to pursue. And so from Proverbs he goes on to Ecclesiastes, who teaches, as we said, that all visible and corporeal things are fleeting and brittle; and surely once the seeker after wisdom has grasped that these things are so, he is bound to spurn and despise them; renouncing the world bag and baggage, if I may put it in that way, he will surely reach out for the things unseen and eternal which, with spiritual meaning verily but under certain secret metaphors of love, are taught in the Song of Songs.28 With such a view of the matter, an altogether different range of terms emerge, ones which are symbolical and metaphorical, and whose meanings must be sought at a different level from that of mûsa¯r.29 I shall look at about fifteen of them, some more recognizably wisdom words than others.

27 1974: 142–9. 28 R. P. Lawson 1957: 43–4. 29 RSWM, ‘discipline, instruction, correction’, a word which occurs in Proverbs at least thirty times. The Eros Strand in Wisdom 61

1.9. Wine, milk, honey, lips, and tongue

There are three elements, wine, milk, and honey, which occur throughout the Bible, always, in my view, with metaphorical intent (although negative allusions to wine probably function literally as well). Of these three, ‘honey’ and ‘honeycomb’ occur more often in ‘wisdom’ writing than the other two. But since all three occur in the Song, I should like to consider what they might represent. The common factor between wine, milk, and honey is that they have each undergone a transformation from materials in their raw or simple state to materials in a refined or complex state. Wine is produced by the transformation of fruit into an intoxicating drink; milk by the transformation in women of various foodstuffs and in animals of vegetation; honey, through the agency of bees, by the transformation of nectar––which has already undergone a degree of transformation. A hidden process is involved in each case. Thus they are fitting symbols of the transformation which must also take place at the level of spirit if the raw material of the human person is to develop that capacity for discernment of which Isaiah writes: Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good. (7: 15) Similarly, the famous phrase, ‘a land flowing with milk and honey’, suggests a land in which all that is necessary for transformation will be provided, so that its people may be capable of discerning between what is for their good and what is not. Wine occurs in the Song seven times. At 1: 2 and 4, it is used in implicit parallelism to ‘milk’.30 But, unlike milk, which is never referred to negatively, wine is often regarded as an ambiguous good, as much associated with the intoxication of false worship as with the intoxication of true worship. In the Song, however, wine is an unambiguous good, and yet there is a better: ‘Your breasts are better than wine’, and ‘we will remember your breasts more than wine’. At 2: 4 the female relates that the male has brought her to the ‘house of wine’, a combination unique to the Song meaning, I believe, the Temple, or, implicitly, to a state of prayer. At 4: 10 the male applies the same terms to the female as those she applied to him at 1: 2 and 4: ‘How fair are your breasts, my sister, my bride; how much better your breasts than wine’, a reading we are deprived of by the Masoretic pointing, and one which would have been

30 See §2.4, ‘Pre-Masoretic evidence . . .’ in the next chapter. 62 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God uncovered long ago but for the fact that the same uncovering reveals that ‘breasts’ are ascribed to the male at 1: 2 and 4.31 At 5: 1 honey, wine, and milk are cited equally when the male figure declares: ‘I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk’. The word for ‘milk’, ha¯la¯b, occurs only twice in Proverbs, at 27: 27 and 30: ˙ 33 (though at 5: 19, as we have seen, milk is implicit in the breasts of the ‘wife’), and similarly twice in Sirach at 39: 26 and 46: 8. We do not find milk in any of the psalms, neither does it occur in the Wisdom of Solomon. In the Hebrew Bible it occurs over forty times, twenty times in the phrase ‘a land flowing with milk and honey’. A note in Alexander’s Targum of Canticles suggests a tradition which became more fully explicit later: ‘“Milk” = spiritual sustenance is a common simile in both early Jewish and early Christian literature.’ And he cites Cant. Rabbah, the Odes of Solomon, 1 Peter, and a tractate of the Talmud, b. Erubim 54b, on ‘Her breasts will satisfy you at all times’ (Prov. 5: 19).32 In the Old Testament generally and in the Song in particular, references to milk are often hidden in the term ‘breasts’, although milk is explicit in the Song at 4: 11, 5: 1, and 5: 12, of which 4: 11 and 5: 1 are embedded in wisdom vocabulary: Your lips drop flowing honey, O bride, honey and milk are under your tongue. and I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey, I have drunk my wine with my milk. The word sá¯pâ, meaning ‘lip, speech, edge’, is widely distributed, especially in the singular and in its meaning of ‘edge, shore of sea, bank of river’, but in the plural, and in its meaning of ‘lips’, ‘speech’, it has certainly been claimed by wisdom writers, occurring in Proverbs over forty times, a dozen times in Job, and two dozen times in Psalms. ‘To drop, drip’, na¯tap, used figuratively of ˙ prophetic discourse (BDB 642), is not a wisdom word, but is used at Prov. 5: 3 in a verse of which the one above at 4: 11 from the Song appears to be a reversal: For the lips of a strange woman drop flowing honey; and her palate is smoother than oil. Honey seems always to denote some form of knowledge. In the verse from

31 The NEB, followed by the REB, has partially uncovered this reading, but applies it to the female at 4: 10 only. 32 Alexander 189 n. 1. The Eros Strand in Wisdom 63 the Song, the lips of the bride distil knowledge, from which we are to understand that she there functions as a wisdom figure. The strange woman’s lips also distil knowledge, but it is a knowledge which leads to death. Another significant interpretation of the verse from the Song is found in the Babylonian Talmud which takes honey and milk as symbolizing the mystical doctrine of the Chariot and uses this verse to assert that such doctrine should not be talked about in public but should be kept ‘under the tongue’.33 The word ‘tongue’, la¯sˇôn, is similar to ‘lips’––to which it is often in parallel–– in being widely distributed but much used in wisdom writing, especially in Proverbs, Psalms, and Job. The second occurrence of milk, at 5: 1 in the Song, ‘I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey, I have drunk my wine with my milk’, was used earlier in a comparison with Sir. 24: 19–21. The third occurrence at Cant. 5: 12, ‘His eyes are like doves by channels of water, washed with milk . . . ’ coincides in translation with ‘water channel’ at Sir. 24: 30, but there is no similarity of vocabulary in the Greek, and since the Hebrew of Sirach 24 is lost, a link with wisdom vocabulary cannot be shown. The word for ‘honey’, de˘basˇ, occurs in the Hebrew Bible fifty-four times and always seems to signal some wisdom influence even in settings which are otherwise far removed in style and content from the writings generally regarded as belonging in the wisdom category. A striking example is found in the story, 1 Sam. 14: 24–45, of Jonathan eating honey in ignorance that Saul had put a curse on any man eating food that day. The clue that something is to be understood beyond the surface meaning of the story comes at 14: 27 when Jonathan dips his staff into the honeycomb (yaar, a word which occurs otherwise only at Cant. 5: 1), and puts his hand to his mouth, ‘and his eyes saw’. Another story, less mysterious but equally unyielding of meaning at the surface level, is that at Judg. 14: 5–18 when Samson rends a lion and later finds a swarm of bees and honey in its carcass, an incident he turns into a riddle to use against the Philistines––who are also the enemy in the Jonathan story. In the Song, ‘honey’ occurs twice, at 4: 11 and 5: 1, as we have seen, with ‘drippings’ and ‘honeycomb’ in both places. At Ps. 19: 10, in a verse which is all wisdom imagery, honey and the drippings of the honeycomb occur together, following ‘the judgements of the Lord are true, and righteous altogether’:

More to be desired are they than gold, even much ﬁne gold, sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb.

33 Hagigah 13a. ˙ 64 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God At Psalm 81: 16 the Lord declares the good things he would have given to Israel if he had walked in God’s ways: ‘I would feed him with the finest of the wheat, and with honey from the rock I would satisfy you’ (an example of enallage34 which RSV/NRSV suppresses). And, as cited above, Ps. 119: 103: ‘How sweet are your words to my taste, more than honey to my mouth.’ The references in Proverbs are, as in the case of wine, ambivalent. We have seen the first, at 5: 3. At 16: 24 honey is commended: ‘Pleasant words are like a honeycomb; sweetness to the soul and health to the body.’ At 24: 13 even more so: ‘My son, eat honey, for it is good; and the honeycomb, sweet to your taste. So is the knowledge of wisdom to your soul . . . ’ But at 25: 16 a warning is issued: ‘Have you found honey? Eat only enough for you, lest you be sated with it and vomit it.’ And at 27: 7 the state of satiety turns to loathing: ‘He who is sated loathes honey; but to one who is hungry everything bitter is sweet.’ These warnings are related to mystical experience in the well-known rabbinical story of ‘The Four who entered Pardes’, as we shall see in Chapter 5. Ben Sira points beyond these dangers to the source of honey, and puts a lovely exhortation into the mouth of Wisdom herself: Come to me, you who desire me, and eat your fill of my produce. For the remembrance of me is sweeter than honey, and my inheritance sweeter than the honeycomb. (Sirach 24: 20)

1.10. Palate/taste; uprightness/smoothly

Then your taste, like the best wine, goes smoothly to my beloved, moving the lips of sleepers. (Cant. 7: 1035) Two words in this verse bring us well into the semantic ﬁeld of wisdom vocabulary. First, hek, ‘palate, roof of mouth’, often translated ‘taste’, is chieﬂy ˙ poetical and is especially found in wisdom literature (BDB 335). The eighteen occurrences of the word indicate that the connotations of most of them include the capacity to understand something by its ‘taste’. ‘Cannot my taste discern disaster?’ (Job 6: 30). ‘For my palate/taste will meditate [on] truth’

34 Enallage = the exchange of one case, mood, or tense for another. In the Song it occurs at 1: 2. See the Commentary ad loc. 35 In the Hebrew numbering, which I follow, Chapter 7 begins with verse 13 of Chapter 6 in English versions. Thus the references to the verses of Chapter 7 are one different, 7: 10 being 7: 9 in the English versions. The Eros Strand in Wisdom 65 (Prov. 8: 7). ‘How sweet are your words to my taste; more than honey to my mouth’ (Ps. 119: 103). The word occurs three times in the Song: ‘his fruit is sweet to my taste’ (2: 3), ‘his taste is most sweet’ (5: 16), and 7: 10, as above. When, however, the word occurs with the verb ‘to cleave’ it is properly translated ‘roof of the mouth’. Second, mêsˇa¯rîm, derived from the root ya¯sˇar, ‘evenness, uprightness, equity’, occurs nineteen times, always with connotations of moral virtue, as at Isa. 26: 7: ‘The way of the just is mêsˇa¯rîm.’ For Prov. 23: 31 and Cant. 7: 10, BDB (449) gives ‘smoothness, of flow of wine’. But ‘smoothness’ conveys the wrong resonances in English, since it not only lacks the element of ‘righteousness’, ‘justice’, or, at the very least, ‘rightness’, present in mêsˇa¯rîm but, rather, arouses associations of a contrary kind. As we have seen above, ‘the lips of a strange woman drip flowing honey, and her palate is smoother than oil’ (Prov. 5: 3). But the word for ‘smoother’ in that verse is ha¯laq, which, in its ˙ various forms, has only the kind of negative connotations we associate in English with smooth talk, flattery, seductive speech, and so on. But that mêsˇa¯rîm=‘smooth’ in certain contexts seems unavoidable, and if ‘smoothness’ in relation to wine is understood as indicating a virtue in the character of good wine, then it becomes possible to accept it.36 There is an earlier use of mêsˇa¯rîm at Cant. 1: 4 in a verse redolent of Merkava mysticism which we will look at in the Commentary ad loc.

1.11. Gold

The word for ‘gold’, za¯ha¯b, occurs in the Song three times, 1: 11, 3: 10, and 5: 14, plus two further times when the words are ketem pa¯z,‘fine gold’, at 5: 11, and pa¯z alone at 5: 15. Both these latter words are poetical and late and not much used. On the other hand, za¯ha¯b occurs well over 500 times, 100 times in Exodus alone, and is distributed throughout the books of the Hebrew Bible with the exception of five,37 and in twelve of the Deuterocanonical books, especially Sirach and 1 Maccabees. It is not, then, a wisdom word, though much used in the wisdom books, most often in ‘better than’ sayings: ‘Happy the one who finds wisdom, and the one who gains understanding, for the gain from it is better than gain from silver, and its profit better than gold’ (Prov. 3: 13–14). Nevertheless, I believe the wisdom books often use ‘gold’ as a symbol for a state of being, and that the ‘better than’ sayings are referring to this state, a highly desirable one, but not, evidently, the ultimate one. The clue, I think, is

36 On the analogy of ‘a righteous knife is a knife that cuts’, as I once heard the word ‘righteous’ explained. 37 These are: Leviticus, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, and Micah. 66 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God given in the idea of testing: ‘When he has tested me I shall come forth as gold’ (Job 23: 10). Two sayings in Proverbs are on the same theme, 17: 3: ‘The crucible is for silver, and the furnace is for gold, and the Lord tries hearts’; 27: 21 is nearly identical and also shows, in the next verse, that what tests the good will fail on the fool. But it is Ben Sira, as so often, who makes the point clear: Accept whatever is brought upon you, and in changes that humble you be patient. For gold is tested in the fire, and those found acceptable, in the furnace of humiliation. (Sirach 2: 4–5) But at Lam. 4: 1a–2 what has been tested can lose all the virtue it once acquired: How is the gold become dim! the most fine gold changed! . . . The precious sons of Zion, they who were weighed against gold, how are they esteemed as earthen pots, the work of the hands of a potter. At Cant. 1: 11 a plural subject promises the female: We will make you ornaments of gold, studded with silver. The word translated ‘ornaments’ is tôr, which occurs only here and in the previous verse, and not otherwise with this spelling. At 1: 9 the female has been compared to ‘a mare among Pharaoh’s chariots’, and what follows is taken to be a description of her ‘trappings’. BDB (1064) gives ‘plaits (of hair?)’ for the plural form of tôr at 1: 10, and ‘plaits, circlets of gold’ for the construct form at 1: 11. The same word also means ‘turtledove’ (BDB, 1076), and occurs with this meaning at Cant. 2: 12, and is how the LXX understood the word at 1: 10, likewise the Vulgate. In Ps. 74: 19 the turtledove is figurative of God’s people, but the verses in the Song yield the sense that the poet is also referring to the Torah, the Law, reinforced by the repetition of the word so that it appears twice in close proximity, suggesting the two tablets of the Law, as the Targum also understands these verses. The harness of gold studded with silver may, then, be symbolic of those virtues which have withstood testing in the furnace of the Law, and in the crucible of the commandments. That the ‘mare’ here represents Jerusalem is suggested by ‘your neck’, in the previous verse, which occurs in the Song three times (1: 10; 4: 4; 7: 5) and otherwise only at Isa. 52: 2: Shake yourself from the dust, arise! sit! O Jerusalem! The Eros Strand in Wisdom 67

loose the bonds from your neck, O captive daughter of Zion.

1.12. Pleasant/delightful; pleasant/sweet

The word na¯ îm becomes more signiﬁcant in the Song the more its other uses are studied. It is an adjective meaning ‘pleasant, delightful’, but which, like mêsˇa¯rîm, is not well served by its English translations, for it implies a high order of moral worth, a pleasantness, delightfulness, loveliness, derived from virtue. It occurs a dozen times mostly, if we include the ﬁve occurrences in Psalms, in the wisdom books, and at Cant. 1: 16 in parallel to ya¯peh, ‘fair, beautiful’. Forms of the verb, noun, and adjective of ya¯pâ and ya¯peh, ‘to be beautiful; fair, beautiful’ occur sixteen times, making it the Song’s major keyword, and here, at 1: 15 and 16, it is striking that the male and the female use it in turn: Behold, you are fair my companion, behold, you are fair . . . Behold, you are fair, my beloved, pleasant indeed. It seems to me that we are being told that the companion and the beloved share the same nature, a point to which we will return. The address by the male repeats ‘fair’ while the address by the female uses the parallel word na¯ îm, two other occurrences of which bring us, I believe, close to the poet’s meaning, Ps. 27: 4: ‘One thing have I asked of the Lord . . . to see the beauty of the Lord’, where RSV and NRSV rightly keep ‘beauty’ (from AV) since ‘beauty’ is an important constituent of the word na¯ îm, and Ps. 90: 17: ‘Let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us’ (AV, RSV, and NRSV give ‘favour’ here). Another occurrence, from 2 Sam. 23: 1, may be adduced: Now these are the last words of David: The oracle of David, the son of Jesse, the oracle of the man who was raised on high, the anointed of the God of Jacob, and the pleasant psalmist of Israel. Two words in this verse, David (spelt the same in the poet’s unpointed Hebrew as dôd, the word used for the beloved in the Song) and na¯ îm,38 make

38 BDB puts this occurrence under a different root. See 654 col. I, OYEN II. There is, of course, nothing to indicate from which root the occurrence at Cant. 1: 16 derives. It might be from the one at 2 Sam. 23: 1. 68 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God a link with the Song verse, and suggest that the exclamation ‘Behold, you are fair [the word applied to David on his first appearance at 1 Sam. 16: 12], my beloved [dôd = David] pleasant indeed’ is intended by the poet to indicate who it is who is being addressed, thus providing the basis for the Targumist’s messianic interpretation of the Song. Forms of ma¯taq ‘to be sweet, pleasant’, occur in the Song in two places: at 2: 3 as an adjective, ma¯tôq, in the sentence, ‘His fruit is sweet to my taste’, and as a plural noun, mamttaqîm, at 5: 16 in the sentence, ‘His taste is most sweet, and all of him is precious.’39 Forms of the root occur twenty times, most often in wisdom books, but also once each in Exodus, Isaiah, and Ezekiel, and three times in Judges, of which only Exodus appears not to reflect a wisdom connotation. At Ezek. 3: 3 the prophet is instructed to eat a scroll, ‘and it was in my mouth like honey for sweetness’, after which God instructs him, ‘speak my words to them’. At Ps. 19: 11 (10), quoted earlier, the Psalmist declares that the law of the Lord, his testimony, statutes, commandment, fear, and judgements, are ‘sweeter than honey and the drippings of the honeycomb’. Ps. 55: 15 (ET 14) concerns the treachery of the friend, with whom had been taken ‘sweet counsel’. Prov. 16: 21 claims that ‘the sweetness of lips increases learning’; 16: 24 that: ‘Pleasant words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body’, as we saw above; and 24: 13–14: ‘the drippings of the honeycomb are sweet to your taste. Know that wisdom is such to your soul . . .’ If, then, we recall that ‘palate/taste’ is a recognized wisdom word, and that it generally con- notes the capacity for discernment, it becomes clear that, combined with forms of ma¯tôq, the sentences, ‘His fruit is sweet to my taste’ (Cant. 2: 3), and ‘His taste is most sweet’ (Cant. 5: 16), are markedly sapiential in character.

1.13. ‘Bless’ and ‘praise’

The sentence at Cant. 6: 9, ‘The daughters saw her, and they blessed her; the queens and the concubines, and they praised her’, reﬂects Prov. 31: 28: ‘Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her.’40

39 The form of QTM, here OYQTMM, ‘sweetness’ occurs otherwise only at Neh. 8: 10, for which BDB (609a) gives ‘––of drinks’ and for the Song ref. ‘of lovers’ kisses’, an example of where BDB provides a translation in accordance with the prevailing interpretation. Mary Carruthers on ‘Sweetness’ (2006) comments on this word in a study which is a model of how to arrive at meaning in ancient literature. 40 I am indebted to the commentary on the Song by Jill M. Munro for this connection (1995: 69). The Eros Strand in Wisdom 69 The vocabulary connecting the two sentences are the verbs (both in the Piel), ‘to bless’ ( isˇsˇer) and ‘to praise’ (hille¯l), plus ‘daughters’ in the Song sentence which replaces ‘sons’ in the Proverbs one. The word isˇsˇer, used in both Proverbs and the Song, means ‘pronounce happy, call blessed’ (BDB 80), but always with its primary meaning, ‘go straight, advance in the way of understanding’, strongly implied. As both verb and noun, it occurs mainly in Proverbs and Psalms, and the noun has been well described as a ‘sapiential keyword’:41 ‘Blessed is the one who listens to me’ (Prov. 8: 34, plus seven times; twenty-five times in Psalms, and ten occurrences distributed in late books). In this (plural construct) form, it appears in the LXX as makarios or makarioi, the word used in the New Testament for the Beatitudes (where it is always in plural). The principal ‘praise’ word of the Hebrew Bible is hille¯l, especially in Psalms, where it occurs twenty-three times in the plural imperative form halle˘lû, plus the shortened form of God, Yah –– Halleluyâ, ‘Praise ye Yah!’ Because of its use in the liturgy, this form is well-known and must, one supposes, always have been so. Other ‘praise’ words, notably ya¯dâ, and its related form, tôdâ, and te¯hillâ, related to hille¯l, are similarly, in the nature of the literature, most often applied to God. The word a˘sˇar (primary form of isˇsˇer), on the other hand, unlike its alternative ‘blessing’ word, ba¯rak, is only applied to humans and never to God. Thus the conjunction of isˇsˇer, ‘bless’, and hille¯l, ‘praise’, which occurs only in Proverbs and the Song, is striking. Moreover, the appearance (in Hebrew) of Proverbs’ ‘he praises her’, and even more the Song’s ‘they praise her’, is quite close to ‘Hal- leluyah’. These points might suggest that the author of Proverbs had a conception of Wisdom42 as representing both the created and the uncreated order, and that the author of the Song understood what was being implied in the juxtaposition of these particular praise words and followed suit, improving on Proverbs by making his praise word plural, that is, by providing the ‘u’ of halleluyah (which Proverbs also does in the last verse, 31: 31). This is to read a great deal out of terminology, but I am encouraged by a desideratum expressed in a long footnote by von Rad, in Wisdom in Israel, on the questionable use of the term ‘hypostasis’ in relation to Job 28, Prov. 8: 22–36, and Sirach 24: one must ask, further, whether it is sensible first of all to establish a precise definition of ‘hypostasis’ and then apply it to the texts. The reverse process would be a method-

41 S. Terrien 1993: 55. 42 That is, if the passage about the LYX-T$oA, the ‘valiant woman’ of Prov. 31: 10–31, is about Lady Wisdom, as I cannot doubt. But the power of the passage is that it clearly intends to function on two levels and is thus rightly understood as an inspiration to all literal women to be similarly valiant. 70 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God ologically more correct one, namely to examine the texts and, if a particular discovery emerges, then to formulate a deﬁnition of it.43 Certainly von Rad’s ‘methodologically more correct’ process was the one from which, after contemplating the Hebrew text, the above thoughts emerged. Moreover, that the biblical writers intend to convey the idea that Wisdom belongs both to the created and to the uncreated order is conﬁrmed in any encounter with sophianic theology.44

1.14. Master workman

The masculine noun, omma¯n, is hapax legomenon, occurring in the Song at 7: 2, and generally considered to be a loanword from Akkadian ummânu, ‘craftsman’. BDB (53) gives ‘master-workman, artist’, and indicates that related forms occur in Mishnaic Hebrew and in Syriac where, at Exod. 28: 11, it equals ha¯ra¯sˇ, ‘graver, artiﬁcer’, all of which provides a basis for its transla- ˙ tion in the Song, ‘the work of the hands of a master craftsman’. Whether it also provides a basis for the word to which BDB points, a¯môn (ii, 54), Prov. 8: 30, ‘artiﬁcer, architect, master-workman’, is less certain, though a link is usually accepted and rare references made to the Song.45 But, whatever the word may mean at Prov. 8: 30, the occurrence of what appears to be a form of it in the description of the Shulamite at Cant. 7: 2 suggests that the poet is using it: The curved lines of your thighs are like ornaments, the work of the hands of a master craftsman. The term ‘Shulamite’46 occurs twice at Cant. 7: 1 (6: 13) and not otherwise in the Bible, and has given rise to many rationalizations and emendations.

43 147 n. 3. Von Rad’s discussion of the nature of ‘wisdom’ in this chapter, ‘The Self- Revelation of Creation’, may partly have influenced my understanding of the juxtaposition of the two words. 44 I have Bulgakov particularly in mind, and regret that I have not managed to incorporate any of that extraordinary stream of Russian thought on Sophia which I first encountered in an M.Litt. thesis called ‘Aspects of the Theological and Philosophical Background of Sergei Bulga- kov’s Sophiology’, by Jean Kyrke-Smith, 1987. The whole thesis, and what I have since read of Bulgakov himself on Sophia, speaks to me of the Song of Songs, but the present spadework had to be done first. I can only hope that someone will be stirred to work on the Song from the standpoint of Bulgakov’s sophiology. 45 The multiplicity of discussions on this word in Proverbs is indicated by the title of an article, ‘Amon Again’, by M. V. Fox, 1996. My own study of it is indebted to the careful coverage of the subject by Alice Mary Sinnott 1997: 58–66. 46 In Hebrew the ‘m’ is doubled, which looks heavy in English. AV has a single ‘m’, in which form the name has entered the language. But RSV/NRSV give ‘Shulammite’. The Eros Strand in Wisdom 71 Othmar Keel notes that although the consonants of Shulamite give the feminine form of Solomon, sˇe˘lo¯mo¯, the vowel letters are ‘more reminiscent of the Shunammite, the one from Shunem’. He goes on: ‘Shunem is a small village (now known in Arabic as sulam . . . ) made famous in the OT by the beautiful Abishag, who was brought from that village to warm David, who had become cold with age (I Kings 2:13–25).’47 This way of putting it suggests that the poet may have intended us to see in the Shulamite both the one who warms the messianic figure grown cold, and the one who represents wisdom, that is to say––because the form is feminine––Lady Wisdom. This second view, that the Shulamite is Solomon, follows Sheppard’s lead at Cant. 3: 6–11, where he sees Solomon as representative of Lady Wisdom. The question, translated by ‘what’ instead of ‘how’: ‘What does your visionary gaze see in the Shulamite?’ might then be answered: ‘We discern the figure described at Proverbs 8’: And I was beside him, a master workman. Whatever a¯môn may mean here at Prov. 8: 30, it appears that the poet understood the word to mean ‘master workman’. More crucially, he appears to have understood it as referring to God not to Wisdom. Whether the phrase in Proverbs may be so understood has been asked by several scholars. The question is complex, and made infinitely more so by the subsequent history of the idea of Wisdom as applied to Christ, ‘through whom all things were made’. But if we go back to the time when the poet pondered a Hebrew scroll of Proverbs, it is possible to see that there would have been nothing to prevent him reading God as the ‘master worker’––all the more so if, earlier in the passage at verse 22, he had read Adonai qa¯na¯ni as ‘the Lord created me’.

1.15. Despise/contempt; wealth

The last two words in the sapiential vocabulary of the Song are bûz and hôn which both occur in the ﬁnal chapter. Bûz (Cant. 8: 1, and twice at Cant. 8: 7) has the same form in both verb and noun, meaning ‘to despise’ in the verb, and ‘contempt’ in the noun. BDB has ‘WisdLit & poet.’ against both. Taken together, there are ten occurrences in Proverbs, ﬁve in Psalms, three in Job, a well-known occurrence at Zech. 4: 10: ‘Who has despised the day of small things?’, and one each in Genesis, 2 Kings, and Isaiah. At Cant. 8: 1 the female, addressing the male, says:

47 Keel 1994: 228. 72 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

If I found you outside, I would kiss you; neither would they despise me. Six verses later the word ‘despise’ occurs again: If a man gave all the substance of his house for love, they would utterly despise him. At Prov. 6: 31 there is an almost identical line which describes a man being compelled, in the context of adultery, to restore sevenfold: ‘he shall give all the substance of his house’. In the two Song verses there is no antecedent for ‘they’, and NRSV, for instance, gives the translation, ‘no one would despise me’, and again at 8: 7, taking the active verb as passive, ‘it would be utterly scorned’. But it seems to me that an antecedent should be sought. In the ten occurrences of bûz in Proverbs, we find that those who despise are the ones worthy of contempt. The word is used with unfailing consistency, as a few examples will show: ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; but fools despise wisdom and instruction’ (1: 7). ‘He who despises his neighbour is lacking in sense’ (11: 12). ‘He who despises the word brings destruction on himself’ (13: 13). ‘Do not speak in the hearing of a fool, for he will despise the wisdom of your words’ (23: 9). ‘The eye that mocks a father and despises to obey a mother, will be picked out by the ravens of the valley and eaten by the vultures’ (30: 17). It is fools, then, who despise the man (and it is a man, isˇ not a¯da¯m) who gives all the substance of his house for the kind of love the Song is talking about. The masculine noun, hôn, at Cant. 1: 8 meaning ‘wealth, sufficiency’, is, according to BDB (223), ‘almost wholly WisdLit, especially Proverbs’, where it occurs eighteen times, plus four times in Ezekiel and three in Psalms. The Old Testament has a variety of words for wealth,48 and the assumption most often encountered is that they are to be taken au pied de la lettre. That the ancient Israelites regarded literal prosperity as a sign of God’s favour is a commonplace of interpretation. It comes up in sermons whenever the story of the rich young man occurs (Matt. 19: 16–30; Mark 10: 17–31; Luke 18: 18–30), when the disciples, having been told by Jesus that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, exclaim, ‘Who then can be saved?’ But if the disciples thought the possession of literal wealth was a sign of God’s favour, why had they given up everything, as they claimed, in order to attach themselves to a man who, the texts are at pains to show, possessed nothing? But the story is effective, however understood, and may be left here without enquiring further into the

48 Among them RCWA, BHZ, FSK, R$oE. The Eros Strand in Wisdom 73 meaning of Jesus’ words, or what the disciples understood him to be talking about, providing a conclusion is not drawn which reduces the entire Old Testament to a single, literal level of interpretation whenever a word for riches of some kind occurs. For it is doubtful whether the biblical literature is any more concerned with wealth in its gross form than it is with human sexuality. For the present purpose, a small start can be made in favour of this point in the examination of the word hôn. The word hôn is most often translated by AV as ‘substance’, substantia being the word used by the Vulgate for two-thirds of the eighteen occurrences in Proverbs. Many of these could be taken literally: ‘Honour the Lord with your substance (hôn) and with the first-fruits of all your produce; then your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will be bursting with wine’ (3: 9–10). But when (8: 18–19) Lady Wisdom declares: ‘Riches and honour are with me; surpassing wealth (hôn) and righteousness’,49 followed by ‘My fruit is better than gold, even fine gold, and my yield than choice silver’, one might wonder how the riches and wealth of the previous line are to be understood. Even more so at 13: 7, which AV translates: ‘There is that maketh himself rich, yet hath nothing; there is that maketh himself poor, yet hath great riches.’ This, if archaic, is accurate. In any tradition based on spiritual rather than on material principles the thought of this sentence is clear. But GKC gives ‘to make, i.e., to feign oneself rich’,50 for the reflexive form of this verb, and subsequent translations have adopted this interpretation: ‘One man pretends to be rich, yet has nothing; another pretends to be poor yet has great wealth.’ But one commentator,51 after using this translation, notes: ‘On the other hand, the climate of the Wisdom literature would support a contrast between the real wealth of the poor man [rather, he should have said, of the one making himself poor], and the bankruptcy of a rich man who is never satisfied.’ Again, at 13: 11 the thought makes excellent sense if hôn is understood as wealth in the spiritual realm: ‘Wealth gained by vanity shall be diminished; but the one gathering by labour shall be increased.’52 All the occurrences bear examination from this standpoint. There is much in the Song, then, we can better understand if we read it in conjunction with Proverbs, that is to say, if we return it to its place among the wisdom books where, after all, the evidence suggests it belongs.

49 RSV/NRSV translates HQDC as ‘prosperity’ without a footnote acknowledging that the word means ‘righteousness’, or some word synonymous with it. 50 Gesenius 1910: 150. 51 Edgar Jones 1961: 128. 52 RSV/NRSV give ‘hastily’ in place of ‘vanity’ on the basis of both the LXX and the Vulgate reading. 74 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

Conclusion

The detail we have been considering in this last section has inevitably obscured the eros strand in the wisdom writings, but let us take a brief glance at another witness to the tradition, the Wisdom of Solomon, in which the eros strand is particularly predominant. That this book is known only in Greek, and possibly written later than the Song,53 cannot affect the impression of it belonging to the same tradition. Horbury writes that it ‘belongs above all to the sapiential stream of Jewish biblical tradition, and crowns the series of earlier biblical wisdom-books’.54 There are few verbal correspondences between Wisdom and the Song, doubtless due to the difference in language, but certain descriptions sound similar. For instance, ‘she is more beautiful than the sun, and above all the orders of the stars’ (Wisd. 7: 29) is evidently the same thought as, ‘You are fair, my companion, as beauty itself, comely as Jerusalem’, and ‘Who is she who looks down like the morning star, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, and terrible as the hosts of heaven?’ (Cant. 6: 4 and 10). Again, ‘Being but one, she is able to do all things’ (Wisd. 7: 27), has resonances with ‘One is my dove, my perfect one’ (Cant. 6: 9). But if verbal similarities are few, the emphasis in the Wis- dom of Solomon on living with wisdom may throw light on the term used by the male in the Song to address the female: ra ya¯ti, a feminine form with suffix, not otherwise attested, of rea ‘friend, fellow, companion’. In conclusion, a passage from Winston’s Introduction to his book on the Wisdom of Solomon describes well the eros strand in wisdom, a strand more sustained in the Song than anywhere in this literature: In depicting Sophia, the author is all aglow with a burning enthusiasm that fills the verses dealing directly with her with a luminous and passionate intensity . . . He speaks of his love for her and his seeking to make her his bride so that he might live with her (8: 9; 7: 28; 8: 16). It is noteworthy that the terms of the description of Wisdom’s union with God correspond very closely to those of the description of the student’s union with Wisdom. This undoubtedly implies that man’s ultimate goal is union with God, which may, however, be achieved only through union with His Wisdom, which is but one of His aspects.55

53 Regarding the date of Wisdom, David Winston writes that ‘various scholars have placed it anywhere between 220 BCE and 50 CE’. Winston himself thinks it ‘very likely’ that it was written in the ﬁrst half of the ﬁrst century CE (1979: 20, 23). William Horbury favours an earlier date: ‘The Egyptian Jewish community, in close touch with Judea and probably including Judean refugees, seems the likeliest cradle for the Greek text of the whole book, perhaps between 100 and 50 BCE’ (2001: 653). 54 2001: 650. 55 1979: 40–1. 2

Breast Imagery

A major image in the Song of Songs, which occurs eight times in the Masoretic text and ﬁve more times in the versions,1 is that of ‘breasts’, and it is this image which has been adduced in the modern era as evidence of erotic intent. But an examination of the two words for ‘breast’ throughout the Hebrew Bible reveals that they occur only in poetical contexts, where the image is symbolic of nurture, including Ezekiel’s allegories, ﬁrst of Jerusalem in chapter 16, and then of Jerusalem and Samaria in chapter 23, as I hope to show. There are no references to breasts in narrative passages concerning sexual encounters. This is not due to any delicacy on the part of the biblical writers but to an evident convention whereby ‘breasts’ signify ‘nourishment’ and not sexual pleasure. I shall suggest that this is equally true of the Egyptian poems in the fourth section of this chapter, while in the third I will examine evidence which indicates that this imagery was applied to the male in the opening lines, and very possibly again at 7: 9, but was in later times suppressed by means of the Masoretic pointing.

2.1. In the Bible

There are altogether twenty-eight occurrences of words for the human breast2 in the Hebrew Bible, the word sˇad and its related form sˇo¯d occurring twenty- four times, while the less common dad occurs only four times, apart from ﬁve occurrences in the Song which, I shall contend, the Masoretes pointed to mean ‘love’, and one at Prov. 7: 18, as we have seen (§1.7), where, I suggest, the Masoretes pointed similarly. Here, then, is a list of the twenty-eight occurrences, grouped according to themes or books, followed by some discussion on the more problematic uses of this image: Gen. 49: 25 [Jacob’s blessing of his son Joseph]: ‘by the Almighty [sˇadday] who will bless you with blessings of heaven above, blessings of the

1 In the Peshitta version of the Song there are two occurrences fewer, as we shall see later. 2 Another word, HZX, is only used of the breast of a sacrificial animal and is not listed here. 76 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God deep that lie beneath, blesssings of the breasts [sˇa¯dayîm], and of the womb’.3 Isa. 28: 9. ‘Whom will he teach knowledge, and whom will he make understand instruction? Those weaned from milk, those removed from the breasts?’ (sˇa¯dayîm). Isa. 60: 16. ‘You [Zion] shall suck the milk of nations, you shall suck the breast (sˇo¯d) of kings; and you shall know that I, the Lord, am your Saviour and your Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob.’ Isa. 66: 10–11. ‘Rejoice with Jerusalem, and be glad for her, all you who love her . . . that you may suck and be satisfied with her consoling breast . . . ’ (sˇo¯d). Joel 2: 16. ‘Gather the people, sanctify the congregation, assemble the elders, gather the children, and those sucking the breasts . . . ’ (sˇa¯dayîm). Ps. 22: 9. ‘Yet thou art he that took me from the womb; thou didst keep me safe upon my mother’s breasts’ (sˇa¯dayîm). Job 3: 12. ‘Why did the knees receive me, or why the breasts (sˇa¯dayîm) that I should suck?’ Job 24: 9. ‘They tear the orphan from the breast (sˇo¯d), and hold the poor by a pledge.’ Lam. 4: 3. ‘Even the sea monsters draw out the breast (sˇo¯d), they give suck to their young ones; the daughter of my people [i.e. Jerusalem] has become cruel.’ The preceding nine quotations are plainly concerned with the function of breasts to provide nurture. The three following are not so plain: Hos. 2: 2. ‘Plead with your mother [Israel] . . . that she put away her harlotry from her face, and her adultery from between her breasts’ (sˇa¯dayîm). Isa. 32: 12. ‘Wailing upon the breasts (sˇa¯dayîm) for the pleasant fields, for the fruitful vine.’ (RSV. A difficult verse. BDB (704 under sa¯pad) gives ‘over [i.e. concerning] the fields wailing, over the delightful fields’, which would necessi- tate only the amendment of a sˇin to a ´sin.) Prov. 5: 18–19. ‘Let your fountain be blessed; rejoice with the wife of your youth. A loving hind, a gracious doe, let her breasts [daddayîm] satisfy you at all times, and with her love be intoxicated continually.’ (For this last verse see §1.6.)

3 The occurrence of sˇadday, ‘Almighty’, and sˇa¯dayîm, ‘breasts’, in the same verse is striking and is cited, with Isa. 13: 6 and Joel 1: 15 (‘destruction from Shadday’, sˇo¯d misˇsˇadday in both texts) as an example of paronomasia. See Harriet Lutzky 1998. Also David Biale 1982, esp. 247–8. Breast Imagery 77

The following five verses, and seven occurrences of ‘breasts’, are from Ezekiel, and both words, sˇad and dad, are used. The less common form, dad, is thought more properly to mean ‘nipple’, ‘teat’, and I shall use ‘teats’ wherever it occurs in the following passages from Ezekiel: 16: 2–3, 7. ‘Son of man, make known to Jerusalem her abominations, and say, Thus says the Lord your God to Jerusalem . . . I have made you a multitude like the growth of the field, and you have increased and grown great and come to maturity. Your breasts (sˇa¯dayîm) are formed, and your hair has grown; yet you were naked and bare.’ 23: 2–4. ‘Son of man, there were two women, the daughters of one mother; they played the harlot in Egypt . . . there their breasts [sˇa¯dayîm] were bruised, and there they pressed the teats [daddayîm] of their virginity. Oholah was the name of the elder and Oholibah the name of her sister . . . Oholah is Samaria, and Oholibah is Jerusalem.’ 23: 8. ‘Oholah . . . did not give up her harlotry . . . they pressed the teats [daddayîm] of her virginity.’ 23: 21. ‘Thus you [Oholibah] longed for the lewdness of your youth, when your teats [daddayîm] were pressed by the Egyptians for the sake of the breasts [sˇa¯dayîm] of your youth.’ 23: 33–4. ‘You [Jerusalem] will be filled with drunkenness and sorrow, with the cup of horror and desolation, with the cup of your sister Samaria. You shall drink it and drain it out . . . and tear off your breasts’ [sˇa¯dayîm]. In the following seven verses from the Song, the eight occurrences of ‘breasts’ are all in the plural form of sˇad, that is, sˇa¯dayîm: 1: 13. ‘A bundle of myrrh is my beloved to me; he abides between my breasts.’ 4: 4–5. ‘Your neck is like the tower of David built in courses . . . your two breasts like two young harts, twins of a gazelle.’ 7: 4. ‘Your two breasts are like two young harts, twins of a gazelle. Your neck is like the tower of ivory . . . Your nose is like the tower of Lebanon which looks towards Damascus.’ 7: 7–8. ‘This your stature is like that of a palm tree, and your breasts to its clusters. I said, I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of its boughs. Then let your breasts, I pray, be like clusters of the vine, and the fragrance of your nose like apples.’ 8: 1. ‘O that you were like a brother to me, sucking the breasts of my mother.’ 8: 8–10. ‘We have a little sister, and she has no breasts; what shall we do for 78 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God our sister in the day that she is spoken against? If she is a wall, we will build upon her a course of silver; and if she is a door we will enclose her with boards of cedar. I am a wall, and my breasts are like towers; then was I in his eyes as one who finds peace.’ In addition, there are five occurrences of the word dad which, I shall argue in the fourth section of this chapter, have been pointed by the Masoretes to read ‘love’ rather than ‘breasts’ or ‘teats’: 1: 2. ‘your breasts are better than wine’. 1: 4. ‘we will praise your breasts more than wine’. 4: 10. ‘How fair are your breasts, my sister, my bride, how much better your breasts than wine.’ 7: 13. ‘there I will give you my breasts’. Excluding the Song for the moment, there are twenty references to breasts in the other books cited. Of these, eleven are addressed, or relate to, peoples or cities personified, nine to Jerusalem (of which two include Samaria, and one is to Zion), one to Samaria alone, and one to Israel. This is the usage I hope to be able to show is significant for the Song.

2.2. In Ezekiel

There is in vogue a wild imprecision in describing Ezekiel’s language in chapters 16 and 23.4 Ezekiel uses strong sexual metaphors to convey the constant readiness of Israel both to unite with powerful allies instead of remaining united to God, and to yield to idol worship. It is the language of a high eros used negatively, but to apply such words as ‘erotic’ and ‘pornographic’ in their usual sense to these metaphors is anachronistic.5 That they have been damaging to women down the centuries, as feminist readers contend, is undoubtedly true, but the remedy is not provided by forcing the biblical texts to serve as examples of the subjugation of one gender by another.6 In chapter 23, Ezekiel enlarges on the theme, expressed at 20: 5–9, that

4 David Halperin (1993) provides the most extreme example. But a two-page bibliography to a talk given by Paul Joyce at the Society for Old Testament Study, January 2008, ‘The Prophets and Psychological Interpretation’, provides numerous others. For instance, two earlier ones, A. Klostermann 1877, E. C. Broome 1946, and several later, in particular J. J. Schmitt 2004. 5 See R. Abma: ‘My problem with the term “pornography” is not only that it is anachronistic with respect to the biblical texts. It . . . implies that ancient documents are judged by a modern standard that is fundamentally alien to them.’ 1999: 30–1. 6 See, in particular, Julie Galambush (1992), a valuable study in its details but not unlike Halperin’s in its conclusions. I am grateful to Dr Paul Joyce for pointing me to this book, among others, and especially for an illuminating discussion. Breast Imagery 79 Israel sinned from the time of her bondage in Egypt. The charge at 23: 8––‘She did not give up her harlotry which she had practised since her days in Egypt’––repeats that of 20: 8 when the Israelites, on being brought out of Egypt, rebelled against God ‘and did not cast away the detestable things their eyes feasted on, nor did they forsake the idols of Egypt’. ‘Thus you longed for the lewdness of your youth’ is the language Ezekiel uses to describe the com- plaints of the Israelites against Moses: ‘We remember the fish we ate freely, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions and the garlic . . . ’ (Num. 11: 15). The longing to return to the fleshpots of Egypt or, in Ezekiel’s terms, the lewdness of their youth, in spite of the evils they endured, is what Ezekiel is castigating. And the evils are pictured under the metaphor of the bruising, pressing, or squeezing of their breasts which, if it had been in the Exodus account, would have meant the hardness of the Egyptian taskmasters in extracting the last drop of goodness from the Israelites, but which, in Ezekiel’s account, is clearly connected with their propensity to yield to idol worship. The two unusual verbs used by Ezekiel in relation to breasts at 23: 2–4, 8, and 21 are worth investigating. The first, ma¯ ak, occurs otherwise only twice, at Lev. 22: 24 and 1 Sam. 26: 7. This latter occurrence seems not to be significant (‘with his [Saul’s] spear thrust [or ‘pressed’: a passive form of ma¯ ak] into the ground at his head’), but, in view of the numerous affinities of Ezekiel with the Holiness Code (Leviticus 17–26),7 we would expect something from the Leviticus reference where the verse reads: ‘You shall not offer to the Lord that which is bruised or crushed or torn or cut’. AV, RSV, and NRSV translate the word here as ‘bruised’ which, since actual damage is implied, is evidently right. But while AV retains ‘bruised’ in relation to breasts in Ezekiel 23, RSV amends to ‘handled’, while NRSV takes a further leap away from the text by providing ‘caressed’: ‘their breasts were caressed there, and their virgin bosoms fondled’. Likewise the New Jerusalem Bible and the Revised English Bible translate ma¯ ak as ‘fondled’. But at Lev. 22: 24 they all translate ‘bruised’. The other word, a¯s´â, occurs only in Ezekiel 23, at vv. 3, 8, and 21. BDB (796) gives ‘press, squeeze’ as for ma¯ ak, and adds in brackets ‘unchaste act’, while under ma¯ ak (590) it gives the translation ‘there were their breasts squeezed’ and adds ‘unchastely’, but goes on: ‘fig. of intercourse of Samaria and Jerusalem with Egypt, involving idolatry’. It is this that Ezekiel rages about. His use of the two words for ‘breasts’ in the context of idolatry links with what I believe is the use of daddayîm (MT: do¯dîm) at Prov. 7: 18, namely, a cultic use of breast imagery, understood as yielding nourishment, either for good or for evil. However, in favour of an erotic handling of breasts it could

7 See for example Lawrence Boadt 1991: 307. 80 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God be objected that ‘to squeeze’, ‘press’, and even ‘bruise’ ﬁts very well. But the book of Ezekiel, which paints the terrible picture of the glory of the Lord leaving his Temple (10: 18–19), is written at an altogether diﬀerent level.

2.3. In the Song

The first reference to breasts in the Song, which uses the word sˇad (1: 13), does what I believe the whole work is intended to do, namely, reverses the condemnations of the prophets and reveals Israel in her ideal aspect as the worthy consort of her creator: ‘A bundle of myrrh is my beloved to me; he will abide between my breasts.’8 This verse suggests the opposite situation to that in Hosea: ‘Plead with your mother [Israel] . . . that she put away her harlotry from her face, and her adultery from between her breasts’ (2: 2). What then do the breasts represent in both these verses? The Targum to Cant. 1: 13, immediately following ‘he will abide between my breasts’, launches, inexplicably on the face of it, into the episode of the Golden Calf and goes on: ‘Behold, then Moses descended from the Mount with the two tablets of stone in his hands.’ The Targumist understands the breasts to symbolize the two tablets of stone, a symbolism evidently alien to his cast of mind.9 He alludes to it at Cant. 1: 2 with ‘written on two tablets of stone’, because he is reading ‘your [male] breasts’ in an unpointed text, not ‘your loves’, as pointed by the Masoretes (see the next section), and again here at 1: 13. But at 4: 5 and 7: 4, where the text specifically refers to two breasts, he shies off on to the theme of two messiahs. Only at 8: 1 does he explicitly link ‘the breasts of my mother’ with the Torah.10 The Torah is, indeed, the means by which the people are to be nourished, and it is represented by the metaphor of stone, symbolizing permanence and durability, for the Torah must, in the first place, be engraved on the hardest, the most unyielding material available so that it might not easily be effaced and thus forgotten, or defaced and thus misinterpreted. But other metaphors

8 See R. N. Whybray 1974: 44: ‘The normal meaning of the verb lyn/lûn is “stay the night”; but it is also used in a metaphorical sense of a moral quality or condition of life which “abides” with a man or a community.’ See the eight references he gives. 9 The Targumist succeeds in stripping the Song of the feminine principle, not a breath of it being allowed to remain. He is an Amos rather than a Hosea, a Luther rather than a Bernard, which is to betray the original nature of the Song. The Targum has its own particular interest, enormously increased by Alexander’s detailed and learned Notes. But its spirit is not that of the Song. 10 See Alexander 189 n. 1: ‘“Mother” = Torah . . . The image is apt: just as the mother nourishes the child, so the Torah nourishes Israel’. Breast Imagery 81 are needed. The importance of the Song for the biblical literature is that it picks up from Hosea (2: 2) and Isaiah (66: 11) the metaphor of ‘breasts’ for that aspect of the Torah which is yielding, comforting, and, above all, nourish- ing. Thus the breasts represent the feminine aspect of Torah, called both ‘mother’ and ‘wife’, especially in the Wisdom literature; an implicit metaphor, unlike ‘stone’, which is always explicit. There are two further references to two breasts at 4: 5 and 7: 4: ‘Your two breasts are like two young harts, twins of a gazelle.’ These animals represent further aspects of the Torah, or of wisdom, as we have seen (§1.6). The word o¯fer, ‘young hart, stag’, occurs ﬁve times in the Song and nowhere else. Here, at 4: 5 and 7: 4, the word is plural, and at 7: 4 they are ‘twins’ of a seviyyâ, ˙ ‘gazelle’, a creature twice used in the Song in adjuration (2: 7 and 3: 5), that is, in place of God, as we have seen.11 The next two references to ‘breasts’, at 7: 7–8, require the previous verse also: How fair and pleasant you are, O love, for delights! This your stature is like that of a palm tree, and your breasts to its clusters. I said, I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of its boughs. Then let your breasts, I pray, be like clusters of the vine, and the fragrance of your nose like apples.12 The noun used here for ‘delights’, which also means ‘daintiness’ and ‘luxury’, only occurs otherwise at Prov. 19: 10, and at Mic. 1: 16 and 2: 9, and there is not much to be gained from it in these places. But there is a great deal to be gained from its verb, ano¯g, which is applied to Jerusalem at Jer. 6: 2 and Isa. 66: 11, and to delighting in the Lord at Ps. 37: 4 and 11, Isa. 55: 2, 58: 14, and Job 27: 10. The delight spoken of in these passages bears, by reason of the meaning of the word, an intensity of feeling which is universally understood in relation to sexual delight but less commonly understood in relation to delighting in God. On the passage as a whole, there is something not unlike it in 1 Enoch at 24: 4–5: It [a tree] had a fragrance sweeter than all spices, and its leaves and ﬂowers and wood

11 See §1.6 for the discussion so far of these animals. There is a fuller discussion in the Commentary at Cant. 8: 14. 12 In a lengthy disquisition (1977: 636–7), Pope succeeds in transforming the nose here into the vulva by showing that ap in Ugaritic is applied to a city gate and may, therefore, be cognate with Akkadian apu, ‘hole’, and aptu, ‘opening’. 82 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God never wither; its fruit is beautiful and resembles the clusters of the date-palms. Then I said: ‘How beautiful is this tree and fragrant, and (how) fair are its leaves, and (how) very lovely to the eye are its blossoms.13 The biblical text which looks significant in relation to Cant. 7: 7–8 is from a passage on Wisdom at Prov. 3: 18: ‘She is a tree of life to them that lay hold on her.’ The verb is the same in both places, ha¯zaq, and can mean ‘seize’ and ‘lay ˙ hold of’. The ‘breasts’ here would then be those of the ‘wife’, that is, Lady Wisdom, at Prov. 5: 18. But another way of understanding this passage is suggested by the application of a¯nag, ‘delight’, to God. The verse, ‘How fair and pleasant are you, O love, for delights’, comes at the end of the six verses beginning, ‘Return, return, O Shulamite’, which unquestionably refer to the female figure. But it is impossible to know to whom the verse ‘How fair and pleasant, O love [voca- tive?], are you for delights’ applies, for it is an exclamation concerning the abstract noun ‘love’. The word ‘love’ occurs in the Song seventeen times, ten times in a substantival form, and seven times in a verbal form (both numbers are significant). It is not used in direct address by the male, but, with two exceptions at 8: 6 and 7, where the male seems to be speaking,14 the occurrences of ‘love’ are spoken by the female. Thus, 7: 7 may mark the separation of the male’s description of the female, 7: 1–6, and be the beginning of her description of him which, in that case, would take us to the end of the chapter. That there is no problem about positing a change in gender is due to the fact that in unpointed Hebrew, as also in Greek, there is no indication of gender in direct address. The Vulgate, on the other hand, gives: ‘Quam pul- chra es, et quam decora, carissima, in deliciis’, after which address to the female necessarily follows. If this sentence goes back to Jerome, and is not a later assimilation to the Masoretic text, then this understanding of the passage may already have been current in Palestine when Jerome was translating the Hebrew Bible at the end of the fourth century––which is indeed possible for reasons we shall see in Chapter 6. There are two reasons for suspecting that the Masoretic pointing here does not reflect the original text. First would be the desire to avoid the application of breasts to the male figure, as in the opening verse, to which we shall come shortly. The question raised by the attribution of ‘breasts’ to the male here, is whether the sentence, ‘This your stature is like to a palm tree and your breasts to clusters,’ might

13 Matthew Black 1985: 39. The symbolism of the date palm is a theme of the Kabbalists. See, for instance, Gershom Scholem 1987: 172–3, which relates to the Song. 14 See the Commentary ad loci, where these verses are attributed to the male, contra the MT. Breast Imagery 83 reflect some aspects of the representation of a deity found in Babylonian writings as described by Jerrold S. Cooper in ‘New Cuneiform Parallels to the Song of Songs’ (1971). Cooper cites such descriptions as: ‘His stature is a poplar’; ‘His back-bone is a palm’; ‘His breasts are figs’. Like some of the parallels cited by Pope, these phrases seem too close to be accidental. But another, and stronger reason might have been the desire to avoid applying the word koma, ‘stature’, to the male because of the concern in Rabbinic circles about the esoteric literature on the ‘Body [or Stature] of God’, Shiur Koma, an alteration to the text which, as we shall see when we come to Chapters 5 and 6, is supported by the view that this literature began to be suppressed, or modified, in the third century. In which case an alteration to the traditional reading would have taken place well before Jerome’s translation, and the Masoretes would only have been following what was already established by their time. A further and, I think, decisive reason for suspecting an alteration is that the application of feminine suffixes to this passage creates a major textual problem which is at once removed if they are replaced by masculine suffixes. After the ‘fragrance of your nose is like apples’ the text goes on without sigla of any sort: ‘And the roof of your mouth like the best wine for my beloved . . .’ The word for ‘my beloved’, dodi, can only be spoken by the woman for reasons we have seen (Introduction §10). The theory that the Masoretes preserved the consonantal text, even if they increased its difficulty with their pointing, might account for their having left a problem for all subsequent readers. Commentators have exercised enormous exegetical ingenuity on this question and have proposed a range of solutions, none of which seem at all likely.15 Another, more minor, problem would also be resolved if the passage applied to the male and not to the female. At 7: 5 the male has already compared the female’s nose to the tower of Lebanon and, as the text stands, it is odd that he applies a quite different metaphor only four verses later. But if the chapter is repointed to make of it an exchange of compliments, then it is the female who comments that the fragrance of his nose is like apples,16 which

15 See Pope 1977: 639, for a discussion of the problem and some examples of attempts to solve it. The most popular, if the most impossible, is the ‘interruption by the woman’ line, which seems already to have been established in 1894 (M. Friedlander). It has been followed by numerous commentators including M. V. Fox (1985), Roland Murphy (1990), Jill Munro (1995), Ariel and Chana Bloch (1995), and John F. Brug (1995), and is still going strong; for instance, Richard S. Hess (2003), Yair Zakovitch (2004), Stoop-van Paridon (2005). But Cheryl Exum (2005) disagrees, which may encourage future commentators to think again. 16 See the section below on Egyptian links (§2.5) for a parallel to ‘the fragrance of his nose’. 84 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God is all the more probable because at 2: 3 it is she who says: ‘As the apple tree among the trees of wood, so is my beloved among the sons.’ The next reference to breasts in the Song is at 8: 1: ‘O that you were like a brother to me, sucking the breasts of my mother.’ Somewhat on the lines of the Targum, Joüon writes that we have here, ‘en termes voilés et allegoriques comme tout le poème’, a properly messianic passage in which is expressed the ardent desire of the bride to see the beloved take human form.17 To this also we will return at greater length in the Commentary, where I hope to show that Joüon is probably nearer the mark than might at first appear. The last two references to breasts in the Song occur at 8: 8–10: We have a little sister, and she has no breasts; what shall we do for our sister in the day she is spoken against? If she is a wall, we will build upon her a course of silver; and if she is a door we will enclose her with boards of cedar. I am a wall, and my breasts are like towers; then was I in his eyes like one who finds peace. ‘We think immediately of Jerusalem,’ Tournay declares in his commentary on these verses: ‘This Jerusalem can only be the holy city restored by Nehe- miah [who] rebuilt the walls and fixed the doors to the gates,’ and he gives a number of biblical references, notably, ‘that the only other use of the verb dbr, “to speak,” in the pual (passive) is in specific reference to Jerusalem in Ps. 87: 3: “Glorious things are spoken of you.”’18 But, more specifically, the ‘younger sister’ here represents, I believe, the Second Temple, defending itself against the charge, ‘she has no breasts’, namely, is inadequate to provide the true nourishment which the First Temple provided. From 1 Enoch, the ‘Animal Apocalypse’ (85–90), we learn that the tower symbolizes the Temple and when it is rebuilt the bread placed on the table is regarded as ‘polluted and not pure’.19 This appears to be the view of the author of 1 Enoch, but it is evidently not the view of the author of the Song, who is here, I believe, championing the validity of the Second Temple (see Commentary, ad loc.).

17 1909: 302. All references to Joüon are to this work. 18 Tournay 1988: 38–9. 19 R. H. Charles 1913: 256. Breast Imagery 85

2.4. The pre-Masoretic evidence for ‘breasts’ at Song 1: 2 and 420

In verses 2 and 4 of chapter 1 of the Song there is an important difference between the Hebrew Bible, which our English versions follow, and the Septuagint and the Vulgate. The Hebrew of the Masoretic text is translated at verse 2: ‘your love is better than wine’, and at verse 4: ‘we will praise your love more than wine’. But both Greek and Latin render ‘breasts’––‘your breasts are better than wine’, and ‘we will praise your breasts more than wine’–– which is treated by commentators as a mistake and either ignored or given an explanation which accords with the Masoretic pointing. But was it a mistake? In Hebrew the word dad, translated ‘breast’, ‘teat’, or ‘nipple’, has, in my view, been pointed by the Masoretes in its five occurrences in the Song, to look like a noun for ‘love’ spelt defectively. Thus it occurs twice in relation to the male in the opening verses, and three times in relation to the female, rendered in every occurrence by the Septuagint and Vulgate ‘breasts’, whereas wherever ‘love’ or ‘beloved’ is clearly intended the word is spelt plene, that is, with its vowel letter, dôd, which distinguishes it from the word for ‘breast’, dd. It would, then, have been surprising if the translators of an unpointed text, on seeing a double dd without a vowel letter, had translated it as anything other than ‘breast’. The change from ‘breasts’ (the occurrences of the word in the Song are all in the plural) to ‘love’ was, I contend, evidently effected by the Masoretes somewhere between the sixth and the ninth centuries CE, and probably nearer the ninth than the sixth, as suggested by the reading ‘breasts’ implied by the Targumist in the eighth century. At first sight this conjecture seems not to be supported by the pre-Masoretic literature, in particular a discussion in the Mishnah which is taken up in the Gemara of the Babylonian Talmud,21 and is also mentioned in Cant. Rabbah (I. 2, §1). In the printed, unpointed, versions of all these texts, where Song 1: 2 and 4 are quoted, dd, with its pro-nominal singular suffix, but with no indication of gender, is spelt with a vowel letter, thereby forming a word for ‘love’ and agreeing in regard to pronunciation with the Masoretic text, thus eliminating any question of reading ‘breasts’. But this is a case of the later assimilation of the Rabbinic texts to the Masoretic text, and if we look at the context in which these verses are quoted it is evident that the rabbis are, in fact, discussing the gender of the suffix on the word for breasts. Should it be, one rabbi asks another, daddêka¯, your (male) breasts, or

20 A version of this section was presented to the Patristics Conference in Oxford and published 1997. But the first part is substantially changed in the light of further thought and investigation. 21 m. Avoda Zara (lit. ‘strange worship’ = idolatry in rabbinical terminology) 29b and b. Avoda Zara 35b. 86 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God daddayik, your (female) breasts? And the reason for concluding that they are referring to breasts,whether male or female (and the first rabbi puts his col- league right by showing that the suffix must be masculine), is that they are in the middle of a discussion on cheese, that is to say, a process of milk. The evidence from Qumran similarly favours the reading ‘your breasts’ at 1: 2 and 4. Among the remains of four scrolls of the Song there are two fragments of the opening seven verses, the first of which, 1: 1–6, shows both occurrences of the word spelt without a vowel letter.22 In view of the normal Qumran practice of adding vowel letters to assist a correct reading, this suggests that the word would most probably have been given a vowel letter precisely to avoid reading ‘your breasts’ had the reading at that time been ‘your love’.23 A further cause for suspicion when the word is pointed to mean ‘your love’ is that the form is plural: ‘your loves’. Against this difficulty it could be argued that the form might be plural with singular meaning. There are, however, only three occurrences of ddym pointed do¯dîm, in the Hebrew Bible, Ezek. 16: 8, the same at 23: 17 and Prov. 7: 18, and we have already seen that this latter is translated by the Vulgate Veni, inebriemur uberibus, ‘Come, let us be drunk with breasts’. At Ezek. 23: 17 the Vulgate describes the Babylonians coming to her, namely, Jerusalem, ad cubile mammorum, ‘to the bed of breasts’, both occurrences being in plural, and supporting my view that dd, when not referring to an uncle or an aunt, refers to breasts, and that there must have been some cultic significance attached to the word. But for the third example at Ezek. 16: 18 the Vulgate gives tempus amantium, this latter word being a plural participle, ‘time of lovers’, generally here translated in the singular: ‘Your time is the time of love’, for which the context is address by God to Jerusalem. The LXX is of no help in these cases, giving plural participles of καταλω for both the occurrences in Ezekiel which, whatever the word means in these contexts, is neither ‘love’ nor ‘breasts’. But at Prov. 7: 18 the LXX supports the usual translation with ‘let us enjoy love until morning’. The least that can be concluded from this survey is that the case for do¯dîm meaning ‘lovemaking’, as now so often alleged, is not very strong.24 A fourth

22 6Q published by M. Baillet 1982. 23 But see Emanuel Tov 1992: 109, where the Song is not included among those books which manifest evidence of the Qumran practice. Professor Tov reads VYDD as pointed by the Masoretes (private communication), and therefore as lacking evidence for the Qumran practice. 24 This usage may have originated with M. V. Fox who writes: ‘I render dodim as “caresses” because “lovemaking”, which is more precise, often seems awkward in translation. Dodim always refers to sex acts . . . ’ 1985: 97. The extent to which this usage has caught on is revealed by its inclusion in Pope Benedict’s Encyclical Letter, Deus Caritas Est where he writes: ‘two different Hebrew words are used [in the Song] to indicate “love”. First there is the word dodim, a plural form suggesting a love that is still insecure, indeterminate and searching . . . ’ (2006: 6 of the downloaded version). Breast Imagery 87 occurrence of dôdîm is found at Cant. 5: 1 but it has a vowel letter between the dd which does relate it to dôd, that is, to some form of ‘love’, and is consequently translated ‘beloved ones’. Thus the evidence leads to the speculation that Jerome translated amantium at Ezek. 16: 8 because his Hebrew text had a vowel letter inserted between the two dds. Apart from a desire in later times to gloss over what may once, in Ezekiel and in the wisdom literature of Proverbs and the Song, have had a cultic significance, no longer understood in Masoretic times, a reason for the change from ‘breasts’ to ‘love’, especially at 1: 2 and 4 where it is the male, namely, God, to whom breasts are ascribed in the LXX and Vulgate, was suggested to me by Raphael Loewe’s paper, ‘Apologetic Motifs in the Targum to the Song of Songs’. The Targum manifests the same concerns as those of the Masoretes, one of which was anthropomorphism. In the Song, at 5: 10–16, the female describes the person of the beloved, and this passage was taken up in Jewish mysticism, notably in the Shiur Koma literature, as we will see in Chapter 6. About this tradition Gershom Scholem wrote that ‘it aroused the bitterest antagonism among all Jewish circles which held aloof from mysticism’, and that, between such circles and Jewish mystics, ‘the antagonism was mutual, for it is in this attitude towards anthropomorphism that Jewish rational theology and Jewish mysticism part company’.25 Thus the Targum, to return to Loewe, ‘succeeds in eliminating every single reference to the person of the Deity in 5: 10–16 except that of the eyes . . . God’s eyes being, indeed, so familiar a biblical expression as scarcely to raise any antianthropomorphic scruples’.26 At Cant. 1: 2 and 4, consequently, the Targum suggests the reading ‘breasts’ only by references to the Law ‘inscribed on two tablets of stone’, which indicates that the Targumist was using an unpointed text. The Targum, although retaining many earlier midrashic elements and representing a historical allegorical line of interpretation is, nevertheless, rooted in the peshat, the ‘plain meaning’,27 and it is this which links it with the Masoretes, whose period of development has been characterized as the period of the peshat.28 A period, then, when antianthropomorphism and a mood for the plain meaning had combined, would hardly have allowed breasts to God if an alternative reading could be made available. Whether the Masoretes pointed dd to mean ‘love’ spelt defectively, or whether their pointing reflected a change in pronunciation already in use (which would accord with the view that the Masoretes were never innovative), remains a question.

25 G. Scholem (1941) 1961: 63. 26 Raphael Loewe 1966: 191. 27 For an exposition of this term, see Raphael Loewe 1964: 140–85. 28 Cf. James Barr 1968: 60. 88 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God A contrary witness in the pre-Masoretic period, however, is the Syriac which reads ‘bowels’ (namely, ‘tender feelings’ or ‘compassion’) at 1: 2 and ‘love’ at 1: 4. But, unlike the Hebrew, the Syriac does not bring the later occurrences of dd into line but reads them as ‘breasts’, which suggests a concern about the attribution of breasts to the male ﬁgure.29 Jerome, on the other hand, translating the Song in Palestine from the Hebrew at the end of the fourth century, as earlier noted, read ‘breasts’ wherever the double dd occurred in his unpointed text, thus agreeing on this point with the Septuagint and Old Latin versions. It was, then, with good reason that both Greeks and Latins give ‘breasts’ not ‘loves’ from the original Hebrew.

2.5. Links with Egyptian liturgy and poetry

If the two occurrences of dd at Cant. 1:2 and 4 are to be read as ‘breasts’ not ‘loves’, the same reading must be applied to the other three occurrences, twice at 4: 10 and once at 7: 13, verses which particularly suggest links with ancient Egypt: How fair are your breasts, my sister, my bride, how much better your breasts than wine, and the fragrance of your oils more than all spices. (4: 10)

Let us rise early for the vineyards; let us see if the vine has blossomed, if the tender buds have opened, and the pomegranates have come forth; there I will give you my breasts. (7: 13) The striking similarities between the Song of Songs and some of the Egyptian poems have been noticed for a century and more, and although this subject takes me well beyond the limits of my study, it is impossible to ignore the Egyptian material once one has encountered its imagery, however super- ﬁcially. Two scholars who have devoted full-length studies to comparing the Song and the Egyptian poems are John B. White, A Study of the Language of Love in the Song of Songs and Ancient Egyptian Poetry, published in 1978, and

29 The Song of Songs was very little referred to in Syriac tradition until the late fifth or sixth century. See Sebastian Brock 1989: 133. I am very grateful to Dr Brock for his kind help in this and related areas. Breast Imagery 89 Michael V. Fox, The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs, published in 1985.30 Both these scholars are equally committed to the view that the Egyptian poems are about human love but White’s book points in his notes to a good deal of the evidence for a sacral interpretation, notably an article by Aylward M. Blackman, ‘On the Position of Women in the Ancient Egyptian Hierarchy’. This article does not deal with the Egyptian ‘love songs’, much less with the Song of Songs, but its implications for both are remarkable. A further aid to understanding is provided by Virginia Lee Davis in a critical response to an earlier article by Fox on the Cairo Love Songs.31 Davis presents in a short compass a much clearer picture of the Egyptian ethos than that presented by Fox, but in spite of her extremely interesting comments, which convey a culture centred on the gods and the religious sphere, Fox has been careful to omit the religious dimension from his study except for a single and, in the context of his approach, astonishing comment: ‘The Egyptians felt divinity’s presence everywhere. They were, as Herodotus saw, the most religious of peoples’ (236). This is certainly the impression gained from Blackman, and between his long, rambling, but immensely informative study, and Davis’s response to Fox, together with White’s and Fox’s translation of the Egyptian poetry, there is sufficient basis––at least for the present purpose––for comparisons to be made with certain passages in the Song. How the links between the Song and the Egyptian Songs are to be explained remains a difficulty. Fox writes that there is a gap of perhaps a thousand years between them, but he claims that channels for literary transmission existed at many times, if not continuously, throughout the centuries, and he points to the unmistakable ties between Proverbs and Egyptian wisdom literature (191). Davis also comments: ‘the circumstances for borrowing (in both directions) are numerous and well known, and their existence in the ancient Near East is generally accepted by most scholars today’ (111). From my own reading of the Egyptian material a conviction has emerged that the links with the Song, however problematic historically, are undeniable and that they are, on the evidence of Blackman’s article, liturgical. The first passage cited above, Cant. 4: 10, applies imagery to the female which is earlier applied to the male in the opening verses (1: 2b–4):

30 Three shorter studies (Antonio Loprieno, Pascal Vernus, and Gerald Moers and Hubertus Münch), written more recently(2005), also compare the Song and the ancient Egyptian poetry. But as their assumptions concerning both the Song and the Egyptian poetry are those of White and Fox, I have not attempted to incorporate them. For a welcome challenge to this consensus and a vigorous exposition of the diﬀerences between the Song and the Egyptian poems see Hector Patmore (2006) . 31 Both written in 1980. 90 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

... your breasts are better than wine. For fragrance your oils are good; your name is poured forth as oil, therefore the maidens love you. Draw me, we will run after you; the king has brought me into his chambers, let us rejoice and be glad in you; let us praise your breasts more than wine; rightly they love you. In these opening lines, breasts are, as I have argued in the previous section, ascribed to the male while in the other two passages they are ascribed to the female. In ancient Egypt suckling breasts are ascribed to a goddess, Hathor, but also to the women who represent her, not, as far as I have gathered, to any male, even a god. According to Blackman, Hathor’s high-priestess bore the title ‘She who gives suck’, namely, he writes, ‘she was identiﬁed with the goddess Hathor, who either in human or bovine form is so often depicted suckling the Pharaoh, thereby imparting to him life, stability, and good for- tune’.32 This theme recurs in the article and is clearly a central one. The author of the Song, it seems, takes the imagery of nurturing breasts and applies it to the male, thus suggesting that his intention is to focus on the nurturing aspect of God. Blackman tells us that there were musician-priestesses attached to the temple of Osiris at Abydos and to the temple of Hathor at Cusae, and he says that ‘almost every woman who dwelt in or near Thebes during the New Kingdom seems to have served as musician-priestess’. He goes on: ‘Again an inscription of Ramesses II, and also of Ramesses III’s adaptation of it, speak of the great noble ladies of the temple of Ptah and the Hathors of the temple of Atum, who were evidently musician-priestesses, for they are spoken of as greeting the king (when he visited these temples) with jubilation and the beating of tambourines’ (9; emphasis in Blackman, here and in the following citation). Further on Blackman refers again to the inscription of Ramesses II, ‘which speaks of the Hathors of the temple of Atum being in festival, their hearts rejoicing, their hands holding tambourines, and how they cry out for joy when they see the Pharaoh’s beautiful form. Thus not only was the high- priestess of the sun-god identiﬁed with Hathor, but the musician-priestesses over whom she presided were designated Hathors also’ (14). Blackman’s article is wholly focused on Egyptian temples, the worship performed in them, and the processions in and from them when festivals involved processions through the streets. Read in its light, together with a

32 Aylward M. Blackman 1921: 11. Breast Imagery 91 verse from Psalm 68, the opening verses of the Song also imply a procession and thus plunge us into the Temple and into its liturgical activity from the beginning of the book. There are no tambourines in these verses, though there are in Psalm 68, but there is much else. In particular there are the maidens, a˘la¯môt. In his article HMLE [almâ], C. Dohmen notes that ‘a survey of the OT ‘almâ texts shows that, despite their small number, there is a real difference between the usage of the singular and the use of the plural: the occurrences of the plural all stand in isolation, whereas the occurrences of the singular stand in a kind of mutual relationship’.33 The plural form of almâ occurs twice in the Song, here at 1: 3 and again at 6: 8: There are sixty queens and eighty concubines, and maidens (a˘la¯môt) without number. About this verse Dohmen writes: ‘Cant. 6: 8 occupies a special place among the texts using the plural: the triad of me˘la¯kôt [queens], pilagsˇîm [concubines], and ‘a˘la¯môt [maidens] has a special semantic force here; otherwise the juxtaposition of the three words would make little sense.’ Dohmen goes on to suggest that ‘the triad expresses the distinct legal status of the various women belonging to the royal harem’, and cites 1 Kgs. 11: 3, ‘And he [Solomon] had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines.’ When we turn to Blackman we discover that in the Egyptian cult concubines were assigned to the gods: Amenre not only possessed a human wife but also a number of human concubines. At their head was a woman entitled Chief of the Concubines, who seems generally to have been the wife of the high-priest or else his sister or daughter . . . The generally accepted view is that the concubines of Amun were no other than his musician- priestesses, a view which finds some support in the fact that the last-named are definitely stated to have been attached to the house of the God’s Wife . . . (16) Blackman goes on to say that other gods had earthly concubines assigned to them and he lists ten, and continues: ‘Strange to relate we even hear of concubines of certain goddesses with a presiding Chief of the Concubines in each case’, and he mentions four, Mut, Ubastet, Isis, and Nekhbet. Later in the article Blackman discusses the role of the ‘sacerdotal princesses’: from the reign of Osorkon III of the Twenty-third Dynasty, about 720 B.C., to that of Psammetikhos III of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, about 525 B.C., Thebes was ruled not by the high-priests but by a succession of God’s Wives. The God’s Wife was now no

33 C. Dohmen 2001: 160. 92 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God longer the wife of the Pharaoh; a princess of the reigning house was assigned the title and had to adopt a daughter to succeed her . . . (18) Whether these sacerdotal princesses are the counterpart of the queens in the Song, or whether the ‘great noble ladies of the temple of Ptah’ and, presumably, elsewhere, might be, one cannot know, but it seems likely that the Egyptian concubines are the source of those in the Song. Blackman’s description of the Egyptian cult does, moreover, raise questions about the meaning of 1 Kgs. 11: 3. The context of the verse is concerned with the perennial temptation to succumb to the lure of worshipping other gods, and the condemnation of Solomon for so succumbing. The enumeration of the princesses and concubines might reflect a memory of their origin and function in the Egyptian cult. It would probably, in any case, have been all one to the biblical writer whether they represented a foreign cult or Solomon’s harem; what concerned him was that they ‘turned away his heart’ from the true worship of the God of Israel. Neither in 1 Kgs. 11: 3 nor, apparently, in Blackman’s account of the position of women in the Egyptian hierarchy, is there a counterpart to the ‘maidens’. Dohmen notes that from the sixth century BCE onward, the word appears with increasing frequency in various semitic languages, being used in a quite general and unnuanced sense for ‘boy, girl, slave, handmaid, etc.’ One text from the fourth or third century BCE appears to use a˘la¯môt in the sense of ‘female cultic servants’ (158). Two instances of the plural involve what Dohmen calls ‘the difficult expression’ al- a˘la¯môt, Ps. 46: 1 (superscription) and 1 Chron. 15: 20. The third, already referred to, Ps. 68: 25–6, has affinities with both the opening verses of the Song and the Egyptian cult evoked by Blackman: They saw your processions, O God, processions of my God, my King, in the sanctuary; The singers before, the musicians after; maidens (a˘la¯môt) in the midst, playing tambourines. In the opening verses of the Song a procession is implied by the presence of the maidens (a˘la¯môt), who appear in procession both at Ps. 68: 25 and, in the form al ala¯môt, in the procession of the ark at 1 Chron. 15: 20, while the next line at Cant. 1: 4, ‘Draw me, we will run after you’, continues the sense of movement, as also the next: ‘the king has brought me into his chambers’. This form of ‘chambers’ only occurs otherwise in relation to the building of the Temple at 1 Chron. 28: 11: ‘And David gave to Solomon his son the pattern of the porch . . . and of its inner chambers.’ ‘His chambers’ at Cant. 1: 4 is immediately followed by: ‘Let us rejoice and be glad in you.’ The combination of forms of ‘rejoice and be glad’ occurs Breast Imagery 93 frequently in the Hebrew Bible, always with reference to God, two occurrences being in the same first plural form as in the Song: ‘This is the Lord; we have waited for him. Let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation’ (Isa. 25: 9), and: ‘This is the day which the Lord has made; let us be glad and rejoice in it’ (Ps. 118: 24). Our passage then returns to the imagery of breasts with: ‘let us praise [make remembrance/mention] your breasts more than wine; righteous ones love you’, forming a kind of inclusio. In the Egyptian poems, as translated by Fox, the motif of breasts occurs, I think, only three or four times. But I suspect that there are two words being used for ‘breasts’, as in the Song, and that one of them, apparently consisting of the same two letters, dd, as in the Song, has, by analogy, suffered the same fate and is being similarly misread as ‘love’, progressing in Fox and subsequent commentaries to ‘lovemaking’ (see note 24 above.) This suspicion arises because against the line, ‘Your liquor is (your) lovemaking’, Fox has a note: ‘Dd, determined by the phallus sign; a semiticism (corresponding to Hebrew dodim) meaning sexual lovemaking’ (10–11). If dd is a semiticism then it is more likely that it means ‘breast’, which ‘your liquor’ supports. Fox is following the view that dd means ‘love’ spelt defectively. The phallus determinative, moreover, invites the assumption that sexual activity is denoted. I will return to this point. In the first of the poems set out by Fox, the female invites the lover: ‘take my breasts that their gift may flow forth to you’ (a footnote to ‘gift’ gives ‘Lit. property, content’), which corresponds to ‘there I will give you my breasts’ at Cant. 7: 13. In the third Egyptian poem the male lover declares of the female that ‘her breasts are mandragoras’, or mandrakes, while at Cant. 7: 14 the text goes on: ‘The mandrakes give their smell . . . ’ This is the only occurrence of mandrakes in the Song, but of the Egyptian poems Fox writes:

The rrmt, a kind of fruit, is a recurring motif in the love songs. The fruit clearly had an erotic significance. Keimer identifies the rrmt with the aphrodisiac mandragora, and I have followed that rendering, although the identification is not certain. (9) In the Hebrew Bible the word ‘mandrakes’, apart from the one reference in the Song, occurs five times in a single passage at Gen. 30: 14–16, which, as BDB states, shows mandrakes ‘as exciting sexual desire, and favouring procreation’, I would expect, from the reference to mandrakes in the Song, that the identification of the word rrmt with the same fruit in the Egyptian poetry is correct. What I doubt is that in the context of that poetry the mandrake signifies an aphrodisiac understood as confined to the purely physical level. There are two more similarities with Blackman’s article I should like to note. One relates to Cant. 7: 13: ‘Let us rise early for the vineyards.’ On the title ‘Adorer of the God’, Blackman notes that the word for ‘to adore’ may be 94 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God connected with an identical word meaning ‘to do something in the morning’, ‘to rise early’, and he suggests that the verb ‘to adore’ may originally have meant ‘adore in the morning’ and have come into use because it was the custom of the Heliopolitan priests to adore the sun-god at dawn (13). The other similarity is between the special bead necklace named mnit worn by Hathor’s priestesses and verses 1: 9–10 in the Song: To my mare among the chariots of Pharaoh, I have likened you, my companion. Your cheeks are comely with circlets, your neck with strings of beads. Blackman writes: These musician-priestesses, when dancing and rattling their sistra in her worship, consciously impersonated the goddess––those attached to the temple of Atum at Heliopolis being actually called Hathors. During their performances they held out their sistra and bead necklaces for their onlookers to touch, so imparting to them the blessing of the goddess . . . [Hathor] was regarded as actually immanent in her emblems, the sistra and bead-necklaces. (14) Among the other links between the Egyptian poems and the Song one of the most striking is the use of the terms ‘brother’ and ‘sister’––especially the latter. In the Song, the term ‘brother’ applied to the beloved is used only once (8: 1), and only indirectly, by the female: O that you were as a brother to me, sucking the breasts of my mother; I would find you, I would kiss you in the street, neither would they despise me. The Sixth Stanza of one of the Egyptian poems contains the lines: Then I could hurry to (my) brother and kiss him before his company, and not be ashamed because of anyone.34 We find another link when the ‘Girl’, as Fox calls the female speaker in the poems, thinks of the love of the brother, and declares: The scent of your nose alone is what revives my heart.35

34 Fox, P. Chester Beatty I, Group A, 55. 35 Fox, P. Harris 500, Group B, 21. Fox writes that ‘the nose kiss . . . was a common gesture of affection in ancient Egypt’ and that ‘the word for “kiss” was written with the nose determinative from earliest times’. Breast Imagery 95 Lastly (though the similarities are by no means exhausted), the figure of Mehi, sometimes written with the god determinative, who appears in three of the groups of poems, rides in a chariot, and has a group of followers called ‘lovers’, is reminiscent of the beloved in the Song at 5: 1 when he exhorts his companions: ‘Eat, friends! Drink and be drunk, beloved ones!’ The subject of the links between the Ancient Egyptian material and the Song of Songs is a large one, and deserves fresh treatment by a scholar capable of getting behind the assumptions of the present times, exemplified in the conclusions both White and Fox, and, as far as I can discover, all subsequent writers, draw from this material. White, for instance, argues against the con- tention of F. R. Schröder for a religious background both to the Egyptian love lyrics and to the Song of Songs and quotes A. Hermann as having ‘correctly argued against Schröder’s narrow limitation of the imagery of love poetry to the religious sphere’ (68). And Fox assumes that the absence of the god determinative proves that the material is secular (the same argument––the absence of the divine name––used of the Song) and that the presence of the phallus determinative denotes sexual activity. It may do, but it cannot be assumed. Fox is regarding the phallus only in its secondary significance of providing pleasure (as breasts are now regarded) and not in its primary significance of co-creating with God. In the Hebrew Bible, Ezek. 16: 17 suggests the existence of phallic symbols in the worship of Jerusalem, while in Hinduism the phallus is regarded as a sacred symbol to this day. The possibility that the phallus determinative signalled a sacred symbol in ancient Egypt should be explored. Fox manifests to a degree the desire of our age to discover in ancient literature a ‘pre-Fall harmony . . . relived in a private paradise’, ‘a love unconscious of any Fall’ (xxv). Consequently he becomes a victim of anachronistic conclusions: ‘Egyptian and Israelite poets alike seem to accept premarital sex with no hesitation’ (xxiii). Like many another scholar who has written on the Song and similar literature in recent years, Fox’s learning is rendered nugatory by a post-Freudian epistemology. It is not possible to understand ancient texts from within a perspective which is itself a response to modern history. A passage in Erich Neumann’s The Origins and History of Consciousness brings us closer to the approach I believe is necessary. After quoting two passages from ancient Egyptian material Neumann goes on: the sexual symbolism that appears in primitive cult and ritual has a sacral and transpersonal import, as everywhere in mythology. It symbolizes the creative element, not personal genitality. It is only personalistic misunderstanding that makes these sacral contents ‘obscene’. Judaism and Christianity between them––and this includes Freud––have had a heavy and disastrous hand in this misunderstanding. The desecra- tion of pagan values in the struggle for monotheism and for a conscious ethic was 96 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God necessary, and historically an advance; but it resulted in a complete distortion of the primordial world of those times. The effect of secondary personalization in the struggle against paganism was to reduce the transpersonal to the personal. Sanctity became sodomy, worship became fornication, and so on. An age whose eyes are once more open to the transpersonal must reverse this process.36 This passage is particularly applicable to the Mesopotamian material, especially in the area of ‘obscene’ imagery, as we have learnt from the parallels Pope provides in his commentary on the Song. Nevertheless, the ‘transpersonal’ nature of the Egyptian poetry is equally apparent to those not prone to ‘personalistic misunderstanding’, in Neumann’s phrase. That the Song manifests undoubted links with the literature of both these far earlier periods must have implications for understanding the Song itself. Finally in this section, there is a small but striking point from Blackman in relation to the Song: ‘The high-priestess seems not merely to have been the head of the musician-priestesses; in some temples, as her respective titles indicate, she bore a very close relationship to the presiding divinity’ (11). This also describes the close relationship between the male and the female in the Song, between whom there is an affinity which could be explained purely on the basis of love but is, as we have already noted, no less an affinity of nature. This affinity of nature might be related to the use of the terms ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ in the Egyptian poems, and ‘sister’ in the Song, for which a clue can be found in White where he mentions that the gods, Inana and Osiris, call each other brother and sister.37 But for the use of ‘sister’ in the Song, although Egyptian influence may have played a part, the more immediate reference, wherever the beloved calls his companion ‘my sister’, must, I believe, be: ‘Say unto wisdom, thou art my sister’ (Prov. 7: 4).

2.6. The Odes of Solomon

The Odes of Solomon is a collection of forty-two poems, probably written, it is thought, in the early second century CE. Whether they were written in Syriac or Greek remains an area of debate, the contenders on both sides of the question producing weighty arguments. In a review of Oden Salomos: Text, Übersetzung, Kommentar, Teil 2: Oden 15–28, by Michael Lattke (2001), Lester Grabbe reports that Lattke expresses the view that he is coming to the conclusion that the original text was in Greek. And the suppression of the

36 1954: 19. 37 White (68) is quoting, and dismissing, the earlier work by F. R. Schröder who argues, as already noted, for a sacred origin of the Egyptian songs. Breast Imagery 97 attribution of breasts to God in the Peshitta at Cant. 1: 2 might be a point in support of this view. James H. Charlesworth, on the other hand, argues that they were written in a form of Aramaic-Syriac, and gives compelling reasons for this conclusion in the notes to a lecture in which he writes: The Greek copy is full of Semitisms, is inferior linguistically to the Syriac [which] preserves many features usually typical of an original language (e.g. paronomasia, alliteration, assonance, metrical scheme, parallelism, rhythm). Variations in the extant manuscripts are sometimes explained by a Syriac original (e.g. brk and krk in 22:6).38 The Odes are in any case profoundly Judaic in feel. Some of the imagery shows a remarkable aﬃnity with the opening verse of the Song, ‘Your breasts are better than wine’, understood as address to God: The Son is the cup, And the Father is He who was milked; And the Holy Spirit is She who milked Him; Because His breasts were full, And it was undesirable that His milk should be ineﬀectually released. The Holy Spirit opened Her bosom, And mixed the milk of the two breasts of the Father, Then She gave the mixture to the generation without their knowing.39 Also at Ode 8: 14: ‘And my own breasts I [God] prepared for them, that they might drink my holy milk and live by it,’ and 14: 1–2: ‘As the eyes of a son upon his father, so are my eyes, O Lord, at all times towards Thee. Because my breasts and my pleasure are with Thee.’40 About this imagery Robert Murray writes: Strange as it is, the same image of drinking from God’s breasts, the drink being both the Word and the Spirit, is found in Irenaeus,41 and there is always the possibility that the key to the image is simply the cup of milk and honey that was given to the newly- baptized, as J. H. Bernard proposed in his thoroughgoing baptismal interpretation of the Odes, followed by Jean Daniélou.42

38 From the notes to the lecture given at Yarnton Manor, Oxford, 8 May 2008. 39 Ode 19: 2–5, translated by James H. Charlesworth 1977: 82. Charlesworth’s long note 4 explains the application of the feminine gender to the Holy Spirit: ‘The feminine Holy Spirit here belongs to the Odist’s language . . . The Odes, therefore, share with the early Jewish- Christian Gospels the idea that the Holy Spirit is feminine . . . ’ Ibid. 83. 40 Ibid. 42 and 65–6 respectively. 41 Murray’s note here gives: ‘Adv. Haer. iv, 62 (Harvey II, 293)’, to which he adds: ‘The Son is pictured as God’s milk also by Clement of Alexandria, Paed. 1, 6, 42 (GCS Clem. I, 115.17–20)’. 1975a: 316. 42 Ibid. 98 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God Stranger still is that scholars have not yet, it appears, seen any link between the Odes and the Song––a measure of the extent to which the Song has dropped from scholarly consciousness, or perhaps because this image does not occur in the Peshitta, and is concealed in the Hebrew by the Masoretic pointing, as we have seen. But there are other affinities, for instance, Ode 3: 5, ‘I love the Beloved, and my soul loves him.’43 And an immensely significant affinity is found in several allusions in the Odes to the ‘garments of skin’. ‘I have removed from me my garments of skin’ (Ode 25) is the identical thought to that at Cant. 5: 3, ‘I have put off my tunic’, both clearly referring to the same doctrine––derived from Genesis 3: 21: ‘And he clothed them with tunics/garments of skin’––which suggests that both poets were, most probably, ascetics (see §7.9). Further affinities are that both the Song and the Odes are ascribed to Solomon, and they are both written at a similar level of mystical insight. Whether the Odes are all fully Christian is another area of debate. Charles- worth, in the notes to his lecture, writes: ‘Surely we should avoid terms like “Christian” and “Church” in the first century; the best term is the non- prejudicial “Palestinian Jesus Movement.”’ Certainly, the sense of joy in the fulfilment of messianic expectations is too intense to be doubted, and suggests that Providence provided a poet to record for posterity the impact of the Incarnation on those who were to become followers of the new movement. A paragraph from Charlesworth’s notes provides a description which seems to me to fit the Odes exactly: Most likely, the Odist was a Palestinian Jew, perhaps an Essene, before he came to believe that Jesus is the promised Messiah, even though the name of Jesus never appears in the Odes. The poetry of the Odes is similar to that of the Psalter, upon which it is often based; but no lament is present in the collection. The tone of the Odes is an enthusiastic joy at the dawning of a new day because the Messiah has appeared.

43 Translation from J. A. Emerton 1984: 601. Charlesworth translates: ‘I love the Beloved, and I myself love Him’ because, he tells us in note 5 to this line, the word ‘soul’ conjures up Greek ideas. But in the Song the bride uses the term six times in such lines as ‘Him whom my soul loves’ (1: 7; 3: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5: 6). 3

Symbols of Israel

There are two passages, one in the canonical book of Hosea and the other in the deuterocanonical 4 Ezra, in which symbols of Israel are embedded, few and less explicit in the Hosea passage, many and wholly explicit in 4 Ezra. They all occur, some more, some less explicitly, in the Song of Songs. Both Hosea and 4 Ezra have been dated quite closely. H. W. Wolﬀ writes: ‘Hosea’s initial activity coincides with the last two years of Jeroboam II, presumably at least ﬁve years before the king’s death (747–46 BCE)––752 at the latest’,1 while M. E. Stone agrees with the view that 4 Ezra was ‘composed in the time of Domitian, 89–96 CE’.2 Somewhere in between comes the Song. There is, then, a long tradition of symbolism regarding which the Song occupies a central role.

3.1. Hosea 14: 6–9 (ET 5–8)

In a comparative study of Hos. 14: 8a and Cant. 2: 3, ‘“S’asseoir à l’ombre” de l’Époux’, André Feuillet notes that ‘Aucun prophète n’a autant qu’Osée appliqué à Dieu le langage de l’amour humain.’3 This language of human love is expressed by Hosea in the well-known passage, 2: 14–20, which speaks in terms of union, the union of the loving Creator with his creature in the marriage relationship. The author of the Song must, it appears, have been inspired by this prophecy to portray a ‘fulﬁlment’, depicted from the side of an Israel wholly conformed to her Creator, unceasingly seeking him with an equal, yearning love. But, with the exception of the word ‘vineyards’ at 2: 15––a key word in the Song, where it occurs nine times––for an overlap of vocabulary we must look at the last few verses of the last chapter, Hos. 14: 6–9, omitting the ﬁnal ‘wisdom’ addition: I will be as the dew to Israel, that he may grow as the lily,

1 Hans Walter Wolﬀ 1974: xxi. John Day 2001: 571, provides the same dating for Hosea. 2 Michael Edward Stone 1990: 10. 3 André Feuillet 1971: 404. 100 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

and cast forth his roots like Lebanon; that his shoots may spread; his splendour be as the olive tree, and his fragrance like Lebanon. They shall return who sit in his shadow, they shall grow corn, and flourish as the vine; his renown shall be as the wine of Lebanon. Ephraim [shall say]: What have I to do any more with idols? I have answered, and I will regard him. I am like a luxuriant fir tree. From me is your fruit found. The words in bold type are those which occur in the Song. In addition, there are synonyms, or near synonyms: ye˘niqâ at Hos. 14: 7 and sˇelah at ˙ Cant. 4: 13 can both be translated ‘shoots’, while ‘corn’ in Hos. is ‘wheat’ at Cant. 7: 3. Otherwise the vocabulary is that which occurs in the Song. This fact is, of course, noted by commentators but, in the present climate, in such a way as to keep the subject closed to further investigation.4 The passage, like so much in Hosea, is difficult, and translators cannot avoid emending it for the sake of making an intelligible translation. The most difficult line, literally, ‘Ephraim, what to me still in regard to idols?’ is taken to mean either that Ephraim himself declares he no longer has any use for idols in the new paradise promised by God, in which case something has to be supplied: ‘Ephraim [shall say]: What have I to do any more with idols?’ (AV and some moderns), or that God is asking: ‘O Ephraim, what have I to do with idols?’ (RSV/NRSV), a translation which eliminates the important ôd, ‘still’ or ‘any more’ and is, in any case, unlikely. But, however the passage is translated, the metaphors remain the same, and likewise that it explicitly concerns the relationship of God and Israel. What follows is a comparison of the same metaphors with those in the Song.

3.2. Dew

‘Dew’ occurs once at Cant. 5: 2 when the beloved tells the bride, ‘my head is ﬁlled with dew, my locks with the drops of the night’. In Hosea it occurs three times, and the other two, 6: 4 and 13: 3, depict dew as a good which

4 See, for instance, Wolﬀ, ‘The lily and Lebanon are themes found in love songs’, with a footnote giving the references to ‘lily’ in the Song and one to Lebanon, 236. See also G. I. Davies 1992, whose many references to the Song in his commentary on this passage, esp. 306–7, are of the same kind. Symbols of Israel 101 evaporates: ‘your goodness is like a morning cloud, like the dew that goes away early’, and similarly the second occurrence. Otherwise dew is always a favourable image for it is that on which, in hot, dry countries such as Palestine, the land depends for fruitfulness. Thus God’s promise at 14: 5 to be like the dew to Israel is a promise to be that on which Israel daily depends.

3.3. Lily

‘Lily’, sˇôsˇan occurs, in its various forms, seventeen times in the Hebrew Bible, eight in the Song, and nine times elsewhere. Its use in Hosea suggests that it was already in his day an established symbol for Israel, something which could not be deduced from the other canonical references, but is clearly confirmed in the 4 Ezra passage, as we shall see. The other references are: four in descriptions of the design of the Temple, 1 Kgs. 7: 19, 22, 26, and 2 Chron. 4: 6; four in Psalm headings, 45, 60, 69, and 80, and the one in our Hosea passage. The only other flower in the Hebrew Bible is the ha˘bazelet, which BDB ˙ ˙ (287) calls a ‘meadow-saffron or crocus’, and which AV translates as ‘rose’ and RSV/NRSV as ‘crocus’. It occurs twice: Isa. 35: 1: ‘The desert shall rejoice and blossom as the ha˘bazelet’, and Cant. 2: 1: ‘I am the ha˘bazelet of Sharon, ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ the lily of the valleys.’ The LXX translates ha˘bazalet at Isa. 35: 1 as ‘lily’, and at ˙ ˙ Cant. 2: 1 as ‘flower’, thus reducing the named flowers in the Bible to one. This finds support in Cant. Rabbah where Rabbi Judan asks: ‘Is not ha˘bazelet ˙ ˙ the same as sˇôsˇanâ?’5 And he explains that ‘while it is still small it is called ha˘bazelet, but when it becomes full size it is called sˇôsˇanâ’. On the next verse ˙ ˙ in the Song, ‘As the lily among thorns, so is my companion among the daughters’ (2: 2), the same midrash quotes the Hosea verse, ‘I will be as the dew to Israel, he shall blossom as the lily’, and what follows offers reasons for the symbolism lily = Israel: Just as the lily expires only with its scent, so Israel expires only with religious acts and good deeds. Just as the whole purpose of the lily is to give scent, so the righteous are created only for the deliverance of Israel. Just as the lily is set on the table of kings at the beginning and at the end of the meal, so Israel is found in this world and in the world to come. Just as the lily is conspicuous among plants, so Israel is conspicuous among the nations, as it says, ‘All that see them shall acknowledge them’ (Isa. 61: 9).6 We find an early example of a Jewish heroine being called Σωσα´ννα, the Greek form of sˇôsˇanâ, in the Story of Susannah, one of the additions to Daniel

5 Maurice Simon 1951: 92. All references to Cant. Rabbah are to this edition. 6 Ibid. 98. 102 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God in the Septuagint, in which Susannah is shown to be a true ‘daughter of Israel’ and called such by Daniel (v. 48). Nevertheless, from the article ‘Lily’ in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, it appears that the biblical symbolism of the lily has been forgotten. Similarly, in Chris- tian art, explanations accompanying medieval paintings of the Annunciation in which the Angel Gabriel is carrying a spray of lilies as he greets Mary, or where there are lilies in a pot between them, always state that the lilies symbolize Mary’s purity. But it is more likely that they originally symbolized her role as the embodiment of Israel, the virgin daughter of God’s people encountered in the prophetic books. If, then, the lily is understood as a metaphor for Israel, the verses in the Song in which lilies are found yield inferences quite other than when the word is understood literally: 2: 1. ‘I am a bud of the plain, a lily of the valleys.’ 2: 2. ‘As a lily among the thorns, so is my companion among the daughters.’ 2: 16. ‘My beloved is mine, and I am his; he feeds among the lilies.’ 4: 5. ‘Your two breasts are like two young harts, twins of a gazelle, feeding among the lilies.’ 5: 13. ‘His cheeks are like terraces of spices, yielding perfumes. His lips are lilies, dripping with liquid myrrh.’ 6: 2. ‘My beloved has gone down to his garden, to the terraces of spices, to feed in the gardens, and to gather lilies.’ 6: 3. ‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine; he feeds among the lilies.’ 7: 3. ‘Your navel is the rounded bowl, may it not lack the mixed wine. Your belly is a heap of wheat, fenced round with lilies.’

3.4. Lebanon

‘Lebanon’ occurs in the Hosea passage no less than three times, and not otherwise in Hosea. In the Song it occurs seven times, plus three times in a related form meaning ‘frankincense’, and once meaning ‘moon’. Lebanon itself is a wooded mountain range on the northern border of Israel and its name, the root of which means ‘white’, is probably derived from the whiteness of its cliﬀs.7 The name occurs sixty-six times in the Hebrew Bible, most

7 BDB 526f. under IWNBL. Symbols of Israel 103 often as bearing forests, especially of cedars, which were used by Solomon to build the Temple, cf. 1 Kgs. 5: 20. In his book Scripture and Exegesis in Jewish Tradition, Geza Vermes surveys the symbolical use of the word ‘Lebanon’ in the Targums, and finds that an examination of ‘sixty passages or so in which the word “Lebanon” occurs in the Hebrew Bible reveals that in almost half of them the word is not understood in its literal sense’.8 Vermes sets out these passages, in which Lebanon is treated as a metaphor, and shows that it means different things in different Targums, but the interpretation which comes to prevail is: Lebanon = the Temple, which Vermes shows it does in the Targums both to Hosea and to the Song. In Section 3, ‘The Origin of the Tradition’, Vermes writes: ‘It seems that the origin of this symbolism is to be found in the association of Deuteronomy 3: 25 with Isaiah 60: 13 and Psalm 92: 13–14’ (37). These last two are particularly striking: ‘The glory of Lebanon shall come to you [Jerusalem], the cypress, the pine and the cedar, to make beautiful the place of my sanctuary.’ And ‘the righteous shall flourish like a palm tree; he shall grow like the cedar in Lebanon. They that are planted in the house of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God.’ In Section 1, ‘The Dead Sea Scrolls’, Vermes writes that the interpretation Lebanon = the Temple is also found in the Habakkuk Commentary XII. 3–4 on Hab. 2: 17: ‘Lebanon is the Council of the Com- munity, and the beasts are the simple of Judah,’ and Vermes shows that the apparent change of symbolism is explained by the belief of the Community that, since the Temple of Jerusalem has fallen into the hands of wicked priests and is, consequently, defiled, ‘the Council of the Community is the one true sanctuary in which God is to be worshipped’ (32–3).9 Finally, on this particular point, Vermes sees the tradition, Lebanon = the Temple, as having been fixed between the beginning of the fifth and the second century BCE. ‘It must,’ he writes, ‘be supposed that during [these] centuries some new factor came into force to fix, make known, and impose this exegetical tradition. The intermediary appears to have been the Song of Songs’ (37).10 Surrounding the first occurrence of Lebanon in the Hosea passage, we find the language of planting and growing, as in Vermes’s third biblical text, Ps. 92:

8 Geza Vermes 1973: 26. 9 For the ‘Commentary on Habakkuk’ see Vermes 1990: 282–9. 10 In a footnote on the next page (38), Vermes offers a rare challenge to the consensus: ‘From the conclusions reached in this chapter it would appear that if the Song of Songs, as a literary unit, ever had a meaning other than symbolical, the interpretive alteration must have followed very shortly on the commitment of the work to writing. However, such a process would, a priori, demand a fair amount of time. Those who maintain that the Song, as a whole, was primitively conceived as a love poem, must explain why and how this profane poetry was so rapidly adopted as a religious allegory.’ 104 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God 14: ‘They that are planted in the House of the Lord shall flourish . . . ’ This language––‘plants’, ‘shoots’, ‘tendrils’, ‘roots’––is taken up in Qumran and in the Jewish mystical literature. In the Song, as already noted, we find it at 4: 12: ‘Your plants [or shoots] are a paradise of pomegranates,’ where ‘paradise’, (parde¯s), as I shall argue in Chapter 5, is also a metaphor for the Temple.

3.5. Fragrance

In the Hosea passage the next metaphor is ‘fragrance’, ‘scent’, or ‘smell’, rêah, ˙ ‘he [Israel] will have a fragrance like Lebanon’. In the Song ‘fragrance’ is a key word, occurring eight times, among which the phrase ‘fragrance of Lebanon’ is found at Cant. 4: 11 and otherwise only in Hosea. In the Song ‘fragrance’ occurs at 1: 3, 12; 2: 13; 4: 10, 11 × 2; 7: 9, 14, always with connotations of worship and prayer, as we will see when we come to these verses in the Commentary.

3.6. Shadow

‘They will return, who sit in his shadow.’ At Cant. 2: 3 the form of ‘his shadow’ (or ‘shade’) is the same: ‘In his shade I delight and will abide, and his fruit is sweet to my taste.’ A much-contended interpretation of the Hosea verse is the third singular suffix on shadow, ‘his shadow’. Many translators and commentators emend to give ‘my shadow’, that is, God’s shadow. But the text could possibly mean Israel’s shadow when the blessings promised by God to him in this passage have come to pass. At Hos. 4: 13 the word ‘shadow’ is used in connection with idolatry when the people are charged with worshipping ‘under oak, poplar and terebinth, because their shade is good’. Similarly, at Isa. 30: 2, God charges the people with trusting in the shadow of Egypt. Thus, it is consonant with Hosea’s vision of an Israel restored to that state of perfection which God intended for his people from the beginning, that Israel will no longer desire the protection of false gods or foreign powers but will himself be capable, by his dependence on the one true God, of providing protection for all who will ‘return’ and sit under his––Israel’s–– shadow. But in the context of God speaking, the third singular masculine suffix is more likely to be a case of enallage, one of those disconcerting changes of person which occur in the Hebrew Bible. However one decides, what is significant for the present purpose is that the Song also has ‘his shadow’. And Symbols of Israel 105 since what follows in the Hosea passage is a declaration by God that he is a tree, and that it is from him that fruit comes, it seems that the Song’s author took ‘his shadow’ to refer to God: ‘in his shade/shadow I delight and will abide, and his fruit is sweet to my taste’.

3.7. Vine

The verb ‘to bud, sprout, shoot’, and so ‘to flourish’, occurs twice in the Hosea passage, both times with a symbol of Israel, first with the ‘lily’ and secondly with the ‘vine’. ‘And flourish as the vine’ is echoed twice in the Song, at 6: 11: ‘to see whether the vine flourishes’, and 7: 13: ‘Let us see if the vine flourishes.’ ‘Vine’ occurs in the Song four times, twice associated with ‘fragrance’, and is, like ‘vineyard’, a metaphor for Israel. This is clear in a number of places: Hos. 10: 1: ‘Israel is a luxuriant vine’; in the parable at Ezek. 17: 3–10; several places in Isaiah, especially the passage at 5: 1–7––a key to the Song, I believe––which ends: ‘For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel’; and, not least, Psalm 80, one of the four psalms which has ‘lilies’ in its heading: You brought a vine out of Egypt; you drove out the nations and planted it. You cleared the ground for it; it took deep root and filled the land. The mountains were covered with its shade, the mighty cedars with its branches; it sent out its branches to the sea, and its shoots to the River. ... Turn again, O God of hosts; look down from heaven and see; have regard for this vine, the stock that your right hand has planted. (vv. 8–11, 14–15) The metaphor of the vine is taken up in the New Testament where it is applied to Jesus at John 15: 1–11, while the parable of the vineyard is of central importance (Matt. 21: 33–46; Mark 12: 1–12; Luke 20: 9–19). We will return to the significance of the vine in the Song when we come to the 4 Ezra passage. 106 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

3.8. Wine

‘His renown shall be as the wine of Lebanon’, literally ‘his remembrance’, which is echoed at Cant. 1: 4 when the maidens declare: ‘we will cause to remember [namely, praise] your breasts more than wine’. As we have seen, ‘wine’ occurs in the Song seven times, but the phrase ‘wine of Lebanon’ only occurs at Hos. 14: 8 and not otherwise in the Bible. On this point G. I. Davies writes that the Jerusalem Bible reads ‘Helbon’ for Lebanon, following Budde and Sellin, but, he goes on, ‘it is an arbitrary emendation and unnecessary, for sources ancient, medieval and modern attest the excellence of Lebanon wine in general’ (308). Possibly, but one wonders whether the comparison, ‘his renown shall be as the wine of Lebanon’, would make much of a point in the context of Hosea’s paradisal passage if it referred merely to a well-known wine. If Lebanon = the Temple in Hosea, and wine can function as a metaphor for the intoxication of worship, then it is more likely that the phrase is intended to be understood in these terms.

3.9. A luxuriant ﬁr tree

The claim that God is like a tree occurs nowhere else in the Bible. He is, moreover, at once an evergreen and a fruit-bearing tree. ‘Thus’, Wolff observes, ‘it can hardly be disproved that a type of tree of life is conceived of here,’ and he points to Gen. 3: 22 for a tree of life pictured as a fruit tree’ (237 and n. 38). In the Song there are two words, one each in verses 16 and 17 of chapter 1, which echo the be˘rôsˇ ra a˘nan, the ‘luxuriant fir’ who is God, of Hos. 14: 9: Behold, you are fair, my beloved, pleasant indeed; truly, our couch is luxuriant [raanan]. The beams of our house are cedar; our rafters are fir [berotim]. The first line uses ‘wisdom’ language, as we have seen, while the word for ‘bed’ or ‘couch’ is that used at Prov. 7: 16 in the context of Folly seducing the neophyte to false worship. That worship is also the subject of this passage in the Song is indicated in the following line by the vocabulary which includes not only the commonly used word for the Temple––‘house’––but also the materials, cedars and firs, for building it: And he [Solomon] built the walls of the house on the inside with boards of cedar; from the floor of the house to the beams11 of the ceiling, he covered them on the

11 Reading ‘beams’ or ‘rafters’ here, not ‘walls’ again. See BDB 900 under HRWQ. Symbols of Israel 107 inside with wood; and he overlaid the floor of the house with boards of fir (1 Kgs. 6: 15). On the last word, ‘fir’, be˘rôsˇ, there is a difference of opinion between whether it means ‘fir’ or ‘cypress’. There is also a difference in spelling between Hosea and the Song, the latter using the Aramaic form of the word, be˘rôt, which occurs only at Cant. 1: 17. On the word in general, Pope observes that ‘as with the parallel word for cedar [it] is used predicatively in the plural as designating the material of the structure in question, not the living trees of the forest’ (362). The adjective, ra a˘nan ‘luxuriant, fresh’, applied to God at the end of the Hosea passage, ‘I am a luxuriant fir’, and to the couch at Cant. 1: 17, occurs nineteen times in the Hebrew Bible, eleven of them in connection with idolatrous worship, marked by the phrase ‘under every luxuriant tree’, a phrase not found in Hosea. The books, moreover, in which the phrase does occur are all thought to be later than Hosea, and it may have been Hosea’s application of the simile ‘a luxuriant evergreen’ to God which gave rise to it, it thereafter being used against the people who were seen to be worshipping under every tree, or, if kol may be taken to mean ‘any’,12 then any ‘tree’ that took their fancy, instead of under the one tree of Hosea, namely, God. But if Hosea does not use the phrase, the practice comes under condemnation at 4: 13: ‘They sacrifice upon the tops of the mountains, and burn incense upon the hills, under oak and poplar and terebinth, because their shade is good.’ The language of ‘whoredom’ and ‘adultery’ surrounding this verse is usually taken literally and expatiated upon,13 but to understand these terms as between humans and not between God and his people is to mis- understand Hosea. For him, as for all the prophets, ‘adultery’ is a metaphor for idolatry, which is unfaithfulness to God. That he is describing actual gatherings seems likely. At least, I am unable to wean myself from the picture conjured up. And that such gatherings would lead to an expression of the primary failure at the secondary level is also likely, not to say, certain. But Hosea is concerned with the horror of false worship, with the failure to respond to the one, true God, leading to the desire for other gods. And against these other gods who are worshipped under trees, whatever precisely that may mean, he pictures God as the one luxuriant evergreen under whose shade a ‘returned’ Israel will eternally dwell. The author of the Song would have been familiar with both Hosea’s picture of God as a luxuriant evergreen, be˘rôsˇ ra a˘nan and the later phrase ko¯l e¯z ˙

12 That is, instead of ‘every’ in the context of INER JE-LK. 13 See for example Wolff, 86–7, who refers frequently to ‘sex rites’ here and elsewhere. But Davies registers a doubt, 126–7. 108 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God ra a˘nan. The vocabulary of the first he uses at Cant. 1: 16–17 among metaphors of the Temple, while at Cant. 2: 3 he transforms the fir into an apple tree to show Israel, the bride, now dwelling or sitting under God’s shade in the eschatological paradise at the end of time and finding his fruit sweet to her taste. And ra a˘nan he uses in a double reversal: of the bed of idolatry at Prov. 7: 16, and of its frequent function in prophetic denunciations of idolatrous worship.

3.10. Fruit

The word ‘fruit’ occurs ﬁve times in both Hosea and the Song. As in English, the word has a wide range of meanings from the fruit which one eats to the metaphorical realm of consequences, this latter predominating in the Hebrew Bible. In Proverbs, where it occurs ten times, the usage is consistently metaphorical, one verse in particular, ‘The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life’ (11: 30), linking with both its use in the Hosea passage and the verse in the Song, ‘in his shade I delight and will abide, and his fruit is sweet to my taste’ (2: 3). At Cant. 4: 13 and 16 ‘fruit’ is joined with a noun meaning ‘excellence’ (meged) which occurs again in the Song at 7: 14 and otherwise only at Deuteronomy 33 in the blessing of Joseph, 13–17, where it occurs ﬁve times. The last two occurrences of ‘fruit’, at Cant. 8: 11 and 12, will be looked at in the next part on 4 Ezra under the heading of ‘The vine’.

3.11. 4 Ezra 5: 23–8

23 And I said, O sovereign Lord, from all the forests of the earth and from its trees, thou hast chosen for thyself one vine; 24 and from all the lands of the world, thou hast chosen for thyself one planting-place, and from all the flowers of the world, thou hast chosen for thyself one lily, 25 and from all the depths of the sea, thou hast filled for thyself one river, and from all the cities that have been built, thou hast consecrated Zion for thyself; 26 and from all the birds that have been created, thou hast named for thyself one dove; and from all the flocks that have been made, thou hast accepted for thyself one sheep; Symbols of Israel 109

27 and from all the multitudes of peoples, thou hast gotten for thyself one people; and to this people whom thou hast loved, thou hast given the Torah which is approved by all. 28 And now, O Lord, why hast thou given over the one to the many, and dishonoured the one root beyond the others, and scattered thine only one among the many?14 From the perspective of a study of the Song of Songs this is a remarkable and unique passage, for no other collects and sets out the entire range of symbols applied here and there to Israel in the Old Testament, and found in the greatest concentration in the Song, as in 4 Ezra. In the Song they occur in the idyllic context of eschatological fulfilment; in 4 Ezra in that of present desolation, all hopes for Israel brought, as it then seemed, to nothing. The book known as 4 Ezra is printed in those English Bibles which include the Apocrypha under the title 2 Esdras, ‘Esdras’ being the Greek and Latin form of Hebrew ‘Ezra’. The NRSV has a helpful heading to 2 Esdras: ‘Com- prising what is sometimes called 5 Ezra (chapters 1–2), 4 Ezra (chapters 3– 14), and 6 Ezra (chapters 15–16).’ Chapters 1 and 2, which contain Christian material, and chapters 15 and 16, written apparently as a Christian appendix to 4 Ezra, are no part of chapters 3–14, also known as the ‘Ezra-Apocalypse’, which is a wholly Jewish work, and the oldest part of the book. The confusion to which the varying titles and enumeration give rise is paralleled by the complexity of the textual history. Scholars agree that it was originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic, with the weight of opinion favouring a Hebrew original under Aramaic influence. But nothing of this original has survived, neither is there any evidence of its use in ancient Jewish literature.15 It was from a Greek translation, which did not survive in its entirety, that the other versions derived: Latin, Syriac, Ethiopic, Georgian, Arabic, Armenian, and a fragment in Coptic. Of these, Stone tells us, the Latin and Syriac versions have been the most influential, the Latin version through its inclusion in the Vulgate, and the Syriac version because Syriac is the best known of the oriental languages. In the case of the present passage, the Hebrew vocabulary for the symbols of Israel is easily inferred, as we shall see. There are eight symbols which can be clearly enumerated: ‘vine’, ‘planting- place’, ‘lily’, ‘river’, ‘Zion’, ‘dove’, ‘sheep’, and ‘people’, the last being the culmination of those symbols which, it is stated, God has chosen, consecrated,

14 This translation is taken from Stone, 125, with the exception of ‘planting-place’, for which see the section below under that heading (§3.13). 15 See Stone, 1–9, for a detailed account of the textual history. 110 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God and named for himself. ‘Root’ and ‘one’ could also be taken as symbols of Israel, as we shall see in the last section of this chapter, ‘One people, one root, one perfect one’, which would bring the number to ten, a more likely number than eight. In any case, they will be included in the following examination of Ezra’s symbols as they occur in the Song.

3.12. Vine and vineyard

In a chapter called ‘The Vineyard, the Grape and the Tree of Life’, Robert Murray writes: ‘Vine-symbolism provides one of the constants of Old Testa- ment literary tradition,’ and he goes on to say that ‘it begins, probably, with Jacob’s blessing of Judah in Genesis 49: 11’.16 That the author of 4 Ezra puts it first because he regards it as first in importance may be regarded as certain since the vine provides a start to the sequence which evokes the entire span of sacred history. As we have seen, ‘vine’ occurs in the Hosea passage, and it occurs in the Song four times. At Cant. 2: 13 the verse is difficult: The fig tree has formed its green figs; and the vines are in bud, giving a fragrance. Only the word for ‘fig-tree’ is undisputed, while the word for ‘bud’ or ‘blossom’ (´se˘ma¯rda¯r) is hapax legomenon. Pope comments that the primary point of this verse can be seen at Mark 13: 28: ‘From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near.’17 The plural form, ‘vines’, only occurs otherwise at Hab. 3: 18: in a verse portraying the opposite situation: ‘Though the fig tree will not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines . . . ’ But the next verse declares, nevertheless, the intention to rejoice in the Lord, and the verse which follows ends the book with a striking resonance of Song language: ‘He will make my feet like hinds’ feet.’ The second and fourth occurrences of ‘vine’ in the Song, at 6: 11 and 7: 13, have been touched on briefly in connection with the verb ‘to flourish’, which occurs twice in the Hosea passage and twice in the Song. The four occur-

16 Robert Murray 1975a: 96. This long chapter provides a necessary corrective to the treatment of vine-symbolism in modern commentaries on the Song, and although Murray is largely concerned with the development of this symbolism in the New Testament and early Syriac tradition, the chapter reveals the Old Testament roots of that tradition and its continuous expression in Syriac exegesis. 17 Pope, 398. But, to avoid giving a false impression of the thrust of Pope’s exegesis on figs, it should be added that he continues: ‘The sacral sexual associations of the fig, however, suggest further possible implications . . .’. Symbols of Israel 111 rences of ‘vine’ in the Song are all associated either with the word ‘to flourish’ or with ‘fragrance’, both of which apply to Israel in an ideal context. But a fuller picture of ‘vine’ symbolism in the Song is provided by the word ‘vineyard’, which occurs nine times. This word needs to be looked at in conjunction with ‘vine’, even though the two words are quite distinct in Hebrew, gepen for ‘vine’ and kerem for ‘vineyard’. The first occurrence of vineyard in the Song is at 1: 6: ‘My mother’s sons were incensed against me; they made me keeper of the vineyards; the vineyard belonging to me I have not kept.’ ‘My mother’s sons’ are, it seems to me, the prophets. The word for ‘incensed’, ‘angry’ could be derived from the verb ‘to burn’,18 in which case it would lead to Ezekiel 15 which begins with a question from God: ‘What is the vine tree more than any tree?’ and continues in typical prophetic vein: ‘Therefore, thus says the Lord God: As the vine tree among the trees of the forest, which I have given to the fire for fuel, so will I give the inhabitants of Jerusalem’ (15: 6). But we see from what the female in the Song has to say––who here, I believe, represents Jerusalem––that her sins and their consequences are now in the past. (See the Commentary, ad loc.) The next verse in the Song in which ‘vineyards’ occurs is at 1: 14: ‘A cluster of henna is my beloved to me in the vineyards of Engedi.’ The word ‘cluster’, esˇco¯l, also occurs twice in plural at 7: 8–9, and six other times in the Bible, always associated with grapes, as here, ‘in the vineyards of Engedi’. In Robert Murray’s Symbols of Church and Kingdom, ‘cluster’ occurs frequently in poems about vines, vineyards and grapes, all of them opening up level upon level of meaning. For the present purpose I will note only that Murray cites 4 Ezra 9: 21–2: And I [God] saw, and spared [some] with very great difficulty and saved me a grape out of a cluster and a plant[ation] out of a great forest. Perish, then, the multitude which has been born in vain; but let my grape be preserved, and my plant[ation], which with much labour I have perfected.19 The fourth and fifth occurrences of ‘vineyard’ are at 2: 15, where the word is in plural both times: ‘Catch for us the foxes, the little foxes, that are destroy- ing the vineyards, for our vineyards are in blossom.’ The word for ‘foxes’ or ‘jackals’ occurs about half a dozen times. Ezekiel, at 13: 4, declares to Israel: ‘Your prophets are like jackals among the ruins,’ and Jeremiah, at 12: 10, makes a similar point: ‘Many shepherds have destroyed my vineyards . . . they have made my pleasant portion a desolate wilderness.’ In the Song, the sense

18 RRX, see BDB 359, where however the entry points to HRX (354) for this verse. Both forms mean ‘to burn’ but the first is used of actual burning and the second for ‘burning with anger’, which certainly fits the verse here. 19 1975a: 285. See also the chapter ‘The Vineyard, the Grape and the Tree of Life’. 112 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God is no less strong, indicated by the intensive form of the word, which suggests the foxes are utterly ruining, or corrupting, the vineyards. The adjective ‘little’ applied to them must therefore be intended in a purely pejorative sense. The sixth occurrence of ‘vineyard’, again in plural, is at Cant. 7: 13: ‘Let us go early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine flourishes, whether the grape blossoms have opened, and the pomegranates are in bloom.’ ‘Pomegranates’ is a key symbol in the Song, occurring six times, and will be discussed in Chapter 5 in connection with the Temple. We have seen, in the Egyptian section of the last chapter, a suggestion that to do something early may originally have been connected with adoration of the god at dawn. The last three occurrences are in singular: Solomon had a vineyard at Baal-hamon; he entrusted the vineyard to keepers; each one will bring for its fruit a thousand pieces of silver. My vineyard which is mine is before me; the thousand is for you, O Solomon; and two hundred for those who keep his fruit. (8: 11–12) Baal-Hamon, which can be translated ‘Lord of a multitude’, is not otherwise attested in the Bible. Solomon is represented in the Song seven times and, according to the rabbinical interpretation of the Song, stands for God, though the Rabbis, who were ambivalent about Solomon, are reluctant to equate him with God in every reference: ‘All occurrences of the name of Solomon in the Song of Songs are sacred except one which is secular. Which one is it? “Behold, it is the litter of Solomon” (3: 7). Others say: “Thou, O Solomon, shalt have the thousand” (8: 12).’20 That Solomon is a figure for God in the Song certainly resonates with my understanding, especially in these verses, Cant. 8: 11–12, which link, it seems to me, to Isa. 5: 1–7: Now will I sing to my wellbeloved a song of my beloved concerning his vineyard: My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill; he dug it carefully about and cleared it of stones, and planted it with the choicest vine; and he built a tower in the midst of it, and hewed out also a winepress in it . . . The passage concludes:

20 b. Soferim, 5.17. Symbols of Israel 113

For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah his pleasant plant. He waited for justice, and behold bloodshed; for righteousness, and behold a cry. The links between this passage and the Parable of the Vineyard in the Synoptic Gospels (Matt. 21: 33ﬀ; Mark 12: 1–12; Luke 20: 9–19) are obvious and widely noted. Less obvious but also sometimes noted are the links between the Song verses and both the Old and the New Testament passages. The element missing in Isaiah 5, the keepers, or tenants, is present in both the Song and the Parable, ‘he entrusted the vineyard to keepers’. In the Gospels the husbandmen resist the attempts of the householder to obtain the fruit of his vineyard; in the Song, on the contrary, they yield for Solomon the maximum possible, understanding a ‘thousand’ as a maximum in the same way that a ‘hundred’ represents a maximum in the Parable of the Sower. That all three passages, Isa. 5: 1–7, Cant. 8: 11–12, and the Parable of the Vineyard, are in the same line of tradition is clear, the vineyard in each case representing Israel.

3.13. Planting-place

Ezra’s second symbol is translated in RSV/NRSV, and by both Metzger21 and Stone (125), as ‘region’, which translates the word in the Ethiopic version. But an earlier translator of 4 Ezra, G. H. Box,22 gives ‘planting ground’, though he does not offer any reasons for it. But it chimes well with biblical vocabulary, especially after ‘vine’, the first symbol, vines or vineyards occurring frequently with some form of ‘to plant’. Even more likely, it seems to me, is ‘planting- place’, matta¯ , from the root ‘to plant’, which occurs in such verses as Isa. 60: 21, ‘the branch of my planting’, and 61: 3, ‘the planting of the Lord’. ‘Place’, moreover, agrees with Stone, who proposes topos, ‘place’, as having the best claim to being ‘a Greek term within whose semantic range all the versions could fall’ (125). And he cites Deut. 12: 5, from which point there are a string of references to ‘the place which the Lord your God shall choose out of all your tribes to put his name there’. The phrase hammaqôm a˘sˇer yivhar, ˙ ‘the place which he will choose’, with slight variations, occurs in Deuter- onomy twenty times, and once at Josh. 9: 27. There is a strong implication in several texts that maqôm, ‘place’, refers to a sanctuary. For instance, Jer. 7: 12: ‘Go now, to my place which was in Shiloh, where I set my name at the first,’ while another, in a verse variously translated at Ezek. 3: 12, similarly suggests a

21 B. M. Metzger 1983: 533. 22 G. H. Box 1913: 571. 114 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God special meaning: ‘I heard behind me a voice of a great rushing, saying, Blessed be the glory of the Lord from his place’ (AV). At 2 Sam. 7: 10 there is again a sense of a special meaning, but not necessarily of a sanctuary, when God says to Nathan, ‘I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and will plant them . . .’ (cf. 1 Chron. 17: 9). Here we have both ‘place’ and ‘plant’, and reasons for and against can be brought in both cases. For instance, it might be brought against ‘place’ that by the end of the ﬁrst century, hammaqôm was used metonymically for God in Jewish literature, as also topos in Greek. But if the author of 4 Ezra was imbued with the language of Deuteronomy, his choice of ‘place’ would ﬁt. And although no connection with the Song could be made at the level of vocabulary if ‘place’ is correct, if ‘place’ means Jerusalem in Deuteronomy,23 the connection at the level of meaning would be strong indeed.

3.14. The lily

We have already seen something of this symbol and of its eight occurrences in the Song. Stone adds the information that in later Jewish sources Israel is often referred to as a ‘lily’, and he mentions a piyyut of Eleazar ben Kallir (sixth to seventh centuries CE) which ‘simply calls Israel “lily”, as do many later liturgical poets’ (129). He attributes this to the allegorical interpretation of the Song, although he has previously noted that Israel is likened to a lily at Hos. 14: 6. Stone’s acceptance of the assumption that the Song had an allegorical interpretation imposed on it prevents him from exploring the connections about which, unfortunately, he has no more to say than that ‘an allegory of the Song of Songs was part of the author’s stock in trade’ (130).24 A recent trend among commentators is to claim that the word sˇosˇanâ is more correctly translated ‘lotus’ on the basis that it originated in Egypt. According to a long and learned article on this subject by Blazˇej Sˇtrba, ‘lotus’ was ﬁrst provided by O. Lorentz in 1971, followed by Pope in 1977, and Othmar Keel in 1984, 1986, 1995, and 2000. Sˇtrba himself makes the point that the ‘extra-biblical evidence of the Egyptian love songs and iconography indicates that behind the lexeme HN$oW$o stands “lotus”, once a sacred ﬂower

23 See Moshe Weinfeld 1972: 4: ‘The concept of the chosen “place”, OWQMH, in the book of Deuteronomy, which underlies the law of cult centralization, is developed in the deuteronomic historical literature in terms of the chosen “city”/Jerusalem . . . ‘ 24 Box makes a similar point in a footnote to the 4 Ezra passage: ‘It is well known that the allegorical interpretation of Canticles is very old; in fact the book was only admitted into the Canon on this interpretation. Gunkel aptly notes that our passage already implies such an interpretation of the book’ (571 n. 23). Symbols of Israel 115 of ancient Egypt’.25 Pope provides a disquisition on the subject which begins tentatively but gathers confidence until we end up in Indian erotology and Pope’s favoured locale (368). If the reference at Hos. 14: 6 to Israel growing like the lily (sˇosˇanâ) indicates a tradition of this flower being a symbol of Israel, it is improbable that the source was a sacred flower of Egypt. But even if it can be proved that sˇosˇan is a loan-word from Egypt, the symbolism attached to the lily, which developed in the Bible and subsequently in Juda- ism, separates it from whatever, in that case, might have been its origin. The preference of these commentators for the lotus is manifestly due to the sexual symbolism they attach to it. Thus a long tradition is being sabotaged. And although traditions, however venerable, must yield to truth, the grounds on which the lotus is being promoted over the lily are too contemporary in their interests to be persuasive.

3.15. The river

The fourth symbol at 4 Ezra 5: 25 is ‘river’. There is no word for ‘river’ in the Song but both Box and Stone link Ezra’s river to ‘streams from Lebanon’ at Cant. 4: 15 where the word no¯zlîm, a participle from the verb ‘to flow’, means, BDB tells us, ‘streams, floods’, and cites Exod. 15: 8, which gives us: ‘the floods stood up in a heap; the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea’, imagery not unlike that at 4 Ezra 5: 25: ‘out of all the depths of the sea . . . ’ The river referred to in 4 Ezra seems, Stone thinks, to be the Jordan, which is also the interpretation of the Armenian version and of the Apocalypse of Sedrach (129). But if the tradition ‘Lebanon’ = the Temple goes back to the Song itself, the streams are coming from the Temple. And this is, indeed, just the further thought Stone offers: ‘One might also consider the association of a wondrous and vivifying stream with the temple in Ezekiel’s ideal picture’ (129 n. 24). The whole passage in Ezekiel suggests both the streams of the Song and the river of 4 Ezra 5: 25, but it is enough to quote only 47: 12 where the waters issuing from the Temple have become a river: On the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing. Compare that passage with the following from the Song:

25 Blazˇej Sˇtrba 2004: 499. 116 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

Your shoots are a orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire with nard, nard and saﬀron, calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense, myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices; a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon. (4: 13–15) Another link may be seen with the apocalyptic vision in Zech. 14: 8, to which Stone also points: ‘On that day living waters shall ﬂow out from Jerusa- lem . . .’. The phrase ‘living waters’, mayîm hayyîm, is identical with that in ˙ the Song passage. This theme is treated more fully in Chapter 5, ‘The Garden Temple’, in section 5, ‘Flowing streams from Lebanon’.

3.16. Zion

Ezra’s fifth symbol in the same verse, 5: 25, is Zion: ‘from all the cities that have been built, thou hast consecrated Zion for thyself.’ Zion is first mentioned at 2 Sam. 5: 7: ‘David took the stronghold of Zion; it is the city of David.’ The name occurs altogether 154 times, Psalms and Isaiah having the most occurrences with forty-five in Psalms, and sixty-four in Isaiah. Mount Zion signifies the hill on which the Temple stood, and while synonymous with Jerusalem, it has more consistent resonances of holiness, of being where God is to be found and praised. ‘Sing praises to the Lord, who dwells in Zion’ (Ps. 9: 11). ‘Praise is due to thee, O God, in Zion’ (Ps. 65: 1). In the Song, Zion occurs only once at 3: 11: ‘Go forth, O daughters of Zion, and behold King Solomon with the crown wherewith his mother crowned him in the day of his espousals, and in the day of the gladness of his heart.’ There are numerous occurrences of ‘daughter’ in the singular with both Zion and Jerusalem in the prophetic books, but only three occurrences of ‘daughters of Zion’, Isa. 3: 16, 17; 4: 4, and none of ‘daughters of Jerusalem’ outside the Song. The word ‘daughter’ in Hebrew, as also ‘son’, has a range of meanings which take it far beyond its primary meaning. In biblical Hebrew the word ‘daughters’ is used for ‘villages’, while in Cant. Rabbah at I. 5, §3, when the question is asked: ‘What is meant by daughters?’ the answer given is ‘Towns’. The same use also occurs in the Targum on Cant. 3: 10, where the ‘daughters of Jerusalem’ become ‘all the cities of the land of Israel’, while on 3: 11 they become ‘the districts of the land of Israel’.26 Similarly, once in the Targum on Cant. 1: 6 and twice in Cant. Rabbah, V. 9, §1 and VI. 1, §1, the daughters are understood to represent the ‘nations’. Whatever be the case, the

26 Alexander writes: ‘“Daughters of Zion” is taken in a double sense: a) as districts of the Land of Israel; and b) as inhabitants of Zion.’ He adds: ‘The expression is interpreted very inconsistently in the Targum’ (128 n. 57). Symbols of Israel 117 use of the phrase ‘Daughters of Zion’ in the Song is in positive contrast to the three negative references in Isaiah.

3.17. The dove

‘Dove’, yônâ, is Ezra’s sixth symbol, and it occurs in the Song six times, as follows: 1: 15. ‘Behold, you are fair, my companion, behold you are fair; your eyes are doves.’ 2: 14. ‘O my dove, in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the cliﬀ; let me see your appearance, let me hear your voice.’ 4: 1. ‘Behold, you are fair, my companion, behold you are fair; your eyes are doves behind your locks.’ 5: 2. ‘Open to me, my sister, my companion, my dove, my perfect one . . . ’ 5: 12. ‘His eyes are like doves by channels of waters.’ 6: 9. ‘One is she, my dove, my perfect one; one is she to her mother; pure is she to the one who bore her.’ It is clear from these verses that the dove is an important symbol for the author of the Song. Thus Stone comments that the chief biblical source used here in 4 Ezra 5: 26 is an allegorical interpretation of Cant. 2: 14 and 5: 2, and he goes on to say that ‘this type of interpretation of Song of Songs was already observed in the case of the lily’ (130). But, as in the case of the lily, the dove as a symbol of Israel is already found in Hosea: ‘Ephraim is like a silly dove’ (7: 11), and the same metaphor is used at 11: 11: ‘They [God’s children, i.e. Israel] shall come trembling like birds from Egypt, and like doves from the land of Assyria.’ As we have seen, there is another word for dove which also occurs in the Song, at 2: 12, tôr, and is also symbolic of Israel in one other occurrence, Ps. 74: 19: ‘Do not deliver the soul of your dove to the beasts; do not forget the life of your poor for ever.’ We ﬁnd an example of the imagery used in both the Song and 4 Ezra in the Biblical Antiquities of Philo: And the people said unto him [Jephthan]: Let the dove instruct thee, whereunto Israel was likened, for though her young be taken away from her, yet departeth she not out of her place, but spurneth away her wrong and forgetteth it as it were in the bottom of the deep.27 See the Commentary ad loci for further discussions on the ‘dove’.

27 M. R. James 1917, reprinted 1971: 189. 118 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

3.18. Sheep

‘Sheep’ is Ezra’s seventh symbol and, together with ‘shepherd’ and ‘flock’, is, like ‘vine’ and ‘vineyard’, prominent in biblical symbolism. In the opening paragraph of a section entitled ‘Shepherd, Flock, Fold’ in Symbols of Church and Kingdom, Robert Murray writes: This figure is frequent in the whole Bible as well as in ancient Mesopotamian literature. In this case the pattern of sharing [of titles] which we have been tracing in the present chapter was well established many centuries earlier. Both En-lil and Tammuz (though very different in conception) were addressed as ‘Shepherd’; the hero Gil- gamesh is the ‘shepherd of Uruk’, while Ur called itself the ‘sheepfold’ of the gods. The same pattern, of course is found in the Old Testament, where both God and the king are called shepherd of God’s people, and the New, where Christ, the ‘Good Shepherd’, entrusted his sheep to Peter, and in turn I Peter 5: 2–4 exhorts the clergy to ‘tend the flock’ in such a way as to earn commendation from the ‘Chief Shepherd’. This title, therefore, is not only shared but entails a correlative relationship to ‘flock’ or ‘fold’. (187) In the Song the word for ‘flock’ occurs five times, once with ‘companions’ at 1: 7, twice with ‘goats’ at 4: 1 and 6: 5, once unspecified at 4: 2 (‘your teeth are like a flock having been shorn’), and once at 6: 6 with ‘ewes’, ra¯he¯l, a rare ˙ word which, apart from its use as a proper name (Rachel), occurs otherwise only at Gen. 31: 38, 32: 15, and Isa. 53: 7. The verb ‘to pasture, tend, graze’ or ‘to feed’, used in a metaphorical sense in the prophetic books,28 occurs six times, twice in a form which, at 1: 8, clearly means ‘shepherds’. But the word most commonly used for ‘sheep’, but also for ‘flock’, so¯ n, occurs only once ˙ (1: 8), although the theme is considerably augmented by those translations which add ‘flock’ to ‘pasture’ in the following four instances: 1: 7. ‘Tell me . . . where you pasture your flock?’ 2: 16. ‘he pastures his flock among the lilies.’ 6: 2. ‘to pasture his flock in the gardens.’ 6: 3. ‘he pastures his flock among the lilies.’ The AV adds ‘your flock’ at 1: 7, and RSV and NRSV add ‘his flock’ at 2: 16, and 6: 2 and 3, while NIV, for instance, gives ‘he browses among the lilies’ at 2: 16 and 6: 3, and ‘browse in the gardens’ at 6: 2. Thus the symbol ‘sheep’ is more or less prominent in the Song according to whether the phrase ha¯ro¯ eh basˇsˇôsˇannîm at 2: 16 and 6: 3 is read ‘he who pastures his flock among the lilies’ or ‘he who feeds among the lilies’, and similarly at 6: 2. In any case, the

28 Cf. Jer. 3: 15: ‘I will give you shepherds (OYER) after my own heart, and they will feed you (WERW) with knowledge and understanding.’ Symbols of Israel 119 theme is of considerable importance, and those commentators who have expounded the Song as a pastoral idyll, seeing the hero and heroine as a shepherd and shepherdess, are witnesses to the fact. But the comment by Mary Douglas in her book on Numbers applies no less to the Song: ‘The expectation of rusticity favoured in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century has to be dispelled before the Book of Numbers can be read.’29 There are two verses (7–8) in the first chapter which provide the basis for pastoral interpretations: Tell me, you whom my soul loves, where you pasture your flock, where you make it lie down at noon; lest I be like one going astray by the flocks of your companions? If you do not know, O fairest among women, go forth in the footsteps of the flock, and pasture your kids by the shepherds’ tents. Sheep are clearly implicit in these verses but, if sheep symbolize Israel for the author of the Song as for the author of 4 Ezra, these verses depict not so much a pastoral idyll in which the romantic imagination might graze but, rather, I believe, the central relationship of the entire Bible, that between the Shepherd of Israel and his chosen flock. In contrast to the prophetic represen- tations of the sheep rebelling against the Shepherd, the relationship is here shown to be one of loving obedience to him. The female figure, representing now the flock, now Jerusalem, desires to be shown where she ought to be in regard to the shepherd, that she may be fed by him and given rest in the hottest hour of the day, lest30 she (again?) becomes like a sheep straying31 ‘by [or against?] the flocks of your companions’. Thus the pastoral atmosphere of the Song is, in parts, pervasive. But it is misleading, for it has contributed in recent centuries to the misunderstanding of the book, ‘sheep’ and ‘shepherds’ being as much metaphors in the Song as they are in the prophetic literature.

29 2001: 91. 30 LXX µποτε, Vulg. ne, and see Pope, 330, who equates HML$o with Aramaic HML YD = ‘lest’. 31 See HEU, ‘wander, stray’, BDB 380, in preference to HUE, ‘wrap, envelop oneself’ (741). The former is supported by Syriac, Targum, Vulgate and Symmachus according to BHS, and makes sense in relation to the propensity of sheep for going astray, taking the female ﬁgure as here representing the ﬂock of Israel. 120 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

3.19. One people, one root, one perfect one

The word ‘people’ occurs nowhere in the Song, nor does the word ‘God’, either in the full form of the divine name YHWH––though it may be present in the contracted form Yah at Cant. 8: 6––or in the form Elohim. But, according to the understanding of the book that Ezra would have known, the principal protagonists of the book are precisely God and his people: My beloved is mine, and I am his; he who feeds among the lilies. To judge by the use 4 Ezra makes of its symbols, the Song of Songs is understood to portray his eighth symbol: the people of God in loving communion with God. Thus the contrast between the picture the Song draws of eschatological hope and fulfilment and the dereliction of God’s people in the years following the destruction of the Second Temple is an implicit element in Ezra’s argument with God in the first part of his book. The manner in which he draws to God’s attention those symbols, attested in the biblical literature, of God’s choice, election, and consecration of his people Israel, intensifies the tragedy of their present abandonment. And so, at the point where he arrives at the symbol ‘people’, the very people God has chosen for his own possession, he changes from a rehearsal of the symbols to an anguished cry for explanation: And now, O Lord, why hast thou given over the one to the many, and dishonoured the one root beyond the others, and scattered thine only one among the many? Do we discern two more symbols of Israel in this verse, ‘root’ and the ‘one’, or are they, rather, poetic metaphors? That ‘root’ is understood to be a symbol of Israel is indicated by a verse from 1 Enoch: ‘And the whole race of the chosen root shall be dispersed,’32 and possibly Hos. 14: 6, as we saw earlier: ‘I will be as the dew to Israel, that he may grow as the lily and cast forth his roots like Lebanon.’ The word ‘root’––if the Hebrew, sˇo¯resˇ, lies behind the translations of 4 Ezra––does not occur in the Song but, as in the Hosea verse, it is closely related to another which does, and we will meet it in Chapter 5, ‘The Garden Temple’. The ‘one’ might also be seen as a symbol, paralleled as it is with ‘dove’ in the Song at 6: 9: ‘One is my dove, my perfect one.’ Walter Moberly, in a paper called ‘Toward an Interpretation of the Shema’, uses this verse to illuminate

32 Cited in Stone, 131, and see his n. 42. Symbols of Israel 121 the ‘intrinsically personal and relational’ character of the statement at Deut. 6: 4: ‘YHWH is one.’33 But in view of Wisdom 7: 27: ‘Being but one, she is able to do all things’, ‘one’ would appear to be an attribute of ‘wisdom’ and not a symbol. Nevertheless, there is a temptation to bring the symbols to ten in view of the significance given to this number in the Pentateuch, with its two versions of the Ten Commandments, but especially in early Judaic writings such as Pirqe Avoth, with its list of happenings, reckoned in tens, beginning with ‘The world was created by ten commands’ (5. 1), followed by further examples in the five successive mishnayoth. Otherwise we have to count eight symbols, a number which, unlike seven, for instance, is without significance, as far as I am aware. On these grounds I am inclined to think that Ezra intended ten symbols, and what follows seems to me to confirm the point. The reference to the Shema can be expanded with a quotation from a work which follows in Moberly’s footsteps: In the face of an impasse between good renderings of the text [Deut. 6: 4] and good interpretations, a solution may be found in a text which has often been held up as the most illuminating parallel to Deut. 6: 4. In Song 6: 8–9 the lover praises his beloved34 [verses 8–9a are quoted]. The context of devoted and extravagant love provides a compelling parallel to the Shema with its call for a wholehearted love (Deut. 6: 5). The lover’s statement about this woman is that she is ‘one’, that is, unique, without peer. Significantly what is not being said is that she is the only child of her mother, or the only woman in the court . . . In a similar way what Deuteronomy calls the people of Israel to affirm about YHWH is not that other gods do not exist, but that YHWH is unique for Israel . . .35 The link made here between the Shema and the Song is, I am sure, right, but there may be more to the question of what is meant by ‘one’ than that it means ‘unique’. It is also said of Wisdom that she is ‘one’ and that, consequently, ‘she is able to do all things’ (Wisdom 7: 27). And this power to do all things would come not from being unique but from being one, that is, not many. The difference between being one and many marks the ontological gulf between God and the creation, and although human beings can achieve a remarkable degree of unity, such unified beings, powerful though they may be, yet fall far short of the power of God. But in that case, what is meant in the Song by calling the female ‘one’? That the language is wisdom language is shown in the next two lines of the same verse: ‘The daughters saw her and they blessed her, the queens and the concubines, and they praised her (see §1.13). Thus ‘one’ is the principal attribute of

33 Walter Moberly 1999, see esp. 132–3. 34 To call the female ‘beloved’ is a common mistake. 35 Nathan MacDonald 2003: 74. 122 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

Wisdom in the Song, of Wisdom in the book of Wisdom, but primarily of God in the Shema, which suggests that Ezra is using ten symbols, the tenth being related to the symbols of Israel found in the Song, and to the Ten Commandments. 4

Mythical Elements

The perception that myth permeates the Song of Songs lifts a veil on much that otherwise remains opaque to the understanding. But the term ‘myth’ has become––if it ever was not––problematic, and its misuse is warned against by every writer on the subject.1 Trusting that I have taken all these warnings to heart, I will pass straight to one writer, J. W. Rogerson, who summarizes twelve diﬀerent senses of myth in his book Myth in Old Testament Interpret- ation, and whose summary of the eleventh seems particularly applicable to the present case: Myth is a necessary way of speaking of transcendent reality. This view is a charac- teristically theological one. In many cases its theological presuppositions have not been worked out. Rather, the conviction has been brought to the Old Testament narratives that they are saying something deeper than would appear on the surface, and that this something deeper cannot be exhausted or explained away when narratives are regarded as partly the product of a pre-scientiﬁc outlook or primitive mentality.2

The emphasis on ‘narrative’ in this passage agrees with Robert Murray’s discussion, in his Cosmic Covenant, of the term ‘myth’ which, he writes, ‘remains most useful if it keeps the connotation of story, as in Aristotle’s account of muthos in the Poetics (6, 8)’. And he goes on: ‘it is properly applied to a symbolic account of reality cast in narrative form’.3 But, in what follows we will examine passages which depict a symbolic account of reality cast in poetic form: the description of the female at 7: 1–6; the six occurrences of har, ‘mountain’; and the ‘arrows of ﬁre’ passage at 8: 6–7 for evidence of elements universally agreed to be mythical. The nine occurrences of gan, ‘garden’, should also be treated in a chapter on mythical elements, but since the word is here interpreted as symbolizing the Temple we will look at it separately in the

1 This chapter was written before I had read Michael Fishbane’s Introduction to his Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking (2003) in which he exposes the inadequacy of rationalist apologetics. I regret that I have not managed to cite any of his introduction in this chapter. 2 J. W. Rogerson 1974: 177–8. 3 Robert Murray 1992: 70 124 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God next chapter, ‘The Garden Temple’. There is, however, a great deal of overlap between these two chapters, the Temple being hardly less present in this one.

4.1. Jerusalem––the omphalos of the world

Your navel is the rounded bowl; may it not lack mixed wine. (Cant. 7: 3) An interest in the ancient idea of a ‘navel’ of the earth emerged among several scholars in the early years of the last century, and the credit for having pointed out the significance of the term, Brevard Childs tells us in his Myth and Reality in the Old Testament,4 belongs primarily to W. H. Roscher (Omphalos, 1913) in relation to Greek mythology, where the notion flourished, though it is also found in Babylonia and Egypt. A. J. Wensinck followed with a study of the idea in Semitic thought, drawn from both Rabbinic and Arabic literature (The Ideas of Western Semites Concerning the Navel of the Earth 1916), while Childs himself has a passage which is particularly relevant to the present purpose: We should like to summarize briefly the evidence we have just presented that Zion is conceived of in the Old Testament in terms of mythical space. The main characteristics in mythical thinking about space are clearly present. Zion has a quality of holiness which sets it apart from all other ‘common’ space. Moreover, Zion as a copy of the heavenly reality is pictured in terms of the human body. The world functions as an organism with Zion as its navel. Finally, there is the identification of Zion with Eden. Because both share the same quality of sacred space, distance is transcended. Since God first created Eden as his sacred place, any other space partaking of this holiness must be Eden.5 The key text is the reference to Jerusalem as the navel of the earth in the book of Jubilees but, before coming to it, we need to examine the evidence for such an idea in the Old Testament itself. The word for ‘navel’, sˇo¯r,6 in the verse cited above from the Song, occurs only twice otherwise in the Hebrew Bible, at Ezek. 16: 4, where it is applied by God to the new-born Jerusalem: ‘Your navel cord was not cut’, and Prov. 3: 8:

4 Brevard Childs 1960: 85. 5 Ibid. 88. 6 According to BDB (1057), Prov. 3: 8 and Cant. 7: 3 are questioned, Prov. 3: 8 interpreted as ‘flesh’, and widely adopted by translators, while Cant. 7: 3 is interpreted as ‘vulva’ on the basis of a dubious Arabism (so BDB) but widely adopted by commentators. Mythical Elements 125 ‘It [virtue] shall be health to your navel.’ Of these three occurrences, only that in the Song is translated omphalos, ‘navel’, by the Septuagint. There are two other words translated by omphalos in the Septuagint: tabbûr at Judg. 9: 37 ˙ and Ezek. 38: 12, and sˇa¯rîr at Job 40: 16. This latter form does not otherwise occur and as it has no place in the following discussion,7 we may leave the question of its evident relation to sˇo¯r on one side. The word which dominates modern discussions of the biblical ‘omphalos myth’ is tabbûr. ˙ The verse at Judg. 9: 37 describes people coming down from the tabbûr of ˙ the land, namely, the middle of the land, while Ezek. 38: 12 predicts that Gog will come up against Israel for the purpose of plundering a defenceless people, gathered from the nations, ‘who dwell at the centre of the earth’. Another verse at Ezek. 5: 5, often quoted in this context, sets Jerusalem ‘in the midst of the nations and the countries round about her’ but does not use any word for ‘navel’. In the section ‘Omphalos’ in the article on ‘har’, ‘mountain’, in the Theo- logical Dictionary of the Old Testament, Shemaryahu Talmon writes: ‘The frequently proposed identification of a mountain/navel/midpoint notion in the OT is based on a tendentious interpretation of a few passages that speak of the land of Israel and Jerusalem as lying “in the midst” of the surrounding territories, especially Ez. 5: 5’, and he goes on to dismiss the interpretation in regard to this last reference on the grounds that ‘the passage refers to the city and its sanctuary, not to the mountain per se’. His argument is that expressions such as ‘in the midst’, ‘simply indicate the position of an object within a certain perimeter without necessarily referring to a geometrical or cosmic centre’. And so, ‘the point of the image here is more to indicate security than central geometric position’.8 Talmon’s account of the omphalos myth is not much less tendentious than that of the writers against whose enthusiasm for it he is reacting,9 but his next paragraph is important: Even more influential was the translation of tabbûr ha¯’a¯res in Judges 9: 37 and Ezekiel ˙ ˙ 38: 12 as ‘navel of the earth’, which was adopted by several commentators on the basis of the LXX translation omphalos tes ges/choras. From this translation was derived the theory propounded by Wensinck and accepted by many others that Mt Gerizim, identified with the tabbûr ha¯’a¯res of Jud. 9: 37, was considered the ‘navel of the land’. ˙ ˙ Caspari rejected this theory on many grounds, but nevertheless interpreted tabbûr ˙

7 Although there are some similarities of vocabulary between Cant. 7: 2 and the passage in Job, and I have probably missed something. 8 1978: 437–8. 9 For example a study by Samuel Terrien (1970), to which Talmon refers as an example of the ‘many others’ who followed Wensinck’s theory that Mt Gerizim was considered the ‘navel of the land’. That point apart, credibility is strained by Terrien’s highly charged sexual and psychological language. 126 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God ha¯’a¯res in Ez. 38: 12 as a reference to Jerusalem as the ‘center of the earth’ or of ˙ ‘mankind’, i.e., as a kind of cosmic midpoint. (437–8) We see from Talmon’s treatment of this subject, that the identification of the Judges verse with Mount Gerizim and that of Ezekiel with Jerusalem, is no more certain than a study of the passages concerned would lead one to think (though one can see the case for Mount Gerizim at Judg. 9: 37). Nevertheless, the identification of the only two occurrences of tabbûr in the OT with ˙ Gerizim and Jerusalem takes on an additional interest from the fact that these are the central sanctuaries of Samaritans and Jews respectively as noted also in the New Testament: ‘Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain [Mount Gerizim], but you say that the place where people must worship is Jerusalem’ (John 4: 20). There is yet more to be gained––or, perhaps, lost––from Talmon’s sober assessment of the application of ‘omphalos’ ideas to the biblical literature: Even the interpretation of tabbûr ha¯’a¯res as ‘navel (midpoint) of the earth’ appears ˙ ˙ untenable. The word tabbûr, which is attested only in Hebrew and Aramaic, is etymo- ˙ logically obscure. In mishnaic and later Hebrew it does mean ‘navel’, but this meaning cannot be confirmed for biblical Hebrew, which usually uses sˇo¯r as the term for ‘navel’ or ‘umbilical cord’ (Ezk. 16: 4; Cant. 7: 3; Prov. 3: 8). The context suggests that tabbûr ˙ ha¯’a¯res in Ezk. 38: 12 originally referred to a plateau whose height offered some ˙ security. Talmon goes on to give a number of parallels in which the terminology–– but with the exception of the phrase tabbûr ha¯’a¯res––is used under similar ˙ ˙ circumstances. He concludes: The proposed translation of tabbûr as ‘navel’ thus appears not to have any basis ˙ within the conceptual framework of the OT; it is rather an inference based on later Greek and Jewish ideas that merged with the literal and symbolic significance of mountains as heights. From such a scholar that, it might be thought, is that. But in an earlier section of his article, called ‘Parts’, Talmon states: ‘The literature of the OT frequently uses the terminology of the human body to refer to the various parts of a mountain.’ The evidence adduced is negligible and would have benefited from the inclusion of the ‘navel’ idea were it not that Talmon was to demolish it in his later section on ‘Omphalos’. More striking, Talmon omits all mention of the verse 8: 19 in Jubilees, and although this omission can be justified on the grounds that Jubilees is not a biblical book, it is, nevertheless, odd since a great deal, not suprisingly, has been hung on it: And he [Noah] knew that the garden of Eden is the holy of holies and the Lord’s dwelling place, and mount Sinai the centre of the desert, and mount Zion the Mythical Elements 127 centre of the navel of the earth; these three were created as holy places facing one another.10 The book of Jubilees is generally dated to about 140 BCE or earlier. The complete text survives only in the Ethiopic version but, since the discoveries at Qumran, considerable fragments from ten different manuscripts, all in Hebrew, have been found in four of the caves.11 Unfortunately for the present purpose, there is a gap between 5: 1–2 and 12: 15–1712 and thus there is no way of knowing which Hebrew word––whether tabbûr or sˇo¯r––is used for ˙ ‘navel’ at Jubilees 8: 19. Both words are used in the early rabbinical literature. Thus while remaining aware that the chances for either word having been used in Jubilees appear to be equal, I will pursue the implications of sˇo¯r being the word used for ‘navel’ in the Song. The first point to notice, as we have already seen, is that Ezekiel uses the same word in his description of the origin of Jerusalem: ‘in the day of your being born your navel [sˇo¯r] was not cut’. Whether there is here an awareness of Greek claims for their cities, notably Delphi, to be the navel of the earth, which are being transferred by the writer of Ezekiel to Jerusalem, cannot be known. In any case, it seems that the author intends to suggest a time when Jerusalem was not yet established as the centre of the earth–– ‘your navel was not cut’––with God as the one responsible for her elevation. But if this is so, the Greek translators missed it when they gave ouk edeisan tous mastous sou––‘your breasts were not bound’––in place of omphalos for ‘navel’. And yet they provided omphalos for tabbûr at Ezek. 38: 12, for which ˙ P. S. Alexander, in an article called ‘Jerusalem as the Omphalos of the World: On the History of a Geographical Concept’, gives a highly instructive explanation: The rendering of tabbûr as omphalos is striking and full of potential. It is probable that ˙ the Septuagint here, as often elsewhere, is reflecting Palestinian Jewish exegetical tradition. The word tabbûr, it should be recalled, occurs only twice in the Hebrew ˙ Bible and its sense is very uncertain. This uncertainty may have been exploited already in the late Second Temple period, and Ezekiel 38: 12 used as a convenient Biblical ‘peg’ on which to hang the doctrine of Jerusalem as the navel of the earth. The Septuagint reflects this Palestinian tradition. In other words the equation tabbûr = omphalos in ˙ Ezekiel 38: 12 is not a distinctive Alexandrian invention, but represents Palestinian exegesis as is implied by the Book of Jubilees.13

10 Jubilees 8: 19. C. Rabin 1984: 38. 11 See the introduction to Jubilees by C. Rabin 1984: 1–10. 12 See Flint and Vanderkam 1999: 688. Also, Vanderkam and Milik 1994. For the fragments of Jubilees found at Masada see Talmon and Yadin 1999. 13 P. S. Alexander 1997: 152. 128 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God Alexander then goes on: ‘I would suggest that the doctrine of Jerusalem as the navel of the earth can be traced back no earlier than the Hasmonean revolution of the second century BCE.’ If the Song is considerably later than is generally thought, then the ‘doctrine’ could apply to sˇo¯r at Cant. 7: 3. Unfortunately Alexander is focusing only on the word tabbûr as meaning––or ˙ not meaning––‘navel’, the language of the Song having been rendered inaccessible to scholarly attention by modern scholarly interpretation.14 Before looking at the passage 7: 1–6, which describes the ‘body’ of the female, including the reference to her navel at 7: 2, I should like to draw out some thoughts from the book quoted at the beginning of this section, Brevard Childs’s Myth and Reality in the Old Testament. Childs has mastered the literature on myth in the Old Testament and reproduces it in a form which makes fascinating reading. In a section called ‘An Analysis of Mythical Space’ in the chapter, ‘Old Testament Categories of Reality’, he writes: It is characteristic of myth that creation corresponds to the various parts of the body. Sometimes the body is that of the creator’s, while at other times that of the defeated enemy. This establishes an ontological correspondence between the world structure and the life of man. The world functions in terms of the human organism. (84) In the next section, ‘The Biblical Category’, which examines the Old Testa- ment traditions concerning Jerusalem, Childs writes: Jerusalem as the navel of the earth is also the heavenly city come to earth. Her walls and gates are built of precious stones (Is. 54: 11ﬀ.) The introduction in Ezek. 40: 1–4 removes all doubt that Jerusalem is envisioned as a copy of the heavenly city. This theme receives its widest elaboration in the Apocrypha. (86)15 There is much more of interest in this chapter, but the problem with the material quoted is that if Talmon’s evidence for the terminology of the human body being applied to mountains is negligible, Childs’s evidence for Zion pictured in terms of the human body is nil. There is only one possible example in the whole of the biblical literature, but Childs cannot use it because, as we saw in Chapter 1, he thinks that ‘the Song is wisdom’s reﬂec- tion on the joyful and mysterious nature of love between a man and a woman within the institution of marriage’. What follows is the example he might

14 Another example is provided by Robert P. Gordon in his discussion of ‘Omphalos’ where he cites the word sˇo¯r as occurring at Ezek. 16: 4 but not its occurrence at either Prov. 3: 8 or Cant. 7: 2. Thus, Ezek. 16: 4 notwithstanding, he can claim, in the present state of Song scholarship, that ‘an “omphalos” view of Zion does not exist anywhere in the Old Testament’ (2004: 31 and 45). 15 Childs cites Tobit 13: 16–17; 4 Ezra 7: 26; 10: 54–9; 13: 36; and 2 Baruch 4: 2–6. Mythical Elements 129 otherwise have used, the description of the body of the female at Cant. 7: 1–6, in which the word ‘navel’ occurs.

4.2. The body as myth and as metaphor

1 Return, return, O Shulamite, return, return, that we may gaze on you. What will you see in the Shulamite? As a dance of Mahanaim. 2 How fair are your feet in sandals, noble daughter! The curved lines of your thighs are like ornaments, the work of the hands of a master craftsman. 3 Your navel is the rounded bowl, may it not lack the mixed wine; your belly is a heap of wheat, fenced round with lilies. 4 Your two breasts are like two young harts, twins of a gazelle. 5 Your neck is like the tower of ivory; your eyes are pools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bat-Rabbim; your nose is like the tower of Lebanon which looks towards Damascus. 6 Your head upon you is like Carmel, and the hair of your head like purple cloth; your fringe is bound with bands. This is one of four passages (4: 1–7; 5: 10–16; 6: 4–10; 7: 1–6) found in chapters 4–7 of the Song to which the term wasf is now invariably applied by ˙ commentators. Marcia Falk, who has a substantial section on the subject, writes about the term as follows: Wasf, an Arabic word meaning ‘description’, has come to refer to a particular kind of ˙ poetic passage that describes through a series of images the parts of the human body. While wasfs are not uncommon in modern Arabic poetry, in ancient Hebrew literature ˙ they appear only in the Song of Songs. The similarity between certain passages in the Song and modern Arabic poems was discovered in the last [nineteenth] century; as a result, the technical term wasf has become familiar in scholarly studies of the Song.16 ˙

16 Marcia Falk 1990: 127. M. D. Goulder, reviewing a commentary on the Song, wrote: ‘There is the further repeated reference to the praises of the Beloved/Lover as wasfs. I do not know from what date we may have Arabic poems of this type, or how close the earlier˙ ones may be to the Song, but as it stands the word seems to explain the obscure per obscurius’ (1994: 186). 130 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

It has, indeed! Pope amplifies the theme: The quest for parallels to the descriptive songs of the Canticle has moved from the wasf of neo-Arabic folk poetry to the love songs of ancient Egypt, to the Sumerian and ˙ Akkadian hymns of ancient Mesopotamia, and recently has been brought closer to the Syro-Palestinian setting with the Ugaritic texts from North Syria dating to the middle of the second millenium B.C., and closer still in the description of Sarah’s beauty in the Genesis Apocryphon among the texts from the caves by the Dead Sea from the last pre-Christian century. (69) This description of Sarah is of interest because it is quite unlike those found in the Song: How beautiful the look of her face . . . and how fine the hair of her head, how fair indeed are her eyes and how pleasing her nose and all the radiance of her face . . . how beautiful her breast and how lovely all her whiteness. Her arms goodly to look upon, and her hands how perfect . . . and above all women is she lovely, and higher is her beauty than that of them all, and with all her beauty there is much wisdom in her. (Pope 56) Compare ‘how fine the hair of her head’ with ‘your hair is like a flock of goats which appear from Mount Gilead’ (Cant. 4: 1); ‘how pleasing her nose’ with ‘your nose is like the tower of Lebanon which looks towards Damascus’ (Cant. 7: 5); and ‘how beautiful her breast’ with ‘your two breasts are like two young harts, twins of a gazelle’ (Cant. 4: 5 and 7: 4). Sarah’s neck is not extolled, but had it been we would have seen the same contrast with the Song’s ‘your neck is like the tower of David, built for an arsenal, whereon hang a thousand bucklers, all of them shields of warriors’ (Cant. 4: 4). The obvious difference between the description of Sarah (which goes on to extol her ‘long fingers’ and ‘beautiful legs’) and the descriptions of the female in the Song is that no metaphors are used in the description of Sarah. She is, moreover, described from head to foot whereas the description of the female in the Song goes from feet to head. Another difference is that Sarah is described in the third person, the Song female in direct, second-person address which, with the feminine suffix, is applied outside the Pentateuch to countries or to cities and, most often, to Jerusalem. Thus, the description of Sarah’s beauty, except in so far as it also provides an inventory of her features, cannot be said to provide a parallel to the descriptions in the Song. More to the point, I believe, is that the necessity for the student of the Song to study maps of Palestine and the surrounding countries suggests that we are confronted in these passages by that form of myth which understood the physical world as analogous to the human body. Here, at Cant. 7: 1–6, the description of the human body piles on indications that it represents a geographic area, travelling south to north, of which Jerusalem is the centre and of Mythical Elements 131 which, in turn, the centre is the Temple. Cant. Rabbah tells us that when Israel extols God she commences from above and goes downwards, and when God extols Israel he commences from below and goes upwards (V. 16, §6). Another way of understanding this passage––and, indeed, the Song as a whole––is the statement by C. T. R. Hayward in an essay on Sirach: ‘The “praise of Wisdom” abounds in geographical references.’17

4.3. Visionary seeing, and the ‘two camps’

Return, return, O Shulamite, return, return, that we may see you. What will you see in the Shulamite? [You will see something] like the dance of Mahanaim. ˙ Two words in this opening verse of chapter 7 warn us that the ‘land’ traversed in its first six verses is ‘holy’ land, first the verb ha¯zâ,‘to see’, which occurs ˙ only in the Bible in a visionary sense, and second the noun mahanaîm, ‘two ˙ camps’, which functions, I believe, as a marker18 to the understanding of the passage. But first, the importance of the verb ha¯zâ, ‘to see’, must be stressed. Com- ˙ mentators either ignore the significance of the verb here or attempt a rational- ization. For example, Ariel and Chana Bloch note its use in the Bible in a specialized sense for ‘vision, theophany’, then add: ‘In modern Hebrew, ha¯zâ ˙ underlies mahazeh “theatrical performance,” and its use in Song 7: 1 may well ˙ have contributed to this noun’s “secularization”.’19 But the word had already lost all sense of denoting vision in the early Rabbinic literature in consequence of the view that prophecy, and thus all visionary seeing, had departed from Israel.20 The fourfold call to return suggests, first, the promise to Jacob in his dream, when he sees angels ascending and descending a ladder, that his seed will be as the dust of the earth and will spread abroad to the west, to the east, to the north, and to the south (Gen. 28: 14), and secondly the recall when God ‘will assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth’ (Isa. 11: 12), which is repeated in similar words at Isa. 43: 5–6.

17 1999: 39. There are, excluding Tirzah, ﬁfteen geographical names in the Song. 18 A discussion on the interpretative methods of Onqelos applies also here: ‘often they [his interpretations] are represented by a single, but all-revealing word which depends on a more extensive interpretation in the background’. John Bowker 1969: 24. 19 Ariel Bloch and Chana Bloch 1995: 199. 20 See for example the discussion in John Barton 1986: 105–17. 132 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God But mahanaîm in the next line suggests that the primary link is with the ˙ Genesis verse, which in turn links with Gen. 32: 3, where Jacob again encounters angels of God: ‘This is God’s camp’, he says, and he calls the name of the place Mahanaim. This word is widely thought on the one hand to be a dual form meaning ‘two camps’, and on the other a dual form with singular meaning.21 Against the latter are the occurrences of forms of mahaneh ˙ meaning ‘camps’ in the Merkava texts. Philip Alexander, in his book on the mystical texts of Qumran, writes: The ordinary angels are designated ‘the camps of ‘Elohim’ . . . The language is suggestive and once again hints at a parallelism between earth and heaven, between Israel and the angels. Tradition linked the origin of the idea that the angels were marshalled in camps with the name Mahanaim (‘Two Camps’), which Jacob gave to the place where he met the ‘angels of God (’Elohim)’ in Gen. 32.2. Later Jewish mystical literature often refers to the ‘camps’ of angels (3 Enoch 36.1; Heikhalot Rabbati 28.2, Synopse §277; Sefer ha-Razim 1.5; 4.23; 6.30). But the term forges another link––with Israel in the wilderness where the tribes were organized in camps around the tabernacle (see Num. 2).22

This last also connects to the link between Numbers 2 and the Song at 2: 4: ‘His banner over me is love’, the link being the word for banner, degel, which only occurs in Numbers and the Song (see Commentary at Cant. 2: 4). That mahanaîm means ‘two camps’ is consonant with the poet’s predilection for ˙ the ‘twofold nature of all things’ (of which we will see examples in the Com- mentary) but, more speciﬁcally, with the point Alexander goes on to make: ‘The author of Sabbath Songs, like later mystical writers, apparently struc- tured the geography of heaven in the same way, with camps of angels matching camps of humans’ (19). Thus, what is to be seen in the Shulamite is, I believe, the dance of angels in both the earthly and the heavenly realm, which agrees with the view we shall touch on from time to time that in certain contexts the female in the Song represents the ﬁgure of Wisdom. ‘Camps of angels’ are found especially in 3 Enoch, a late Merkava text, but in which early material abounds. In Philip Alexander’s translation of this work he explains in a long footnote to ‘the camp of the Shekhinah’,23 that the expression is used as a designation of the inner court and the holy place in the Temple, which is what I believe the verse at Cant. 7: 1 is inviting us to contemplate when it asks: ‘What will you see in the Shulamite?’ Further, a verse at Ezek. 1: 24, containing much overlap of vocabulary with the Song,

21 For example Claus Westermann 1987: 225. 22 P. S. Alexander 2006a: 18. 23 P. S. Alexander 1983: 256 n. 1. Alexander’s Introduction, 223–53, provides an exceptionally valuable account of the Merkava literature. Mythical Elements 133 links by word-play, I believe, to the word ‘dance’: ‘And I heard the sound of their wings, like the sound of many waters, like the sound of Shaddai in their going; a sound of tumult like the sound of a camp.’ The word translated ‘dance’, me˘ho¯lâ, at Cant. 7: 1 is not unlike the word translated ‘tumult’, ˙ ha˘mullâ, a word which, like ‘dance’, is used in contexts of tumultuous joy after victory, praise, and worship.24 This then, is what we will see in the Shulamite, the joy, the exultation of both the earthly and the heavenly camps but, especially in what follows, the holy land of Israel, the city of Jerusalem, and, above all, the Temple.

4.4. ‘The chariots of my willing people’

How fair are your feet in sandals, noble daughter! The term ‘noble daughter’ at 7: 2 (see Commentary ad loc.) links with the last verse of chapter 6: My soul did not know that I was set [in the] chariots of my willing people/Amminadib. This diﬃcult verse parallels, I believe, the verse at 5: 2: ‘I sleep, but my heart is awake.’ In neither case, the poet seems to be telling us, is there a knowledge of what is going on at the level of ordinary consciousness. The use of the verb ‘to know’ (ya¯da) here suggests connections with the related form ‘knowledge’ (daat). Before exploring the possibilities of ‘willing (or noble) people’/ ammi-na¯dib, we need to pause on the two occurrences of ‘chariot’ in the Song, one in plural as above and the other in singular at 3: 10. The singular form, merkava, occurs more than two dozen times in the Hebrew Bible but, according to the authorities on Merkava mysticism, ‘is found in the technical sense, i.e. for the divine chariot in the Temple, for the ﬁrst time in 1 Chronicles 28: 18’.25 The plural occurs sixteen times, and of these only Zech. 6: 1 seems to take us in the direction of the Merkava texts, a view supported by Halperin’s comparison of the passage, Zech. 6: 1–6, with the Angelic Liturgy, particularly with the lines: The spirits of the living God that travel about perpetually with the glory of the wondrous chariots. 26

24 Another example of word-play is to be seen two verses ahead between RHSH and RSXY, and it is this example of treating H and X similarly which encourages seeing word-play between HLWXM, ‘dance’, and HLWMH, ‘tumult’. 25 Peter Schäfer 1992: 2, 3. 26 D. J. Halperin 1988: 53. 134 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God The singular form at Cant. 3: 10, plus suﬃx, merkavo, invites the translation ‘his chariot’, but in the context of the previous verse: ‘Solomon made for himself a palanquin’, must be taken to mean ‘his seat’, for which the usual word would be kisse¯ . The combination of explicit ‘chariot’ and implicit ‘seat’ sends the reader to Ezekiel’s vision in chapter 1 where kisse¯ is used for God’s throne (v. 26). Cant. Rabbah (III. 10, §4), similarly goes to Ezekiel’s vision on this verse. After relating ‘his chariot’ to the ‘rider (ro¯keb) in the heavens’ of Ps. 68: 34, this midrash goes on to refer to the four lordly creatures, and the section ends: ‘The Holy One, blessed be He, took them [the living creatures] and engraved them on the Throne of Glory, as it says, The Lord hath established His throne in the heavens, and His kingdom ruleth over all. (Ps. 103: 19).’ The Targum, on the other hand, Alexander tells us, seems to have taken merkavo as meaning ‘screen’ or ‘cover’ rather than ‘seat’. ‘Perhaps’, he suggests, ‘Tg. was deliberately avoiding the possible mystical connotations of the word.’ And, after showing the contrast with Cant. Rabbah, he points to a discussion in his Introduction ‘for Tg.’s possible avoidance of Merkabah mysticism’.27 On the question of how to read ammi-na¯dib, I take it to mean ‘my noble’ or ‘my willing people’, reading a noun and an adjective. But the AV reads it as a proper name, Amminadib, following the LXX and the Vulgate, though these versions both spell the name Ammi-nadab. If we read ‘my noble people’, there is an immediate connection with ‘noble daughter’, bat-na¯dib, two verses later. The forms of na¯dib all give the idea of generosity, of a willing spirit, of voluntary service and, especially in 1 Chronicles 29, the willingness to be consecrated to the service of the Lord in the building of the Temple.28 But if we read the two words as a proper name we want to know: who was Ammi- nadib? Raymond Tournay’s careful exposition of this question, ﬁrst articulated in an article, ‘Les Chariots d’Aminadab (Cant. vi 12): Israël, Peuple Théophore’ (1959), and later in a book, Quand Dieu parle aux hommes le langage de l’amour (1982), expounds both readings, the textual history of the second, ammi-na¯dab, with impressive thoroughness.29 But his chief concern is that we

27 In his Introduction, however (36–9), Alexander disagrees with Raphael Loewe who, in his ‘Apologetic Motifs in the Targum to the Song of Songs’ (1966), takes the view that the Targumist is fighting against the Jewish esoteric interpretation of the Song. This is because, as Alexander himself says, ‘Tg. Cant. stands firmly in the tradition of the “official”, exoteric reading of Canticles’ (36). And that the Targumist avoids the implications of WBKRM gives sufficient grounds for agreeing with Loewe on this point. 28 Cf. Hayward 1996: 62: ‘This root [BDN] is used of voluntary contributions to the fabric of the tabernacle and Temple (Ex. 25: 2; 35: 21, 29; 1 Chr. 29: 5, 6, 9).’ 29 English translation 1988: 100–1. I shall refer to this translation from here onwards. Mythical Elements 135 see with him that ‘the poet is calling to mind the outstanding event which marked the beginning of David’s reign, namely, the transfer of the ark to Jerusalem’ (99), which is recorded as having taken place from the home of Abinadab in Kiriath-Jearim (1 Sam. 7: 1). This transfer required a new cart each time (1 Sam. 6: 7 and 2 Sam. 6: 3), and thus, Tournay suggests, the singular aga¯lâ, ‘cart’, of 1 and 2 Samuel becomes the plural merkavot, ‘chariots’, at Cant. 6: 12. In his earlier article Tournay ascribes the change from cart in 1 and 2 Samuel to chariots in the Song to the influence of Ezekiel. But the word merkava does not occur in Ezekiel, notwithstanding that early Jew- ish ‘chariot’ mysticism derives from Ezekiel’s visions, and in his later book, Quand Dieu parle, Tournay omits any mention of Ezekiel. Nevertheless, the technical use of merkava at 1 Chron. 28: 18 occurs in connection with the ark of the covenant: [‘David’s] plan for the golden chariot of the cherubim that spread their wings and covered the ark of the covenant of the Lord’. Tournay’s interpretation, that the verse at Cant. 6: 12 is about the arrival of the ark in Jerusalem, is, in Alexander’s phrase used earlier, full of potential, and the case for it may yet be made. Moreover, the likelihood of a relationship between 1 Chronicles 28 and Ezekiel’s vision receives substantial support in a discussion in Alexander’s Mystical Texts which concludes: Since he wrote long after Ezekiel, the Chronicler might well be alluding to Ezekiel’s vision, which by his day could already have become known as the ‘Vision of the Merkabah’. This is instructive for our present purposes, since either view suggests that the parallelism between the earthly and the heavenly temples, between the Ark of the Covenant and God’s heavenly throne, was old and very deeply embedded in Second Temple Jewish thought.30 A less problematic link is that between ‘my noble/generous/willing people’––if we read ammi-na¯dib thus––and the prayer pronounced by David in 1 Chron. 29, as Tournay himself expounds: In verses 5–6, the leaders of the people commit themselves [a form of na¯dib] to donate great treasures [gold and silver] to the service of God. And the text continues (v. 9): The people [am] rejoiced at that to which they had committed themselves . . . And in his benediction, David cried out (v. 14): Who am I and what is my people [ ammi] to have sufficient means to commit ourselves [a form of na¯dib] in this way? (101) Here, as Tournay points out, the terminology of 1 Chronicles 29 is similar to Cant. 6: 12. The repetition of forms of the verb na¯dab, meaning ‘to be willing, to do or give freely’, which at 1 Chronicles 29: 14 occurs in the same verse as ‘my people’ (ammi), provides a source for ‘my noble/willing people’

30 P. S. Alexander 2006: 67–8. 136 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God (ammi na¯dib). At 1 Chron. 29: 17 there is also the form ya¯dati, ‘I know’, as at Cant. 6: 12, followed by ‘pleasure in uprightness’, tirseh me¯sˇa¯rîm, two words ˙ found in other parts of the Song (tirsâ at 6: 4 and me¯sˇa¯rîm at 1: 4). Also in the ˙ same verse is a form of na¯dab meaning ‘I have willingly oﬀered’, all of which makes Cant. 6: 12 and bat-na¯dib at 7: 2 look like a ﬁne example of word- play.31 Either reading brings us to the Temple, whether by the journey of the ark or by play on forms of the verb na¯dab in 1 Chronicles 29, as the next part of the same verse (7: 2), contrary to immediate appearances, suggests.

4.5. ‘The curved lines of your thighs’

The curved lines of your thighs are like ornaments, the work of the hands of a master craftsman. The noun meaning ‘curving, curve’, does not otherwise occur. The noun ya¯re¯k means primarily ‘thigh’ and ‘side’. As ‘thigh’ it occurs most often in conjunction with ‘sword’, as at Cant. 3: 8: ‘every man has his sword upon his thigh’; and as ‘side’ to denote an area of the tabernacle or altar, and the base of the golden candlestick in Exodus (25: 31; 37: 17) and Numbers (8: 4). The ‘hollow of the thigh’ occurs four times in the story of Jacob’s encounter with the angel at Gen. 34: 24–32. Other uses are seen as ‘thigh = loins, as seat of procreative power’ (BDB), a meaning which is thought to extend to the placing of the hand under the thigh, namely, genitals, in the taking of an oath (Gen. 24: 2, 9 and 47: 29). The same interpretation is given to the thigh in the instructions for the woman suspected of adultery at Num. 5: 11–31. This last connects with our text. At Num. 5: 19–22 the priest addresses the woman directly, which, in Hebrew, gives to any noun the second person feminine suffix. In the prophetic literature this suffix indicates, as mentioned earlier, address to a city, usually Jerusalem. This is not so in the Pentateuch and therefore the form ‘your [fem.] thigh’ cannot, with the same confidence, be taken to signify that the woman is representative of the people, either Jerusalem or Israel. Against this is the fact that Jerusalem is not named in the Pentateuch since ‘historically’ it did not yet exist. Robert Gordon quotes Yairah Amit, who writes: ‘The Pentateuch’s silence on Jerusalem “roars like

31 André LaCocque has a footnote which is suggestive in relation to the use of the root BDN in both Chronicles and the Song: [‘At 1 Macc. 2: 42] the Asideans [Hasidim] are called κουσιαζ- µεσοι (devotees of the law), the LXX term corresponding to the ˙Hebrew words from the root BDN [na¯dab] characteristic of QS (Manual of Discipline––see 1.7, 11; 5.1, 6, 8, 10, 21, 22; 6.13) which uses this term to designate “the members of the Community willingly and generously engaged in the service of the Torah”.’ 1979: 44 n. 11. Mythical Elements 137 thunder”.’32 In this light, the case Mary Douglas makes, in a chapter called ‘Israel, the Mystic Bride’, for the woman in Numbers 5 being the representative of Israel is all the more compelling.33 Thus, if ‘your thigh’, singular, feminine, represents the reproductive organs at Num. 5: 21, ‘your thighs’, plural, feminine, may equally represent them at Cant. 7: 2, that is to say, the whole area in which union, conception and birth takes place. Viewed in this way, we should expect this area of the ‘body’ in our passage to be represented, all the more so in the light of another book by Mary Douglas, in a chapter called, ‘Mountain, Tabernacle, Body in Leviticus 1–7’, where she argues that the pelvic region of a sacrificial animal is aligned with the ‘holy of holies’.34 How she arrives at this conclusion, and her table of three paradigms of the tabernacle aligned (79), must be studied first hand, but a strand in her thought relevant to this study can be gained from a short extract: The Psalmist said: ‘Truth is in the inner being’ [Ps. 51: 8]. The same interiorizing movement is seen in the space of the body as in the space of the tabernacle building. The temple was associated with the creation, and the creation with fertility, which implies that the innermost part of the tabernacle was a divine nuptial chamber. Even from complete ignorance of mysticism, the analogy of the inner sanctuary with the centre of creation is intelligible. It was fitting that the sanctuary was interpreted as depicting ‘in a most tangible form the union between God and Israel’. (80) The next word, ‘ornaments’, in the line ‘the curves of your thighs are like ornaments’, is a plural form, found only in singular at Prov. 25: 12 in a collection of sayings attributed to Solomon, while another line of enquiry is provided by Hos. 2: 15 where a related word meaning ‘jewellery’ is used. These texts may be part of the poet’s tapestry, but for a parallel here I believe we have to go to the second half of verse 12 in Psalm 144: . . . that our daughters [may be] like corner pillars, carved according to the pattern of a temple.35 There is no overlap of vocabulary with ‘The curves of your thighs are like ornaments, the work of the hands of a master craftsman’, but there is, it seems to me, some correspondence of sense, especially between ‘carved according to the pattern of a temple’ and ‘the work of the hands of a master craftsman’. The discussion on ‘master craftsman’ at §1.13 led to the conclusion that, in the view of the poet, omma¯n here in the Song is the same as a¯môn at Prov. 8: 30 and was understood by him to mean God. This suggests that the ‘thighs’

32 Robert P. Gordon 2004: 11. 33 Mary Douglas 2001: 160–71. 34 Mary Douglas 2000: 66–86. 35 This psalm verse will be examined further in the next chapter. 138 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God represent those recesses of the altar, north, south, and west, on which items are placed and animals sacriﬁced,36 the ‘curves’ being so cunningly wrought by a master craftsman as to appear like ornaments––whatever ornaments in this context might represent. This interpretation brings us into the Temple and since, in the period of the Song, the Second Temple period, it is not possible to know whether texts are describing the earthly Temple or the heavenly one, just as Jerusalem may be either the earthly or the heavenly city, so the ‘curves of the thighs’ may as well be attributed to the work of the heavenly Craftsman as to an earthly.

4.6. The round bowl

If, then, we are in the Temple, what follows is to be seen in this light: Your navel is the round bowl; may it not lack the mixed wine. The springboard of the present chapter is the myth of Jerusalem as the navel of the earth. But in the Song it is the round bowl which is the navel of the ‘body’. If the poet understands Zion as the navel of the earth he is, it seems to me, concerned to show that, within Zion, and within the Temple, what is truly central is ‘the round bowl’. There is not much, unfortunately, we can be certain about this bowl; we can only deduce some possibilities from what little is known about the rare word agga¯n, ‘bowl, basin’, with no assist- ance in the biblical literature from its accompanying word, sahar, ‘roundness’, which is a hapax legomenon. First, the definite articles, applied to both the round bowl and the mixed wine, suggest recognizable items used in specific circumstances, although against this may be set the fact that definite articles are a feature of the Song. But they are not invariable, as can be seen in this passage where ‘your belly is a heap of wheat’, ‘your two breasts . . . twins of a gazelle’. As we do not know in any particular instance to what the poet is referring, I am adopting the view that definite articles may perform a function and should therefore be retained.37 Thus the agga¯n, ‘bowl’ or ‘basin’, may be a particular bowl or basin. It only occurs twice otherwise, Exod. 24: 6 and Isa. 22: 24, both in plural. Of these the

36 Exod. 26: 22, 27; 36: 27, 32 (all west side); Exod. 40: 22; Lev. 1: 11; Num. 3: 35 (all north side); Exod. 40: 24; Num. 3: 29 (south side). 37 Against this see GKC 127e, where Cant. 7: 3 is included among ‘a few instances [where] the nomen regens appears to be used indefinitely’. Mythical Elements 139 significant reference38 for the present context is, it seems to me, the one at Exod. 24: 6–8: And Moses took half of the blood and put it in the bowls, and half of the blood he threw against the altar. Then he took the book of the covenant, and read it in the hearing of the people; and they said, ‘All that the Lord has spoken we will do and we will be obedient.’ And Moses took the blood and threw it upon the people, and said, ‘Behold the blood of the covenant which the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words.’ If these are the verses the poet has in mind in using the word agga¯n, then the blood of the covenant is the centre of the world for him, and our passage is, we might think, concerned with sacrifice of some kind. It is not, I think, a contradiction that the round bowl in the Song contains wine not blood. There are some striking identifications of blood and wine in the Old Testament,39 while in the New their identification is central: ‘This is my blood of the new covenant’, spoken in relation to taking the cup of wine.40 In the period between there is another significant reference at Sir. 50: 14–15 of which, more significantly still, v. 15 is missing in the Hebrew: 14 And finishing the service at the altars, to adorn the offering of the most high Almighty, 15 he [Simeon] stretched out his hand to the cup, and poured out the blood of the grape; he poured out into the foundations of the altar a sweet-smelling savour to the Most High, King of all. Thus the verse (7: 3), with its wine41 in the first half and the heap of wheat––the raw material of bread––in the second, suggests that what is being alluded to here is a rite involving bread and wine which was the precursor of the Christian Eucharist. Support for this possibility is found in the last fifty years or so arising in particular from the study of the story of Joseph and Aseneth in which a rite involving primarily bread and wine, but also oil and honey, has inspired speculations about the possible antecedents of the Last Supper.42 More recently, in a section on the Testament of Levi, Alexander

38 Or, rather, the easier one. The other, Isa. 22: 24, set in a messianic context, is no less signiﬁcant but, in the commentaries I have looked at, is bound to an interpretation from which it would need to be released before it could be used. 39 For example Gen. 49: 11; Deut. 32: 14; Isa. 63: 1ﬀ. Ezek. 39: 19; Zech. 9: 15; Sir. 39: 26; 50: 15. 40 Matt. 26: 28; Mark 14: 24; Luke 22: 20; 1 Cor. 11: 25. 41 The word here is an Aramaism, GZM, meaning ‘mixed wine’. The poet may have avoided using VSM because its only occurrence in this form is at Ps. 75: 9 in the context of a cup of God’s wrath. 42 Randall D. Chesnutt (1995), and the ‘pivotal article’ to which Chesnutt points: ‘Living Issues in Biblical Scholarship: The Last Supper’, by G. D. Kilpatrick, who asks why we have no trace of such an institution in Rabbinic Judaism and suggests that it was because it ‘had been taken over into Christianity, where it became the central rite’, which would have ‘encouraged 140 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God quotes a substantial passage from this work which describes Levi’s celestial investiture as high priest and seven men in white clothing, the second of whom ‘washed me with pure water, fed me by hand with bread and holy wine, and put on me a glorious vestment’. Later in the section, Alexander writes: There has been lively debate as to whether Testament of Levi was originally a Jewish work which has been lightly Christianized (Charles 1908b), or a Christian work which has drawn heavily on Jewish sources (de Jonge 1991). The point is rather moot, but the discovery of Aramaic Levi at Qumran has surely tipped the balance in favour of the former view. And, however one looks at it, Testament of Levi puts it beyond doubt that the old Jewish priestly theology of the celestial temple and its liturgy passed over directly into Christianity.43

4.7. A heap of wheat

If the first half of 7: 3 suggests a rite in which wine is central, the second half of the verse suggests that wheat is an element of equal importance: Your belly is a heap of wheat, fenced around with lilies. The word for ‘heap’, arêmâ, occurs ten times in the Old Testament, four of these in sequence at 2 Chron. 31: 6–9, which are, I believe, the relevant references. The account of the people, first of Jerusalem and then of Israel and of Judah, giving in abundance the first-fruits of grain, wine, oil, and honey at the command of the king for the use of the priests and Levites, ‘so that they might devote themselves to the law of the Lord’, recalls the same spirit we have seen in 1 Chronicles 29 where the repetition of words for ‘generous’ and ‘willing’, in regard to the people, is matched here by the repetition of the word for ‘heaps’ which the people pile up in response to the (liturgical?) needs of the priests and Levites. This piling up into heaps, moreover, takes place in the ‘house of the Lord’, namely, the Temple. The word sûg, translated here ‘fenced around’, occurs in the Hebrew Bible otherwise only at Isa. 17: 11, but becomes an important word in rabbinical writings where it is used in prescriptions designed to make fences round the the Rabbinic leaders to suppress it and any reference to it’ (1952–3: 7). The lack of v. 15 from Hebrew Sirach 50, noted above, tends to support this view. On the inclusion of milk and honey in early Christian rites see Jones, Wainwright, and Yarnold 1978: 92: ‘Tertullian refers to the drinking of milk and honey before the Eucharist (de Corona, 3) while Hippolytus refers to the bringing of milk and honey at the Offertory in the Eucharist (Ap. Trad., 23.2).’ For Joseph and Aseneth see C. Burchard 1985. 43 P. S. Alexander 2006a: 84, 85–6. Mythical Elements 141 law, namely, to safeguard the original commandments. The use of it here suggests that it already had this meaning in the time of the Song. Thus ‘fenced round with lilies’, the lily symbolizing Israel as we saw in the last chapter, suggests that the heap of wheat, as well as indicating bread, represents the prescriptions of the law safeguarded by those worthy to represent Israel. Or, to give another interpretation from the commentary by Ellen Davis:

The fertile zone of the woman’s body produces wine and wheat, which were central elements of Temple sacrifice. Is it more than coincidence that her fields are edged with lilies which, as we have seen, figure so prominently in the ornamentation of the Temple, the earthly Garden of God? (293) The next verse (7: 4), according to the interpretation put forward in the chapter on ‘Breast Imagery’, provides the milk which may have been an element in the proceedings:

Your two breasts are like two young fawns, twins of a gazelle. This line repeats an identical line at 4: 5 which continues, ‘feeding among the lilies’, while here it follows ‘fenced around with lilies’.

4.8. A tower of ivory; Heshbon; and a tower of Lebanon

Similarly, at 4: 5, the line followed ‘your neck is like a tower of David’, and is here, 7: 5a, followed by

Your neck is like the tower of David built in courses; one thousand are the shields hung upon it, all bucklers of mighty men. A ‘tower of David’ is not attested in the biblical literature, but there are possible links with two other passages, one biblical and one apocryphal. The ﬁrst is addressed to Tyre at Ezek. 27: 10–11:

Persia and Lud and Put were in your army as your men of war; shield and helmet they hung in you; they gave you splendour. The sons of Arvad and Helech were upon your walls round about, ˙ and men of Gamad were in your towers; they hung their shields upon your walls round about; they made perfect your beauty. 142 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God The other passage is from 1 Macc. 4: 57 in the description of the rededica- tion of the Temple: ‘They decorated the front of the Temple with golden crowns and small shields.’44 As we shall see when we come to the second mention of a tower in the present passage, there was a tradition of calling the Temple a ‘tower’, and this might explain the ‘towers’ in the Song. your eyes are pools in Heshbon, ˙ by the gate of a daughter of multitudes. The word for ‘pools’ in plural occurs otherwise only at Eccles. 2: 6: ‘I [Solomon] made for myself pools of water from which to irrigate the forest of trees which were springing up.’ In her study, ‘La Version LXX de Cantique des Cantiques et le groupe Kaige-Theodotion’, Marguerite Harl discusses the word limné used by the LXX to translate the Hebrew word be˘re¯kâ in both places. Attested since Homer, she says, limné means a sheet of water which renews the earth, fed by a source or by the waters infiltrating the land following the rise of a river. In the course of a detailed discussion she asks whether perhaps the sense of the word is properly Egyptian.45 Heshbon appears both as an Amorite city which the Israelites conquered (Num. 21: 25ff.), and, in Isaiah and Jeremiah, as belonging to Moab. Whether the appearance of Heshbon in this passage is intended to evoke its history, Amorite or Moabite, is difficult to discern, but the noun, meaning ‘reckoning, account’, which in the Bible occurs only in Ecclesiastes and Sirach,46 seems, in the three occurrences in Ecclesiastes, more promising in the context of the wisdom language of the Song than the proper name: ‘I turned my heart to know and to search out and to seek wisdom and an account for things [hesˇbôn]’ (Eccles. 7: 25), ‘See this that I have found, says the preacher, adding ˙ one to another to discover a reckoning’ (7: 27), ‘for there is no doing or reckoning or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol’ (9: 10).47 But the geographical location of Heshbon must also be part of the poet’s meaning, and we note that it lies some miles east of Jerusalem on the same degree of latitude. The second line of the verse (7: 5b) means something like ‘by a gate of a daughter of multitudes’, which is how the LXX and the Vulgate translate it. The phrase bat-rabbîm, ‘daughter of multitudes’, was taken by Luther as a

44 1 Maccabees survives only in Greek, though it was originally written in Hebrew, probably around 100 BCE. Whether the Song was written after 100 remains a question, but this apparent link to 1 Maccabees is, in my view, very persuasive. The subject of the book would, it seems to me, have resonated profoundly with the poet. 45 Marguerite Harl 1995: 112–13. 46 At Sir. 27: 5 and 42: 3, neither of them of much help with the present passage. 47 Aquila interprets the word according to its meaning as the verb ‘to calculate’. See Harl cited above, 110. Similarly the Targum. See Alexander 179 n. 21. Mythical Elements 143 proper name, and followed by the AV, RSV, NRSV and some other English translations, although no such place is otherwise attested. It is often diﬃcult to know what sˇa ar, ‘gate’, is intended to convey, and it is particularly obscure in this verse. Jerusalem itself is reported to have had eighteen gates, but this gate could, it seems to me, be that of the Temple through which the multitudes entered.48 Or perhaps a link with Jer. 49: 3 should be seen: ‘Howl O Heshbon . . . cry, daughters of Rabbah.’ Athalya Brenner makes a persuasive case for rabbîm meaning Rabbah in the Song, noting that ‘a literary convention of pairing oﬀ Heshbon and Rabbah became more and more prevalent’.49

Your nose is like the tower of Lebanon, looking towards Damascus. In the ‘Animal Apocalypse’ of 1 Enoch the tower is a symbol of the Temple: And that house [Jerusalem] became great and broad, and it was built for the sheep. A tower lofty and great was built on the house for the Lord of the sheep, and that house was low, but the tower was elevated and lofty, and the Lord of the sheep stood on that tower and they oﬀered a full table before him. (89: 50)50

But the sheep err and go their own way, and are devoured by lions and tigers, accompanied by wild boars, ‘and they burnt that tower, and demol- ished that house. And’, the seer goes on, ‘I became exceedingly sorrowful over that tower’ (89: 66–7, p. 256). But the sheep rebuild the tower, and it was ‘named the high tower’, but, in the view of 1 Enoch, though not in the view of the Song, which, I believe, shows itself a defender of the Second Temple, the bread placed on a table before the tower ‘was polluted and not pure’ (89: 73, p. 256). In a study of the Jewish Temple at Leontopolis, built sometime in the second century BCE, C. T. R. Hayward states that tower-temple symbolism was evidently widespread, and in addition to 1 Enoch he cites, among later references, the Targum to the ‘Song of the Vineyard’ at Isa. 5: 2 in which God is made to say of the tower built by the beloved: ‘I built my Sanctuary among them.’51 The ‘nose’, ‘watching, spying’, towards Damascus, is consonant with the feet to head, south to north direction of the passage, while suggesting at the same time the ancient view that war comes from the north.52 Paul Haupt

48 See Schürer 1979: 286–7, for the gates of the Temple, and especially its main gate. 49 Athalya Brenner 1992: 113–15. 50 R. H. Charles 1913: 254–5. 51 C. T. R. Hayward 1982: 433 and 432. 52 See BDB under IWPC (860): ‘of quarter whence invaders were to come . . .’; and Cassirer: ‘war and warriors belong to the north, the hunt and the hunter to the west, medicine and agriculture to the south, magic and religion to the east’, 1953: 86f. 144 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God speculates that the nose here ‘does not refer to a watch-tower, but to a conspicuous point on the eastern side of Mount Lebanon, which must have projected from the face of the mountain-range like a buttress-tower’, and he adds: ‘In Arabic a promontory is called a nose of a mountain, just as we speak of the nose of a ship, etc.’53 ‘Your [fem.] nose’, appe¯k, occurs at Ezek. 16: 12 and 23: 25, in verses applied to Jerusalem, and not otherwise.

4.9. Weaving in scarlet and purple

Your head upon you is like Carmel. The Carmel here at 7: 6 is generally assumed to be the Mount Carmel on the Mediterranean, north-west of Jerusalem, and not the city which lies some miles to its south. It is the combination at Cant. 7: 6 of ro¯ sˇ, ‘head, top, chief’ with Carmel, which at once suggests the mountain, ro¯ sˇ frequently occurring in relation to mountains, three times in relation to Mount Carmel. The poet may also wish to suggest some of the occurrences of the ordinary noun, an identical form for which BDB gives ‘plantation, garden-land, fruit, garden- growth’, translated several times ‘fruitful field’ by AV, RSV, and NRSV. The basis of the word is kerem, ‘vineyard’, a key word in the Song, as we have seen, occurring nine times. But another way of reading it here is to take the word as carmil, ‘crimson, carmine, i.e. crimson stuff, cloth’, a reading to which BDB (502 under LYMRK) draws attention. And, indeed, ‘crimson stuff’ goes remarkably well with the next line of the verse: Your head upon you is like crimson stuff, and the hair of your head like purple cloth; Carmil occurs three times only, all in the building of the Temple at 2 Chron. 2: 6, 13 and 3: 14, always with arga¯ma¯n, ‘purple, red-purple, i.e. purple thread and cloth’ (BDB 71), most notably at 3: 14 where [Solomon] ‘made the veil of blue and purple and crimson fabrics’. The word for ‘hair’ here, a construct form from dallâ, occurs otherwise only at Isa. 38: 12 where BDB (195) gives ‘thrum (threads of warp hanging in loom)’, and RSV/NRSV translate: ‘he cuts me off from the loom’––which does not prevent them from giving ‘your flowing locks’ for the same word here in the Song. It means primarily ‘to hang down’ and, taken with arga¯ma¯n and carmel/carmil, points to the veil of the Temple. The sense of word-play in

53 Paul Haupt 1902: 28. Mythical Elements 145 these final verses of the passage is increased by noticing that the first three letters of arga¯ma¯n, rg, give a rare word for ‘loom’, while arga¯ma¯n itself occurs most frequently in connection with the curtains for the tabernacle, about thirty times out of a possible thirty-nine occurrences. In the Song it also occurs at 3: 10 in connection with the palanquin Solomon made for himself, another passage in which temple imagery is implicit. Purple dye was extracted from the shells of mussels found only on the Phoenician coastline, and Ellen Davis tells us it took eight thousand of these shells to produce one gram of dye (292).54 Thus its use was normally confined to royalty, but in the Bible it is principally associated with the cult. Finally, we come to the last line of 7: 6, usually translated as follows, or similarly: a king is held captive in the tresses. The word melek, ‘king’, is pointed thus by the Masoretes, but the assumption that the radicals, mlk, mean ‘king’ is already found in both the LXX and the Vulgate. The form occurs five times in the Song, 1: 4, 12; 3: 9, 11; and here, 7: 5, all with the definite article except this last, and it is the absence of the article which arouses suspicion. If it were present, whatever ‘the king is held captive in the tresses’ might mean, ‘king’ would have to be accepted as being the same king who has figured four times previously. But pondering the nouns plus singular feminine suffixes suggests a different reading. Beginning at 7: 2, nine nouns follow, plus suffix meaning ‘your’: ‘your footsteps’, ‘your thighs’, ‘your navel’, ‘your belly’, ‘your two breasts’, ‘your neck’, ‘your eyes’, ‘your nose’, ‘your head’ (twice), leaving the last line as the odd one out if translated ‘king’, which directs attention to the possibility that mlk in this last line should be read as a noun, ml, plus the singular suffix, k, namely ‘your’ and whatever ml might mean. An article by Eliezer Ben Yehuda, ‘Three Notes in Hebrew Lexicography’, takes precisely this view on Cant. 7: 6, and is highly persuasive for the most part. Where he is less so, Jastrow’s dictionary comes to the rescue with a verb, mûl, meaning ‘to make an edge, to hem or to fringe’ (742), and a related noun, ma¯la¯l (792), meaning ‘border’, ‘hem’, and from these translations I suggest ‘your fringe’ as applying to both hair and cloth. Then follows a passive form of the verb ‘to bind’, while the last word of the passage presents another problem for which I turn again to Ben Yehuda who offers a cognate in Arabic, and with its help he is able to conclude that ‘in the ancient Semitic language the word rht originally has the general ˙

54 The style of this commentary precludes notes, so the source for this figure is not given. 146 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God sense of a strip of leather or cloth, of a width according to its use in each locality.’55 The last three lines of our passage, then, bearing in mind all the points which contribute to the idea that woven cloth, and therefore most probably the curtain of the Temple is being depicted, may be translated: Your head upon you is like crimson stuff, and the hair of your head like purple cloth; your fringe is bound with bands. That a curtain is being depicted here is suggested by the links with Exodus 26: And you shall make a veil of blue and purple and scarlet stuff and fine twined linen . . . And you shall hang the veil from the clasps, and bring the ark of the testimony in thither within the veil; and the veil shall separate for you the holy place from the most holy. (31, 33; cf. Exod. 36: 35.) The significance of the curtain is already sufficiently shown in this passage from Exodus, but it was the subject of extensive speculation in later mystical texts,56 while in the Synoptic Gospels it is ‘torn in two, from top to bottom’ at the death of Jesus (Matt. 27: 51; Mark 15: 38; Luke 23: 44). To summarize, the passage Cant. 7: 1–6 employs, therefore, ten nouns with second person feminine suffix, a use of direct address to a female object which, in the prophetic literature, is applied to cities, usually Jerusalem. Thus, in this passage, ‘your navel’, ‘your breasts’, ‘your neck’, ‘your nose’, and ‘your head’, with feminine suffix, only occur otherwise in address to Jerusalem. Of the fifteen occurrences of ‘your eyes’, plus feminine suffix, five occur in the Song, and six occur in explicit address to Jerusalem. ‘Your footsteps’, and ‘your belly’ are exceptions, the former not otherwise occurring, and the latter occurring only in implicit address to Jerusalem if, as Mary Douglas suggests, the woman suspected of adultery at Numbers 5 can be understood as representing Jerusalem or Israel. Of the occurrences of address to Jerusalem, Isa. 49: 18; 52: 2; and 60: 4 provide a promise of eschatological fulfilment similar to that of the Song with their ‘Lift up your eyes round about and see’ in the first and third of these references, and in the exhortation at 52: 2: ‘put on your beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city [and] loose yourself from the bands of your neck, O captive daughter of Zion’. Otherwise the cross-references are to Jeremiah and

55 Eliezer Ben Yehuda 1917: 326. The explanation given here of ‘your fringe is bound with bands’ has been considerably abbreviated. The full account is given in the thesis, ‘The Song of Songs and the Eros of God’ 2002: 152–4. 56 See Morray-Jones 2002: 153–72, and Alexander 2006a: 36. Mythical Elements 147 Ezekiel, and are charged with prophetic condemnation and warnings of punishment, all of which our author is concerned to reverse.

4.10. ‘Mountains of cutting’

Until the day breathes, and the shadows depart, turn, my beloved, and be like a gazelle or a young hart upon the mountains of cutting. This verse, Cant. 2: 17, occurs with differences, four times. The first is at Cant. 2: 8–9: ‘The voice of my beloved! Behold he comes leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills. My beloved is like a gazelle or a young hart; he stands behind our wall, gazing through the windows, peeping through the lattice.’ The second occurrence is at 2: 17, set out above. The third is at 4: 6 where the beloved himself speaks: ‘Until the day breathes and the shadows depart, I will get me to the mountain of myrrh and to the hill of frankincense’; while the fourth occurrence of these verses at 8: 14 is the final one of the Song and is again spoken by the female: ‘Flee, my beloved, and be like a gazelle or a young hart upon the mountains of spices.’ The significance of the animals will be looked at when we come to this last verse (Commentary ad loc.), but here we should consider the significance of ‘mountains’ generally before focusing on the ‘mountains of cutting’. The association of mountains and temples in ancient myths is found in the Hebrew Bible in the identification of Mount Zion with the Temple, as for instance at Isa. 2: 2: ‘And it shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the head of the mountains . . .’. I believe that the references to mountains in the Song belong in this realm of ideas illustrated, for example, by Robert Murray in his book, The Cosmic Covenant, where, on the question ‘What is the holy mountain?’ he answers that at the level of ritual the phrase regularly refers to the Temple, while at the level of myth it refers to the divine garden (see Chapter 5), which was part of the supernatural world symbolized by ancient near eastern temples.57 From this kind of perspective, the four references to mountains in these verses suggest that the Temple is to be understood, while spices again point to the Temple, as we are continually seeing. On the verse which is the subject of this section, there is wide disagreement about whether ‘Until the day breathes’, or ‘blows’, refers to the beginning of the day or to its end, but since shadows depart in the morning and gather in the evening it is probable that daybreak is envisaged.

57 Robert Murray 1992: 103, 104. 148 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God The word translated ‘piece’, beter, only occurs at Gen. 15: 10 and Jer. 34: 18–19, apart from here in the Song. For the verb BDB (144) gives ‘to cut in two’, and for the noun, ‘part, piece . . . always of animals cut in two in making covenants’. In the Jeremiah passage there is a ritual of cutting a calf and passing between its parts, a covenant similar to that in Genesis 15, but the people break it and in consequence incur a terrible punishment. That the poet is as aware of this passage as of the Genesis one cannot be doubted in view of the many links to Jeremiah we find in the Song, but he does not draw attention to it since his concern is only with Israel in its redeemed, ideal state. The phrase in the Song, translated here ‘mountains of cutting’, is difficult. It is translated by the LXX ‘mountains of hollows’, while the Vulgate, followed by the AV, took beter as a proper name, ‘mountains of Bether’. BDB (144) gives ‘mountains of cutting’ and turns the phrase into ‘cleft mountains’, in accordance with the rule for forming adjectives, but in view of the word-play between cutting the pieces and cutting a covenant in the Genesis passage, I have adopted the translation ‘mountains of cutting’ for the phrase in the Song. BHS directs us to read besa¯mîm, ‘spices’, for beter because it is the word used in the similar verse at Cant. 8: 14. But the meaning in the Song of this rare word should be explored. In Genesis 15, one of the most mysterious chapters in the Hebrew Bible, God instructs Abram to take a heifer, a she-goat, and a ram, all three years old, a turtledove and a young pigeon. ‘And he took all these, and cut them in the midst and laid each piece against the other. But the birds he did not cut.’ Then a deep sleep falls on Abram, ‘a horror of great darkness’, as the AV translates the rare word tardêmâ, and the chapter ends with God making a covenant with Abram. A covenant in Hebrew is ‘cut’ not ‘made’, and the word berit, ‘covenant’, consists of the same radicals (brt), as beter (btr), which suggests that the poet takes the word beter from Genesis 15 in order to recall the covenant made in it whereby God declares to Abraham that he has given the land to his seed for ever ‘from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates’. But while there cannot be any doubt about the word beter indicating a strong link to Genesis 15, the addition of ‘mountains’ appears to weaken it. Why does the poet take the word which signifies Abraham’s cutting of the animals in a covenant with God, and add mountains to the picture? In a later text, the Apocalypse of Abraham, a paraphrase of Genesis 15, Abraham is instructed by a voice to get the animals detailed at Gen. 15: 9, and to make ‘me’ a pure sacrifice. The voice continues:

I will announce to you guarded things and you will see great things which you have not seen, because you desired to search for me, and I called you my beloved. But for Mythical Elements 149 forty days abstain from every kind of food cooked by fire, and from drinking of wine and from anointing (yourself) with oil. And then you shall set out for me the sacrifice which I have commanded you, in the place which I will show you on a high mountain.58 This apocalypse exists only in an old Slavonic translation from the Greek, of which nothing remains, but which was itself, in all probability, a translation from the Hebrew.59 David Halperin writes that we have no way of testing how faithfully even the earliest of the Slavonic versions represents the ancient Jewish apocalypse on which it is based, or to what extent it has suffered from the improvements of its Christian translators and transmitters but, he goes on, it is ‘so important for any study of the Merkabah that, having recorded this scruple, we must now proceed to ignore it, and treat the apocalypse as it stands as a product of early Judaism’.60 How early is, of course, a question, but the reference to the destruction of the Temple in chapter 27 indicates that its final form cannot be dated earlier than that event in 70 CE. But those elements in it which are closest to being, in Halperin’s words, ‘an apocalyptic midrash on the fifteenth chapter of Genesis’,61 possibly go back to an earlier source from which the Song may also have taken its ‘mountains of cutting’. The passage quoted above suggests, in any case, a similar tradition to that of the Song: ‘because you desired to search for me, and I have called you my beloved’.62 In the biblical story of Abraham there is no theme of desiring to search, whereas this is a prominent element in the Song. And ‘I have called you my beloved’ is also reminiscent of the Song, and striking in its juxtaposition with ‘you desired to search for me’. The ‘mountain’ verse at 4: 6, cited at the beginning of this section, confirms the identification of mountains in the Song with the Temple: ‘Until the day breathes, and the shadows disappear, I will get me to the mountain of myrrh and to the hill of frankincense.’ The mountain of myrrh, with the hill of frankincense in parallel, weaves together a play on har ha-mor––‘the mountain of myrrh’––and har ha-moriah, Mount Moriah, where ‘Solomon began to build the house of the Lord at Jerusalem’ (2 Chron. 3: 1), plus the motif of incense which, in the Bible, can only point to the Temple.

58 R. Rubinkiewicz 1983: 693. 59 See the section ‘Original Language’ in the Introduction by Rubinkiewicz, 682. 60 David Halperin 1988: 103. 61 Ibid. 104. Genesis 22, the sacriﬁce of Isaac, is hardly less present to the reader. 62 ‘My beloved’ in this Apocalypse was probably originally YBHA, cf. Isa. 41: 8. 150 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

4.11. ‘Come from Lebanon’

A rather different ‘mountain’ verse at 4: 8 appears also, on close investigation, to have the Temple for its theme: Come from Lebanon, O bride, come, journey from Lebanon; travel from the top of Amana, from the top of Senir and Hermon; from the dens of lions, from the mountains of leopards. This verse presents several difficulties to the translator. The first word might be the preposition ‘with’, plus first singular suffix, ‘with me’, or a poetical verb atâ, ‘come’, as the LXX, Vulgate, and Syriac take it to be and which, contra the Masoretic pointing, is adopted here. The AV, followed by RSV/NRSV, have taken it to mean both: ‘Come with me’, which is subtly misleading. The next problem is whether ta¯sˇûr i comes from the verb ‘to travel, journey’ or from an identical form meaning ‘behold, regard’. This verb, sˇûr, occurs at Hosea 13: 7: ‘I will be like a lion to them, and like a leopard by the way I will watch’, which suggests some form of ‘to see’ for this verse, especially as it also contains lions and leopards. But ‘travel’ provides a parallel to ‘journey’, an idea which must, I am persuaded, be implied by the poet’s choice of language in these lines. Thus, as every translator laments, choices have to be made which exclude the possibility of conveying the different meanings of the word in the original. A third problem is how to understand ‘Amana’. In context, ‘from the top of Amana’ suggests a mountain but. according to BDB, among others on this subject, Amana is a river flowing down from the Anti-Lebanon into the plain of Damascus, as at 2 Kgs. 5: 12 (where aba¯ma¯ is written in the text but corrected by the Masoretes in the margin to ama¯na¯). This word, ama¯na¯, appears to be related to the different forms of the root from which English derives ‘amen’, and is translated ‘from the beginning of belief’ by the LXX. Senir is the Amorite name of Hermon, according to Deut. 3: 9, and is spelt thus in the Bible also at Ezek. 27: 5 and 1 Chron. 5: 23, where it occurs again with Hermon. Thus the ‘and’ which appears between these two names in both the Song and 1 Chron. 5: 23, presents another difficulty since one would expect them to be cited in parallel if they both refer to the same mountain. Mount Hermon is called ‘the dwelling-place of gods’ in The Epic of Gilgamesh,63 an indication of a long tradition and one which travelled far. In

63 Stephanie Dalley 1998: 71 and 74. Mythical Elements 151 an article,‘El’s Abode: Mythological Traditions Related to Mount Hermon and to the Mountains of Armenia’, Edward Lipin´ ski writes that Hermon was a sacred mountain, ‘as shown by the name itself of hermon which means ˙ something like “taboo” or “sacred precincts”, just as the Arabic haram’.64 ˙ Lipin´ ski goes on to consider the place of Mount Hermon in the pseudepigrapha and states, in relation to the versions of the Testament of Levi, that Hermon ‘is the cosmic mountain which joins the earth with the lowest heaven’. He continues: The same conception lies behind the episode of the sons of God in the Book of Enoch. The celestial beings gather on the summit of Mount Hermon because this is the mountain of the gods, the Canaanite Olympus. The tradition echoed in the Old Babylonian version of the Gilgamesh epos was thus alive still in the second and first centuries BC . . .65 All this, it seems, is the mythical background of 4: 8, but what the poet intends by the verse is suggested by the reflection that if the interpretation of the ‘bride’ as the Temple is correct (and this is the first time in the Song the female is called ‘bride’) then what is being exhorted to journey from Lebanon is the ‘bride’ at an earlier stage, namely as the timber with which the Temple was built, its source being more prosaically described in 1 Kings: ‘Hiram sent word to Solomon, “I have heard the message you have sent to me; I will do all that you desire concerning timber of cedar and timber of cypress. My servants will bring it down from Lebanon to the sea, and I will convey it by sea on floats to the place which you will notify me”’ (5: 22–3 Heb. ET 8–9). The poet transposes this account into another key: ‘Come from Lebanon, O bride, come journey from Lebanon . . .’

4.12. ‘Love is strong as death’

Finally, under the heading ‘mythical elements’ (though there are many more), there is a passage at Cant. 8: 6–7 which is rightly seen, in regard to the Song as a whole, to be of its essence. That the Song is about love from beginning to end receives perfect expression in these verses, and whereas this study is concerned to recover the vertical dimension of love which the evidence, I believe, shows the material intends, these verses could as well be applied to the horizontal, since love is their subject. Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm;

64 1971: 17. 65 Ibid. 34–5. 152 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

for love is strong as death, ardour fierce as Sheol; its arrows are arrows of fire, a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. Joüon regards the Masoretic text as mistaken in ascribing this passage to the female. It is the bride, he thinks, who has been unfaithful (Cant. 5: 3), and it is, therefore, to her that the request to be faithful is addressed. Thus the verse, he says, must be read as addressed to the female (with the Peshitta) and not to the male as given by the Masoretes (315). Since neither Greek nor Latin reveal gender in direct address, the Syriac is significant here in giving a reading opposite to that which the Masoretic pointing would later provide. Early Christian writers also ascribed the passage to the male, and the three pages in Littledale which conflate quotations from Clement of Alexandria, Philo of Carpasia, Theodoret, Ambrose, Gregory the Great, and Bede, among the most well known, reveal an interesting theological difference between the two readings (355–7). The phrase ‘strong as death’ is taken by Pope to be an allusion to the god Mot, which finds support in Day, who goes on to adduce Cant. 8: 6, ‘Its arrows [re˘sˇa¯peha¯ from resˇe p] are arrows of fire’, as evidence that ‘the original mythological background was not out of sight’.66 Resheph was an underworld god whose arrows brought plague and pestilence, and worship of whom was, Day tells us, remarkably widespread in the ancient world. If, then, the poet intends Resheph to be understood, he is reversing the effect of the god’s arrows; they are no longer carriers of plague and pestilence but of the most healing of all wounds: love. Against ‘arrows’ is an article by N. J. Tromp, to which Day himself points, in which Tromp persuasively argues that re˘sˇa¯peha¯ risˇpê êsˇ should be translated ‘its flashes are flashes of fire’.67 Both translations have much to commend them, and provide yet another example of the poet’s predilection for words and phrases which can be understood in two senses. The last word of Cant. 8: 6, ‘a most vehement flame’, translated thus by AV and RSV, but ‘a raging flame’ by NRSV, consists of sˇalhevet,‘flame’, with the addition of ya¯h, which looks like a contraction of the divine name and is translated by BDB under sˇalhevet (529) as ‘YHWH-flame = powerful flame’, with ya¯h seen as an enclitic participle. But at Ya¯h (219) BDB gives ‘flame of fire from Yah’, which sufficiently indicates the difference of opinion on how

66 John Day 2000: 188. 67 N. J. Tromp 1979: 89. Mythical Elements 153 to understand sˇalhevetyâh. Without the addition of yâh, sˇalhevet occurs twice elsewhere, once at Job 15: 30, and once at Ezek. 21: 3–4 (ET 20: 47), which latter may be the passage the poet intends to reverse: Behold, I will kindle a fire in you, and it shall devour every green tree in you, and every dry tree. The flaming flame (lahevet sˇalhevet) shall not be quenched, and all faces from the south to the north shall be burned in it. And all flesh shall see that I the Lord have kindled it; it shall not be quenched. Here, in Ezekiel, it is the wrath of God, symbolized by the ‘flaming flame’, which shall not be quenched; in the Song it is the love of God, suggested by the addition Yâh to sˇelhevet, which cannot be quenched. The arguments against the addition representing the divine name are compelling though not conclusive,68 as also those in favour of the meaning ‘God’69 ––yet another example of the way the poet provides clues but never proofs. The next line of our passage, ‘Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it’, is also thought by Day to have a mythical background, ‘for elsewhere in the Old Testament it is YHWH who overcomes the waters, and in Ugaritic mythology it is Baal’ (205). Thus, although the Song is a late book it is not difficult to account for the presence of myth since, Day says, ‘Canaanite imagery is found in the Old Testament even in very late passages (such as Isa. 27:1)’ (115). That the poet employs vocabulary which links with the earlier mythological background of his world confirms for this reader that myth is an essential element in the communication of the highest truths, occurring here in the context of the most powerful passage on love in the Song. But there are other links, one in particular: But now, thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, and he who formed you, O Israel. Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through waters I will be with you; and through rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and flame shall not consume you. ... Because you are precious in my eyes, honoured, and I love you. (Isaiah 43: 1–2, 4a)

68 Cf. Ariel and Chana Bloch (1995: 213), who set forth the arguments against with good biblical support. 69 For example Tromp, in the article just cited, concludes a strong paragraph: ‘Whatever interpretation of this construct chain is given, it is to be stressed that in any case some relation with YHWH is intended’ (93). 154 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

The author of the Song has used similar imagery and vocabulary and is, I believe, depicting the same protagonists, but from within a diﬀerent frame of reference. If Isaiah presents the relationship between God and Israel in terms of betrayal, exile, and restoration, which invites a historical interpretation, the author of the Song presents the relationship in the trans-historical terms of ‘wisdom’, though at a level far beyond the wisdom literature as commonly deﬁned and understood. 5

The Garden Temple

The word gan, ‘garden’, occurs in the Hebrew Bible forty times, of which fourteen are in Genesis, where it occurs in varying ways as ‘a garden in Eden’ (2: 8), or ‘the garden of Eden’ (2: 15), and otherwise simply as ‘the garden’, except once when it is ‘the garden of the Lord’ (13: 10). In Ezekiel it occurs four times as ‘the garden of God’ and once as ‘the garden of Eden’, which it is also at Isaiah 51: 3 and Joel 2: 3. Otherwise we find only odd references to a garden in Deuteronomy, 1 and 2 Kings, Jeremiah, Lamentations, and Nehemiah, except in the Song, where it is a key word, occurring nine times. The first task, then, is to examine in what sense the poet is using ‘garden’ in this book. There are four passages in which the word ‘garden’ is found: first, 4: 12–5: 1, where it occurs five times; second, 6: 1–3, where it occurs twice; third, 6: 11, where it occurs once in a feminine form; and once at 8: 13, the ninth occurrence. The first passage is the longest, and a particularly important one for the Song, containing another word for ‘garden’, pardes, which became attached to a famous story of Jewish mysticism, ‘The Four Who Entered Pardes’. Although this story, in its original form, is most probably pre-Rabbinic,1 with names added later, notably that of Rabbi Akiva, it came to enshrine a polemic against practices which were probably associated with the Song, and which may have led whole groups of ascetics to defect to Christianity.2 This story is, therefore, an important witness, in my view, to the earliest understanding of the Song, and I have included a section on it.

5.1. The garden of Eden and sanctuary symbolism

The theme of the connections between garden of Eden symbolism and sanctuary symbolism has received considerable attention in the last few decades, but I will cite only two––quite diﬀerent––scholars who seem to me to provide

1 See C. R. A. Morray-Jones: ‘the story is certainly rooted in an apocalyptic and visionary- mystical tradition that is older than the first century C. E.’ 1993: 265. 2 But not only to Christianity. See note 56 to this chapter. 156 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God support for the application of such connections to the garden passages in the Song. The first is Gordon Wenham in his commentary, Genesis 1–15, in which the chapter ‘The Garden of Eden’ is interspersed with pointers to the Tabernacle and the Temple.3 This theme is more fully articulated in his earlier paper ‘Sanctuary Symbolism in the Garden of Eden Story’, in which he writes that the garden of Eden is viewed by its author as an archetypal sanctuary, and he follows this point with much interesting detail. He also shows that the garden of Eden is apparently entered from the east like later sanctuaries, to which he adds that another indication that the garden is viewed as a sanctuary is that its entrance is guarded by cherubim (ke˘rûbîm), the traditional guardians of holy places in the ancient Near East. He goes on: ‘In Solomon’s temple two ke˘rûbîm guarded the inner sanctuary [the de˘bîr] (1 Kings 6: 23–28). Two others on top of the ark formed the throne of God in the inner sanctuary (Ex. 25: 18–22), and pictures of ke˘rûbîm decorated the curtains of the tabernacle and walls of the temple (Ex. 26: 31; 1 Kings 6: 29).’4 Wenham does not explore the ancient Jewish literature which identified the garden of Eden and the Temple, but the connections he draws out from the biblical material are illuminating indeed. The second writer, Margaret Barker, utilizes all the ancient sources available in her book on the Temple, The Gate of Heaven: My main concern is with aspects of the temple mythology which are less well known and I shall reconstruct them largely from extra-biblical texts, also less well known, to show the extent to which a wide range of themes and imagery had their common root in the temple. First, there will be the evidence for the temple as a place of creation and renewal; these themes centre upon the garden of Eden, which the temple was built to represent. Second there will be evidence for the temple as a place of mediation and atonement, themes associated with the veil of the temple which symbolized the boundary between the material and the spiritual worlds. Third there will be evidence for the temple as the place where some could pass beyond the veil and experience the vision of God, seeing into the essence of all things past, present and future. These were the visions of the divine throne which are best known from the Revelation of St John. In each case I shall give one or two examples to show how these ideas passed first into early Christian thought and then into the imagery of many well-known hymns. One of the most extraordinary aspects of temple mythology is that, for all the remoteness of its origins, it proves to be very familiar.5

The imagery of one well-known Latin hymn, Urbs Jerusalem Beata, largely based on the opening verses of Revelation 21, does not contain any reference

3 Gordon Wenham 1987. See especially 61, 76, 84, and 86. 4 From the version reprinted in 1994: 401. 5 1991: 2. The Garden Temple 157 to the garden of Eden, but it weaves together Jerusalem, temple and nuptial imagery, and is a particularly good example of Barker’s point: Blessed city, heavenly Salem, Vision dear of peace and love, Who, of living stones upbuilded, Art the joy of heaven above, And, with angel cohorts circled, As a bride to earth dost move.

From celestial realms descending, Ready for the nuptial bed, To his presence, decked with jewels, By her Lord shall she be led; All her streets, and all her bulwarks, Of pure gold are fashioned.

Many a blow and biting sculpture Polished well those stones elect, In their places now compacted By the heavenly architect, Who therewith hath willed for ever That his palace should be decked.6 The tradition represented by this hymn has not been in fashion for several centuries, but for those who sing it every year on the anniversary of the dedication of a ‘temple’, a church or monastic chapel, it continues to provide a stepping-stone to the presence of nuptial imagery in the Bible. And for such the verse, ‘A garden barred is my sister, my bride, a spring barred,7 a fountain sealed’, is seen as a poetic portrayal of the relationship between God and the place where he is worshipped,8 while in some texts the garden of Eden clearly stands for the Temple.9 Solomon is thus understood to have built the Temple to be the garden of Eden and not merely to represent it. And so Margaret Barker, in her chapter on ‘The Garden’, writes:

6 The Monastic Diurnal, English translation of the Benedictine Breviarum Monasticum, vv. 1, 2, 4, p. 57*. The original hymn probably dates to the seventh or eighth century. 7 MT here gives LG, ‘heap, wave, billow, also spring’, which is widely thought to be a scribal error for IG, so LXX, Syriac, Vulgate + 50 mss. But it is unlikely that the poet would have used ‘garden’ twice, and BDB (164) provides ‘a spring barred, a fountain sealed’ which I have adopted. 8 I regret the loss in the translation of the familiar and more beautiful ‘a garden enclosed’, but LWEN is more correctly rendered ‘barred’. 9 See, for instance, C. Rabin 1984: III. 9–13. 158 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

Solomon built the temple as a garden sanctuary; the walls of the hêka¯l were decorated with golden palm trees and ﬂowers, set with precious stones; the bronze pillars were decorated with pomegranate patterns and the great lamp was a stylized almond tree. But the temple was also built in accordance with a heavenly plan to represent on earth the garden of God. (57) But there was no question of the Temple being set in a natural garden. We learn from the description of the Temple ascribed to Hecataeus by Josephus in Contra Apionem that there was ‘no trace of a plant, in the form of a sacred grove or the like’ (1.199).10 Philo tells us likewise that ‘there is no grove within the walled area [of the Temple] by order of the law for many reasons’, one of them being ‘because the means used to promote the verdure of trees, being the excrements of men and irrational animals, cannot be brought in there without profanity’ (Spec. Leg. 1.74).11 The ‘garden’ was wholly within the Temple. The Temple, therefore, was the garden, and thus the poet of the Song is hardly concealing his meaning by using the term gan for the Temple.

5.2. ‘A garden barred’

12 A garden barred is my sister, my bride; a spring barred, a fountain sealed. 13 Your shoots are a paradise of pomegranates, with excellent fruits; cypresses with nards; nard and saffron, 14 calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices; 15 a spring of gardens, a well of living water, and flowing streams from Lebanon. 16 Awake, north wind, and come, O south! blow upon my garden; let its spices flow forth! Let my beloved come into his garden and eat its choice fruits. 17 I have come into my garden, my sister, my bride, I have gathered my myrrh with my spice, I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey, I have drunk my wine with my milk. Eat, friends! Drink and be drunk, beloved ones! (4: 12–5 1)

10 H. St J. Thackeray 1926. 11 F. H. Colson 1937. The Garden Temple 159

This unit, enclosed by Masoretic paragraph breaks, is the central section of the book, the words ‘nard and saﬀron’ marking the halfway point. Here the male addresses the female as ‘my sister, my bride’, and characterizes her as ‘a garden barred, a spring barred, a fountain sealed’, which, if the female is understood literally, is plausibly interpreted as ‘metaph. of chaste woman’, as BDB (367) gives under ha¯tam, ‘seal, aﬃx seal, seal up’.12 But, if gan stands for ˙ the Temple, it is the Temple which the male is calling ‘my sister, my bride’. ‘The garden barred’ also suggests, in the light of Wenham’s exegesis, Gen. 3: 24, where cherubim are stationed to guard the entrance to the garden of Eden (although this link lacks support from the vocabulary); while the ‘sealed spring’ takes us to several sources, notably Gen. 2: 10, Ezek. 47: 1–12, Zech. 14: 8, as we shall see shortly (§5.5), and Joel 4: 18 (English numbering 3: 18): ‘In that day . . . a spring shall come forth from the house of the Lord.’ Thus, the ‘spring barred’ awaits the day of the Lord: ‘Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat its choice fruits’ (4: 16). And because the Song is precisely concerned with that day, the beloved responds: ‘I have come to my garden, my sister, my bride’ (5: 1).

5.3. ‘A paradise of pomegranates’

‘Your shoots are a paradise [parde¯s] of pomegranates.’ The Targum takes the ‘shoots’ to refer to the young scholars, and this could be one level of meaning. But I think there is more to be understood by this cryptic phrase, as I hope to show in the section ‘The Story of the Four’. The next word, ‘pomegranates’ brings us to the consideration of a key word in the Song which occurs six times, and in the Hebrew Bible otherwise twenty-two times. To follow the fortunes of the pomegranate according to biblical chronology is to follow the fortunes of Israel in regard both to the Temple and to the land. At Exod. 28: 33–5, in the instructions for the building of the Tabernacle, Moses is commanded to make pomegranates of blue and scarlet stuﬀ around the skirts of the ephod, with bells of gold between them. ‘And it shall be upon Aaron when he ministers, and its sound shall be heard when he goes into the holy place before the Lord, and when he comes out, lest he die.’ A repetition of these instructions occurs at Exod. 39: 24–6. At Num. 13: 23; 20: 5; and Deut. 8: 7–8 the focus is on the fertility of the land. At 1 Kgs. 7: 18–20, 42 (cf. 2 Chron. 3: 16 and 4: 13), we again ﬁnd pomegranates being made in their hundreds for the Temple; and 2 Kgs. 25: 13, 17 (= Jer. 52: 17–23) recounts the destruction of the Temple, and how the

12 This interpretation has a long history in Rabbinic exegesis. See Alexander 140–1 n. 45. 160 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

Chaldeans broke in pieces and carried to Babylon all the bronze, including the pomegranates. Joel 1: 8–12 describes the bitter mourning for both land and Temple: ‘Lament like a virgin girded with sackcloth for the husband of her youth. The cereal offering and the drink offering are cut off from the house of the Lord. The priests mourn, the ministers of the Lord . . . The vine withers, the fig tree languishes. Pomegranate, palm and apple, all the trees of the field are withered and gladness is dried up from the people.’ Haggai 1: 9, 18–19 promises the restoration of both the Temple and the fertility of the land, and lists the pomegranate with the vine, the fig tree, and the olive. There is an interdependence between the Temple and the land which is illustrated in these and in numerous other biblical texts,13 not least in the Song itself, as we saw in the last chapter on Cant. 7: 1–6. Here, at Cant. 4: 12–5: 1, the pomegranates are followed by a list of those spices we have earlier seen to supply the constituents of the holy anointing oil and of the holy incense of Exodus 30: 3–24, which further situates Cant. 4: 12–5: 1 in the Temple. If we derive a meaning for the pomegranates in the Song from their first appearance at Exod. 28: ‘And [they] shall be upon Aaron when he ministers and . . . goes into the holy place before the Lord’, the pomegranates would refer to those on the skirts of the High Priest, the only person permitted to enter the holy of holies. We might speculate that, in view of their attachment to the skirts of the High Priest, they could symbolize the testicles in which the seeds of propagation are secreted. Or, with their red juice and numerous seeds, pomegranates might equally well represent the womb. Whatever the case, the pomegranate is evidently symbolic since although it is ‘numbered among the “seven species” with which the land has been blessed, it was not, like the date or the fig, a staple article of diet’.14 Thus one meaning of the pomegranate could be that it symbolizes fertility at the level of spirit; that it represents the generative force of the heavenly world, hence the attachment of simulated pomegranates to the skirts of the High Priest, who alone enters the holy of holies, and then only on the Day of Atonement, that is, the day when the relationship between the people and God is renewed and, consequently, re-generated. Or, if we take the womb symbolism, the High Priest is the representative of the people, Israel, who in relation to God is often taken to be female and, on this interpretation, the seeds of the pomegranates await fructification by the Holy One on high.

13 See, for instance, an article by R. E. Clements (1963), which is concerned with the passages in the Psalms that speak about the dwelling or staying in the Temple. In the course of oﬀering an interpretation, Clements illuminates the relationship between Temple and land in a particularly interesting way. 14 Michael Zohary 1982: 62. The Garden Temple 161 These thoughts may not be far from the biblical meaning of pomegranates, but from Alexander we learn that the seeds of the pomegranate were interpreted by the Rabbis as ‘precepts’: ‘The phrase “as full of precepts as a pomegranate” became almost proverbial in Rabbinic literature.’ And a string of references follows.15 This usage may go back to the Song, and it does indeed supply an interpretation for all six references to pomegranates in the Song, though with some loss of symbolism in regard to their use in the Temple.

5.4. ‘All the chief spices’

The spices which follow, ‘cypresses with nards,16 nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices’ take us immediately to Exod. 30: 23 and 34, where the ‘chief spices’ are listed: myrrh, cinnamon, and calamus for the holy anointing oil, and stacte, onycha, galbanum, and frankincense for the holy perfume. But the list of spices in the Song also takes us to 1 Enoch and to his journeyings in paradise where he sees aromatic trees which exhale the fragrance of frankincense and myrrh, cinnamon, galbanum, and stacte. The text goes on: ‘And after these fragrant odours . . . I saw seven mountains full of choice nard and fragrant trees and cinnamon and pepper.’ Then Enoch comes to the Garden of Righteousness, the pardes kushta of the Aramaic fragments, where ‘beyond those trees’ he sees the tree of wisdom ‘whereof they eat and know great wisdom’.17 In his Notes to the Targum, Alexander points to these passages in 1 Enoch, and also to another source of equal interest: In the Books of Adam and Eve, 29: 3–6, the ingredients of the Temple incense (Exod. 30: 4–36) are said to have been brought by Adam from Paradise: ‘But your father [Adam] said [to the angels], Behold you cast me out [of Paradise]. I pray you, allow me to take fragrant herbs from Paradise, so that I may offer an offering to God after I have gone out of Paradise, that He hear me . . . And the angels let him enter [Paradise], and he took four kinds, crocus18 and nard and calamus and cinnamon.’19 Thus we are provided with two sources which give ‘nard’ as one of the

15 Alexander 133 n. 15. 16 The plural form of nard here is difficult to understand. 17 R. H. Charles 1913: 206–7. 18 The Targumist inconsistently identifies ‘nard’ as riqsha = ‘crocus’ here, having earlier (Cant. 1: 12) identified it as ‘spikenard’ and, for polemical reasons (see the Commentary ad loc.) attributed to it a bad stink––which would be inappropriate in this paradisal context. 19 Alexander 143 n. 53. 162 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God spices of paradise, a link which has implications both for the Song and for the two Gospels in which the word occurs.

5.5. ‘Flowing streams from Lebanon’

After the three lines detailing ‘all the chief spices’, we come to ‘a spring of gardens, a well of living water, and flowing streams from Lebanon’, which yet further confirms the Temple as the locale of Cant. 4: 12–5: 1. The description of the Temple in the Letter of Aristeas, whatever may be thought of it from a historical viewpoint, has a passage worth comparing with Cant. 4: 15: The whole of the floor is paved with stones and slopes down to the appointed places, that water may be conveyed to wash away the blood from the sacrifices, for many thousand beasts are sacrificed there on the feast days. And there is an inexhaustible supply of water, because an abundant spring gushes up from within the temple area. There are moreover wonderful and indescribable cisterns underground, as they pointed out to me, at a distance of five furlongs all round the site of the temple, and each of them has countless pipes so that the different streams converge together . . . There are many openings for water at the base of the altar which are invisible to all except to those who are engaged in the ministration, so that all the blood of the sacrifices which is collected in great quantities is washed away in the twinkling of an eye.20 A footnote on the ‘abundant natural spring’ states that the description of it is supported by Tacitus, who speaks of a ‘fons perennis aquae’ (Hist. 5. 12), but in modern times doubts have been raised about its existence.21 The striking difference between the picture presented in the Song of ‘a spring of gardens, a well of living water, and streams from Lebanon’ and the account in the Letter of Aristeas is the sacrificial system, involving thousands of animals and producing rivers of blood. But if the Song is depicting the heavenly Temple, in the eschatological paradise at the end of time, then no sacrifices will be needed for there will be no sinning and, consequently, no expiation for sins. Thus the Song shows the abundance of water, but without the blood it must wash away in the earthly Temple.22 A ‘spring of gardens’ does not otherwise occur, but ‘spring’ or ‘well’, maya¯n, is always metaphorical in biblical poetry. For instance: ‘With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation’ (Isa. 12: 3); ‘All my springs are in

20 Herbert T. Andrews 1913: 88–90, 103. 21 Ibid. 103 n. 89. 22 But, as Rachel Elior points out in a footnote: ‘It is not without interest that the sacred service in the Temple as described in the book of Chronicles involves only song and music without sacrifices’ 1997: 231 n. 33. The Garden Temple 163 you [Jerusalem]’ (Ps. 87: 7), and in the verse from Joel, as we saw above. But the most important text of all––although no word for ‘spring’ occurs––is Ezek. 47: 1ff: ‘Then he brought me back to the door of the Temple; and behold, water was flowing from below the threshold of the temple, toward the east, for the Temple faced east . . .’ The phrase ‘living water’, which follows a ‘spring of gardens’ at Cant. 4: 15, occurs a dozen times, half of them in Leviticus in connection with rites of purification, to which can be added Num. 19: 17, and five times in various contexts, of which Zech 14: 8 provides a close link with the present theme: ‘On that day living waters shall flow out from Jerusalem.’ In Greek the phrase is translated variously, occurring four times in the New Testament, three times in John (4: 10, 11; 7: 38), and once in Revelation (7: 17). But only at John 7: 38, in the context of the Temple, when Jesus cries: ‘The one believing in me, as scripture has said, out of his belly will flow living water’, is the phrase identical with the LXX of Cant. 4: 15 ( δατο ζντο ). This is one of many examples in John which suggests links between the Song and that Gospel. A study by Michael Fishbane,‘The Well of Living Water: A Biblical Motif and its Ancient Transformations’, is full of implications for the verse, ‘A spring of gardens, a well of living water, and flowing streams from Lebanon.’ First, in a passage following the citation of Ps. 36: 8–10, which includes the line ‘With you is the well of life’, he writes: In this encomium, the natural springs of earthly life are metaphorically transposed on two planes: the first is the concrete temple, which is portrayed here in terms of a stream of spiritual renewal; while the second is God himself, who is presented as the fountain of all life and light. The religious depths of this imagery take us to the heart of biblical spirituality and the religious experience of the temple.23

In the next section of this article, called ‘Transformations in the Scrolls of the Judean Desert’, Fishbane refers to hymns and prayers, possibly written by the founder of the Qumran Community himself, which thank God for having made the writer a ‘fount of flowing waters in a dry land’, ‘an overflowing fountain of waters in a parched soil’, and ‘an “eternal fountain” for the community of salvation’. Fishbane goes on to say that ‘the waters he releases to the fellowship are called “living waters”, and that in this context these phrases cannot merely mean “flowing” or “living water”, but rather the esoteric waters of wisdom and salvation’ (7). In the next section of this study, ‘In the Pseudepigrapha and in Ancient Christian and Gnostic Sources’, Fishbane compares the phrase ‘living water’

23 Michael Fishbane 1992a: 5. 164 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God with its use in the Gospel of John: ‘If anyone is thirsty let him come to me; whoever believes in me let him drink’. As we have seen above, the phrase in Greek is identical in the Song with John 7: 38. Thus the phrase in John reﬂects a tradition found in the Song, and at Qumran. Unfortunately, Fishbane does not explore the phrase in the Song, where it also occurs in the context of the Temple.

5.6. ‘Awake north wind, and come O south!’

The first clause of the next verse, 4: 16, seems to belong to the male and the second clause to the female, because ‘Blow upon my garden’ must be spoken by the male since the garden is his, and ‘my beloved’ can only be spoken by the female: Awake north wind, and come O south! Blow upon my garden; let its spices flow forth! Let my beloved come into his garden and eat its pleasant fruits. The north wind is here called za¯phôn (cf. Prov. 25: 23) and the south wind têma¯n. But these words are also place names. Zaphon is a sacred mountain and divine abode,24 while Teman is the place of a theophany, ‘God came from Teman . . . ’ (Hab. 3: 3). Without losing those connotations, Alexander’s explanation for the Targum’s interpretation may convey the primary meaning: Tg. takes ‘north’, ‘south’ and ‘spices’ as alluding respectively to the table of shewbread, the lampstand and the altar of incense in the Temple. The background lies in Exod. 40: 22–27, ‘And [Moses] put the table in the tent of meeting, upon the side of the tabernacle northward . . . And he lighted the lamps before the Lord . . . And he put the lampstand in the tent of meeting . . . on the side of the tabernacle southwards ... And he lighted the lamps before the Lord . . . And he put the golden altar in the tent of meeting . . . and he burnt thereon incense of sweet spices.’ Cf. 1 Kgs 7: 48–49. Given this context the ‘garden’ easily becomes a symbol of the Temple, and ‘eating the precious fruit’ becomes a reference to God ‘consuming’ the Temple offerings. When linked with vv 12 and 13, the equation garden = Temple suggests a connection, geographic or symbolic or both, between the Temple and Paradise.25 These ‘winds’, then, are exhorted to blow or breathe on the ‘garden’ so that its spices flow forth, the Temple be filled with the fragrance of the incense,

24 See John Day in the section ‘Zaphon as the Divine Dwelling Place’, 2000: 107–16. 25 Alexander 145 n. 61. The Garden Temple 165 and the beloved be drawn to enter to ‘eat its excellent fruit’. The phrase ‘excellent fruit’, occurs earlier in the same passage at 4: 13 and again at 7: 14 without ‘fruit’. Apart from these three occurrences in the Song, the word meged, meaning ‘excellence’, occurs four times in the blessing of Joseph, Deut. 33: 13–16, and not otherwise. There are a number of pointers to Deuter- onomy 33 in the Song, but I am unable to discern what this one might indicate. Another text we have already seen (1.§4) to be very close to Song language is Sir. 24: 19: Come to me, you who desire me, and eat your fill of my fruits. For the memory of me is sweeter than honey, and the possession of me sweeter than the honeycomb.26 This is Lady Wisdom speaking. The Book of Ben Sira exhales the masculine principle almost consistently throughout its 51 chapters except in the attribution of wisdom to the female principle. The Song, in this as in other respects, is not so simple. The role of Wisdom is applied to both the male and the female figures, and in this––as, again, in other respects––it foreshadows theological developments in Christianity. Thus the beloved, here in his role as Wisdom, declares that he has come into his garden, has gathered his myrrh with his spice, eaten his honeycomb with his honey, and drunk his wine with his milk, and he concludes by exhorting his friends and his followers to do likewise.27 BDB––rightly, I think––gives ‘beloved ones’ for this verse. The initiates of Proverbs are now the proficients of the Divine Canticle, and warnings concerning the dangers of intoxication or the sickening effect of too much honey no longer apply. Here, whether in the earthly or the heavenly Temple, the difficulties of the way are forgotten and the allure of false worship no longer threatens, and so Eat, friends! Drink and be drunk, beloved ones! 28

5.7. ‘My beloved has gone down to his garden’

The second passage in which the word ‘garden’ appears is at 6: 1–3, where it occurs twice, once in singular and once in plural:

26 Earlier, in Chapter 1, I used the RSV translation. Here I have used the NRSV. 27 See §1.8 for discussions on honey, wine, and milk, and §4.6 n. 43 for a reference to the liturgical use of these elements. 28 Cf. Isa. 65: 13: ‘My servants shall eat . . . drink . . . rejoice . . . sing for gladness of heart.’ 166 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

Where has your beloved gone O fairest among women? Where has your beloved turned away, that we may seek him with you? My beloved has gone down to his garden, to the terraces of spices, to feed in the gardens, and to gather lilies. Here, at 6: 1–3, we encounter one of the most important themes of the Song: the absence of the beloved and the desire to search for him. We will enquire into it in Chapter 7 in the context of the ‘watchman’ passages, where the verb ‘to search’ occurs four times at 3: 1–2 and once at 5: 6, making, with the above verse, six occurrences in all. The third passage in which the word ‘garden’ occurs is at 6: 11: I went down to the nut garden, to look at the green shoots of the valley; to see whether the vine had sprouted, and the pomegranates had blossomed. The fourth passage, in which ‘garden’ occurs once in plural, is at 8:13: O you who dwell in the gardens, the companions hearken to your voice; cause me to hear it. We will look more closely at these passages as they occur in the Commen- tary. Here I should like to focus on the verb ‘to go down’, ya¯rad, at 6: 2 and 11, from which I will deduce a possible link with the term yorde merkava, ‘descenders to the chariot’. But ﬁrst, about this term Scholem wrote: The paradoxical character of this term is all the more remarkable because the detailed description of the mystical process consistently employs the metaphor of ascent and not of descent. The mystics of this group call themselves Yorde Merkabah, i.e. ‘descenders to the Merkabah’ . . . and this name is given to them by others throughout the whole literature down to a late period.29 If, as my study of the Song leads me to speculate, the poet is using the verb ya¯rad, ‘to descend’, with intent, then in both verses it is the beloved, the messianic ﬁgure, the heavenly representative of Israel, who is descending, that is, preparing to worship. Thus, although himself the object of worship, as the heavenly Israel he also shares in, and indeed leads, the worship of Israel, as we will see in the section ‘The Shiur Koma’ in the next chapter. But before

29 G. Scholem 1961: 47. The Garden Temple 167 considering what ‘descending to the chariot’ might mean, we should first look at what has been understood of the nut garden at Cant. 6: 11. The word for ‘nut’, e˘gôz, occurs nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, but it was to have a long future in medieval Jewish mystical writings. It seems also to have had a long, though largely hidden, past.30 In a brief but dense paper called ‘Hokmath Ha-’Egoz, its Origin and Development’, Joseph Dan (1966) describes finding two manuscripts of a short, independent treatise called ‘The Secret of the Nut’ (Sod Ha-’Egoz), the first of which concludes: ‘This is the end of the exegesis of the verse “I went down to the garden of nuts,”’ and ends with an obscure reference which the second manuscript fortunately clarifies with: ‘All is explained in the Book of Heykaloth’, that is, Dan goes on, ‘the Book of the Holy Celestial Palaces, which is one of the basic texts of Hebrew mysticism in the Talmudic and Gaonic periods’. Dan is responding in this article to an earlier one by Alexander Altmann called ‘Eleazar of Worms’ Hokmath Ha-’Egoz’ (1960), and although Dan makes some important points against Altmann, the earlier article is also full of interest. Eleazar, a Kabbalist (c. 1160–1238), endeavoured, Altmann writes, ‘to give a new interpretation to the Merkabah [‘Chariot’], and to this end elaborated in a number of places the mystical significance of the nut as an image of the Merkabah’. Altmann goes on to say: ‘It is not unlikely that the detailed symbolism of the nut as found in the writings of Eleazar of Worms is a novelty introduced by himself.’ Against this Dan brings the evidence of earlier writings and, in particular, Cant. Rabbah at VI. 1, §1, on the verse ‘I went down to the nut garden’, where there is a description of the tribes of Israel in the desert as organized like a nut, of which Eleazar’s treatise is clearly reminiscent: ‘Just as’, according to Cant. Rabbah, ‘a nut has four quarters and a court in the centre, so was Israel encamped in the wilderness, four standards, four camps, and the tent of assembly in the middle.’31 This, Dan says, ‘is an unusual and unique metaphor very similar to that in the Secret of the Nut’. And he goes on: It is important to note that according to the Midrash the organisation of the tribes in the desert reflects some divine order, so that we find no conflict between the two metaphors describing the earthly tribes and the celestial chariot as reflected in the structure of the nut.

30 Against this, and what follows here, Daniel Abrams writes in a detailed study: ‘it is argued that although these medieval mystics may have possessed some ancient traditions, the “Secret of the Nut” in all of its forms does not emerge from antiquity, but is wholly the product of medieval Europe’ (1997: 4). 31 See Cant. Rabbah VI. 11, §1, where a reference to Num. 2: 17 is given. We will see the signiﬁcance for the Song of the early chapters in Numbers when we come in the Commentary to Cant. 2: 4: ‘His banner over me is love’. 168 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

Dan then links this discovery of an early source for the ‘doctrine of the nut’ with the work of Scholem on the Hekhalot text, the Shiur Koma, and Lieberman’s Appendix D to Scholem’s book, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition: At the end of his detailed study, Lieberman states: ‘The midrash of Shir Ha-Shirim [Song of Songs], the Shiur Qomah and the literature describing the holy chariot are all one and the same.’ This conclusion is in perfect accord with our assumption, viz. that the symbolism of the ’Egoz as describing the tribes of Israel and as describing the Chariot came into being in the same period, and belong together to the earliest Hebrew mystical speculations that are known to us. (77) According to this interpretation of the nut as a symbol of the Divine Chariot, it follows that the expression yorde merkava, ‘the descenders of the Chariot’, or ‘to the Chariot’, as it is generally translated, was thought to be based on the verse ‘I went down to the nut garden.’ This is now seldom noticed. Altmann, in his Hokmath Ha- Egoz article, represents the earlier understanding: The interpretation of the nut as a symbol of the Divine Chariot is suggested by the biblical phrase ‘I went down into the garden of nuts’ (Cant. 6: 11), which was held to refer to the contemplation of the realm of the Merkabah. In the terminology of the Yordey Merkabah the mystic has to ‘descend’ to that visionary experience, and the expression, ‘I went down’ (YTDRY) fitted the situation very well indeed. The ‘garden of nuts’ could easily be identified with the ‘garden’ (pardes) par excellence by which the object of mystical contemplation is commonly designated in Merkabah mysticism. To what extent the Yordey Merkabah made use of the symbol of the nut is difficult to establish. (101) The question all this raises is: Do the links go back to the Song itself, or are they later allegorizations drawn out from the text? Neither Dan nor Lieber- man, in his famous Appendix D,32 believe that the interpretations of the midrashim, and the early Rabbinic literature on the Song generally, can be understood as illuminating its original meaning. And, indeed, those written following the establishment of Akiva’s system reflect––if by no means consistently––the concerns of Rabbinic Judaism. But both the midrashim and, to a surprising degree, the Targum, seem to have access to an understanding of the Song which gives the impression of going back to that work and to the thought-world from which it emerged. That there is more to be understood hardly needs saying, and perhaps when the scholars of Jewish mysticism turn their attention to the Song itself they will unveil those mysteries of its language which are accessible to obser-

32 In Scholem 1965a: 118–26. The Garden Temple 169 vation. Meanwhile I should like to suggest that the meaning of the term yorde merkava might be found in those early Syriac hymns which, using the imagery of Ezekiel’s vision, depict Mary as the chariot of Christ: Had there existed envy in heaven Ezekiel’s chariot would have envied the daughter of Man: the chariot conveyed the likeness of his glory, whereas she carried the reality of His majesty!33 That Mary’s belly was understood in Syriac exegesis as the ‘chariot’ is seen in this and other hymns, and suggests that the word merkava, ‘chariot’, could stand for everything that is meant by the Hebrew word me¯îm, ‘inward parts, intestines, bowels, belly, womb’, most often used ﬁguratively for the ‘seat of the feelings’, as also the Greek word splangkna, which has a similar range of meaning. And if the Merkava mystics are descending to the seat of the feelings,34 their practice is likely to be much the same as the Hesychasts of Eastern Orthodoxy when these refer to ‘putting the mind in the heart’. Hesychasm, of course, appears to belong to later history, and the article under this title in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church describes its distant origins as extending back to the fourth–ﬁfth centuries, which, however, means no more than that written materials are not available earlier. Thus the term yorde merkava is, it seems to me, related to the state of prayer suggested by the verse: ‘I sleep, but my heart is awake’ (Cant. 5: 2) to which we will come in Chapter 7.

5.8. ‘The Four Who Entered Pardes’

The early, possibly pre-Rabbinic, story of ‘The Four Who Entered Pardes’ tells us, I believe, how the Song was understood before it had been rendered ‘safe’ by the expedient of turning it into ‘a hermeneutic key to the interpretation of the Torah’, as Daniel Boyarin expresses it (Introduction §2).35 The discovery by Saul Lieberman of the passage in Origen, utilized with such eﬀect by Scholem (Introduction §4), has left us with the impression that the only

33 Sebastian Brock 1994: 99. 34 See, for instance, Schäfer 1981: §81, 40–1, where the practitioner who wants to gaze at the Merkava is said first to descend and then to ascend, that is, he descends to the seat of the feelings in order to ascend to the vision of the Merkava. 35 These two hermeneutical approaches––the Song interpreted as the key to the Torah, and that presupposed in the Story of the Four––seem to have existed contemporaneously in Rab- binic circles after Akiva. However, the ‘key to the Torah’ interpretation is a Rabbinic (Akivan) innovation and gradually took over, whereas the Pardes story is firmly rooted in the older, authentic meaning of the Song itself, and was subsequently ousted. 170 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God evidence for an esoteric understanding of the Song comes from the Christian side, whereas the well known story of The Four Who Entered Pardes from the Jewish side stares us, as it were, in the face. But before we look at the story we need to look at the word. Pardes is a loanword from Old Persian meaning ‘garden, park, orchard, enclosure’, and it occurs three times in late Old Testament books, Eccles. 2: 5; Neh. 2: 8; and at 4: 13 in the Song. The same word was adopted by the translators of the LXX and, becoming paradeisos, was applied to all references to the garden of Eden, or the garden of God. Scholem tells us that the word pardes was ‘used as the technical term for the heavenly paradise in the oldest Jewish esoteric writings’ and that this has finally been proved by findings made in the Qumran caves, in which two fragments of an Aramaic text of the book of Enoch show that ‘the heavenly “paradise of righteousness” of the Greek and Aethiopian versions is indeed called pardes kushta’.36 A further clarification on this point comes from David Flusser, who, in his article ‘Scholem’s Recent Book on Merkabah Literature’, comments: This makes it clear that the Garden of Eden generally was once styled pardes in the Aramaic of Jewish Palestine and that it was this usage which influenced the LXX choice of paradeisos as a translation. The linguistic formulation of the talmudic tradition regarding the four who entered Paradise (alive) indicates that the identification Gan Eden = pardes survived in the technical jargon of the mystics at a time when talmudic literature, including the Aramaic Targumim, had already jettisoned it.37 Thus there is evidence, against the prevailing views of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,38 that the word pardes is used with special meaning in the Story of the Four and equals the garden of Eden which in turn equals the Temple, as we have seen. Whether the word is similarly used in the Song of Songs, as I believe, is more problematic. Moreover, if in the Song, why not in Ecclesiastes and Nehemiah? In both these cases the pardes belongs to a king, a context close to the original use of the Persian word: a king’s garden or orchard. The poet uses it similarly, if less literally: the King’s garden = the Temple. In the rabbinical literature the Story of the Four is found, with significant variations, in the two Talmuds, the Tosephta, and Cant. Rabbah (b. Hag. 14b; ˙ j. Hag. 77b; t. Hag. 2. 3f.; and Cant. Rabbah I. 4, §1). Several versions of it are ˙ ˙ also found in two of the Hekhalot compilations, Hekhalot Zutarti and Merkava Rabbati, published in Schäfer’s great work, Synopse zur Hekhalot-

36 1965a:16. 37 1960: 62. The addition ‘alive’ in brackets is often found in Jewish writers on this story. It is not found in the original sources. 38 See Morray-Jones 1993: 191 n. 52. The Garden Temple 171

Literatur (1981). The talmudic versions all conclude the story with: ‘Draw me, we shall run after you’ (Cant. 1: 4a), while the story in Cant. Rabbah begins and concludes with the next part of the same line: ‘the king has brought me into his chambers’. In Hekhalot Zutarti and Merkava Rabbati there are versions which conclude with both parts of 1: 4a: ‘Draw me, we will run after you; the king has brought me into his chambers.’ But there is another version in both these compilations which lacks any reference to the Song, the significant point about them being that, unlike all the others, the only name attached to them is that of Rabbi Akiva. The other three are not named. Morray-Jones39 has argued that this must be the earlier Rabbinic version. Here it is: Rabbi Akiva said: Four we were who entered into pardes. One peered and died; one peered and was struck; and one peered and cut the plants. I entered in peace and went out in peace. Why did I enter in peace and go out in peace? Not because I am greater than my companions but because they [my deeds] caused me to fulfil the teaching which the sages taught in their mishnah: Your deeds will bring you near and your deeds will keep you far . . .40 The story in this form gives the impression that it expects the reader to know exactly what it is about, to what biblical book it is linked, and who the unnamed companions of Akiva are. It was evidently so well known at one time that three manuscripts (Synopse, 144–5, §338) give only the first line: ‘Rabbi Akiva said: Four we were who entered into pardes, etc.’ This view needs some amplification. For the first point––that the reader is expected to know what the story is about––I rely particularly on Morray-Jones, who shows that the story is concerned ‘with a visionary ascent to the heavenly temple’.41 For the second––to what biblical book the story is implicitly linked––I rely, apart from the significance of the explicit attributions to the Song,42 on two points in the story itself, though there is also a third. The first depends on what we know of Akiva, but the second is the conclusive point, and I will touch on it before returning to Akiva. The word hêsis, ‘look, peep, gaze, peer’, occurs in the Bible ˙ ˙ only once, at Cant. 2: 9: ‘behold, he stands behind our wall, gazing through the windows, peering through the lattice’. This word is prominent in the story, occurring three times in the majority of examples. Given the way the Rabbis read the Bible, its use could only indicate a reference to the Song. And combined with the man, Akiva, who exclaimed: ‘The Song of Songs is

39 Ibid. 199–200. 40 Schäfer 1981: 145, §338. The quotation in italics is from m. Eduyot 5.7. 41 2002: 18–19. But see the whole chapter (1) for a detailed exposition. 42 Which––remarkably––are ignored in discussions on this subject. 172 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God the Holy of holies’, and to whom thereafter statements concerning the Song were attributed, the most likely conclusion is that the story refers to the understanding of the Song current in certain circles. The original author(s) is evidently making a polemical point in regard to the Song, which the later redactors fully understood. But it clearly became necessary, as time went on, to put the association beyond doubt by attaching words from the Song, plus a further clarification of intent by giving to Akiva’s companions the names of celebrated scholars, the history of each of whom contrasted significantly with the only one capable of surviving the experience ‘in peace’. Thus a verse from the Song was attached to the talmudic and midrashic versions of the story as well as to those versions in the Hekhalot collection which include the names of the other three. Here is a fuller version, also from the Zutarti material: These were they who entered the pardes: Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Elisha Aher, and Rabbi Akiva. Ben Azzai peered and died, and the writing concerning him says: ‘Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of his holy ones, etc.’ (Ps. 116: 15). Ben Zoma peered and was struck, and the writing concerning him says: ‘Have you found honey? Eat what is enough for you, etc.’ (Prov. 25: 16). Elisha Aher peered and cut the shoots, and the writing concerning him says: ‘Do not let your mouth cause your flesh to sin, etc.’ (Qoh. 5: 5). Rabbi Akiva entered in peace and went out in peace, and the writing concerning him says: ‘Draw me; we will run after you, etc.’ (Cant. 1: 4).43 All the verses represented by the etceteras are remarkably apposite to what we know of the stories of each character, not least that of Elisha ben Abuyah, known also by his nickname, Aher (the ‘Other’, here attached to his first name). The continuation of the text attached to Akiva is: ‘The king has brought me into his chambers’, which, as already noted, we find in other versions, some of them much fuller than the one above.44 But for the present purpose, the short and the longer version set out here are sufficient for the hypothesis I am presenting. The names added to the secondary versions are those of contemporaries of Akiva: Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, and Elisha ben Abuyah, who fit the fate accorded to them too closely with what is known of their history to be appended later by chance. But in their case, later memories were unreliable and Ben Azzai and Ben Zoma become confused with each other. The Babylonian Talmud and the Tosefta are correct in noting that Ben Azzai died and Ben Zoma was struck, whereas in the Jerusalem Talmud and Cant. Rabbah, being struck is

43 Schäfer 1981: 145, §339. 44 See Morray-Jones 2002, for a study of the warning concerning water in the longer version of the story. The Garden Temple 173 attributed to Ben Azzai and death to Ben Zoma.45 We must, then, look briefly at what is known of each. The significant fact about Ben Azzai is that he remained celibate. Con- sequently he died, since a man who fails to marry and to reproduce himself does, in some sense, ‘die’. Moreover, it had become, by the time of Ben Azzai, a tenet of Rabbinic doctrine that marriage was as much a sacred duty as the study of Torah. But when Ben Azzai was reproved for not marrying, he replied: ‘What can I do? My soul clings to the Torah46 in love; let others contribute to the preservation of the race’ (b. Yebamoth 63b). Nevertheless, he was revered for his remarkable sanctity, which explains the application to him of the psalm verse: ‘Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his holy ones.’ But there is, I think, still more to be seen in the ‘death’ of Ben Azzai. If we understand the four men as four types––as in the four types of children in the Passover Haggadah, which similarly includes one wicked character––then Ben Azzai may stand for a type which did indeed ‘die’ in the Rabbinic Judaism of his time, but found a home in Christianity and flourished for many centuries until it too met a death in those areas of the West under the influence first of the Reformation and then of the Enlightenment. In Judaism there have been periods of revival, for instance, in the Perushim described by Scholem in his Origins of the Kabbalah,47 and even more dramatically––since they embraced celibacy against the Rabbinic adoption of the biblical command ‘to be fruitful and multiply’ (Gen. 1: 28)––the Jewish Sufis of North Africa, as we have seen (Introduction §9). Nevertheless, the Rabbinic determination to discourage any asceticism which included celibacy has been enormously effective, only matched by the similar determination of the Reformers in Western Christian- ity. Thus, the death of Ben Azzai as a type takes on a particular significance when viewed against the threat celibacy seems to have posed to early Rabbinism, not only on account of the concern for the preservation of the race but because the attraction to celibacy was a phenomenon of the times, particularly widespread among Christians and Gnostic groups. Against this background it might be said that Ben Azzai not so much died as was killed off. Ben Zoma was, like Akiva, an authority on the Halakhah, but his appear-

45 Rowland 1982: 320–1 gives three reasons for accepting the priority of the Babylonian Talmud and the Tosephta versions over the other two. His long and detailed discussion of this story remains indispensable for anyone trying to get to grips with its problems. 46 It is more likely that a contemporary of Akiva would have said ‘God’ here since the elevation of the Torah to a high status is attributed to Akiva (Introduction §2), and thus such a use of ‘Torah’ would not have been current until some time later. 47 1987: 229–30. 174 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God ance in the story of the Four, and the fate ascribed to him, is widely thought to relate to his interest in esoteric speculation, especially in the work of creation, an area of mystical engagement known as maaseh bere shit, comparable to the work of the chariot, maaseh merkava. The particular occasion which seems to have branded him as speculating beyond the permitted limits, is related in both Talmuds, the Tosefta and Bereshit Rabbah,48 in which he is reported to have met Rabbi Joshua but to have been oblivious of his greeting, so meriting the condemnation, ‘Ben Zoma is outside’. The story of the Four in the fuller versions consequently provides him with the verse from Proverbs: ‘Have you found honey? Eat what is enough for you [lest you be satiated and vomit it]’, which, as we saw (1.§9), indicates that honey = knowledge, and therefore too much honey/knowledge gained from mystical speculation will cause satiety leading to the inability to sustain what exceeds the capacity of the mind. Thus Ben Zoma too is discredited. Elisha ben Abuya, otherwise ‘Aher’, the ‘Other’, is the villain of the story for he ‘cut the plants’ (or ‘shoots’, according to the translation), which provides a third link to the Song at the verse, ‘Your shoots are a pardes of pomegranates’ (4: 13). The form of ‘shoots’ in the Song is derived from the verb ‘to send’, sˇa¯lah, which includes in its meanings ‘sprout, shoot’. But here ˙ the vocabulary of the story diverges from the vocabulary of the Song, replacing sˇa¯lah with another word for ‘plant’, na¯tîa. The substitution is ˙ surprising but on exploring it we discover that the only occurrence of na¯tîa is at Ps. 144: 12, where it occurs in masculine plural: That our sons may be as plants (ne˘tı¯îm) ˙ growing up in their youth; our daughters like corner pillars, carved according to the pattern of a temple. This verse contains four words frequently used in the early Jewish mystical literature: ne˘tı¯îm itself; ne˘ûrîm, a plural form related to naar, ‘youth’ ˙ (see the section on the Shiur Koma in the next chapter); tabnît, ‘pattern’, a word linked to the pattern of the Temple, for example, 1 Chron. 28: 11–12 where David passes on to Solomon ‘the pattern of all that he had by the spirit’ for the building of the Temple; and, fourthly, hêkha¯l, ‘temple’, the name given to the Hekhalot literature which is wholly concerned with the Temple and with the worship of God. But to grasp the full signiﬁcance of all to which this verse points we need, on the basis of the Rabbinic principle of ﬁnding the meaning of a verse in that of a contiguous one, to include the previous verse:

48 See Rowland 1982: 323–31, for a full investigation. The Garden Temple 175

Separate and deliver me from the hand of foreign sons whose mouths speak lies, and whose right hand is a right hand of falsehood. It would be difficult to find a scriptural quotation more suggestive of the man who became so ‘foreign’ within his own tradition that, as we have seen, he was called ‘The Other’. The accusation, ‘he cut the plants’, has given rise to much debate, but the general meaning is clear: Aher struck at the roots of his tradition, and in such a way as to hinder the tradition from blossoming in the next generation, the ‘plants’ of both psalm and story. A passage in 1 Enoch, based on Gen. 6: 1–5, has striking resonances with the story of Aher: ‘And all the others [angels] . . . took unto themselves wives, and each chose for himself one, and they began to go in unto them, and to defile themselves with them, and they taught them charms and enchantments, and the cutting of roots, and made them acquainted with plants.’49 From the perspective of 1 Enoch this is the real beginning of evil upon the earth, and the links between this passage and the story of the Four suggest that Aher’s sin was regarded as in some sense the primal sin––which the talmudic references and stories about him support.50 But the cause of Aher’s sin lies beyond the present purpose, the point here being the implication that the shoots of Cant. 4: 12 are what Aher cut as the negative consequence of his mystical experience.51 Finally, what makes Akiva the hero of the story? First, Akiva was a rabbi. The story is a powerful polemic against the practices of the ‘Descenders to the Chariot’, but it was evidently thought better not to ban such practices out- right. Philip Alexander, on the doctrine of the celestial temple and the angelic liturgy, writes: ‘The rabbinic authorities were very wary of the doctrine, and did everything in their power to limit its impact. They stressed its dangers and hedged it about with safeguards . . .’ And he goes on to say that a standard ploy of the rabbis for dealing with practices with which they were uncomfort- able was to claim that, ‘dubious as these practices may be, they are in the end best performed by rabbis’.52 So, the story tells us, if you want to make jour- neys into, or up to, the celestial temple, you must be like Akiva. And Akiva was

49 R. H. Charles 1913: 7. 1–2, p. 192. For more recent translations see Matthew Black 1985, and George W. E. Nickelsburg 2001. 50 For instance, b. Hag. 15b and 77b. There is a huge diversity of opinion on the question of Aher’s sin. For an explanation˙ which seems to me to be soundly based see Rowland 1982: 332–9. 51 It would suit my understanding of the story in relation to the Song very well if it could be maintained, as some believe, that Aher defected to Christianity. But the Babylonian tractate Hagigah shows that the regret at his apostasy––whatever form it took––is too deeply felt, and too˙ movingly expressed, for any such explanation. 52 2006a: 132. 176 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God not only a rabbi, he was the greatest halakhist of his day, that is, he had every jot and tittle of the law at his fingertips and applied his knowledge with impeccable orthodoxy. Secondly, a significant aspect of our knowledge of Akiva’s personal life is that he was married, and had numerous children. The lovely legends concerning his wife––how she encouraged him to learn to write, and then to become a supremely great Torah scholar––are, if not primary, nevertheless integral to Akiva’s history. Thus, he splendidly embodies the injunction to be fruitful and to multiply, the inference to be drawn being: only married rabbis engage in ‘descending to the chariot’ safely. Thirdly, Akiva is the hero of the story because he was the hero of the Song, the one who saved it from being dropped––whether from the canon, as is generally thought, or merely from favour it is now hard to say. Subsequently, as we have seen, sayings about the Song were attributed to Akiva so that he became associated with it as no one else. Thus it was only necessary to attach his name to the story for it to be clear that it warned against the dangers ascribed to the esoteric nature of the Song. But why? In his Faces of the Chariot, David Halperin begins by citing a discussion in the Mishnah which reveals––incontrovertibly it appears––that in the second century ‘expounding the merkabah’ was a common activity which, by implication, was permitted in synagogue worship.53 But a change of outlook took place. In a later section of his first chapter, Halperin goes on to say that ‘the first half of the third century was the heyday of those who wanted to suppress the merkabah’, and he quotes the passage from Origen (Introduction §4): ‘It is a practice among the Hebrews that no one is permitted so much as to hold [the Song of Songs] in his hands, unless he has reached a full and mature age.’ Halperin does not doubt Origen’s testimony, even though, as he says, ‘there is no rabbinic evidence for such a restriction’. But instead of quoting the whole passage he does not get further than this opening sentence. Thus he interprets: ‘If a person does not have the maturity to realize that the Song of Songs is a spiritual allegory, he might get the impression that it is a very sexy book’ (26–7). But such an inference, justified by the sentence from Origen he quotes, fails to notice the distinction Origen then goes on to make: ‘And there is another practice too that we have received from them’, namely, the four passages enumerated by Origen (see Introduction §4), which ‘should be reserved for study till the last’. The distinction Origen is careful to make between the sentence Halperin quotes and the rest of the passage is crucial to its understanding, and by not noticing it Halperin undermines the evidence Origen provides. Other evidence which supports the points Halperin makes about the sup-

53 1988: 11–13. The Garden Temple 177 pression of the Merkava concerns the word ya¯hîd, ‘only, single one, individual’, ˙ found in the Merkava-restriction at m. Hagigah 2.1, where a prohibition is ˙ recorded against expounding the Merkava with a ya¯hîd. The significance of the ˙ term is more clearly revealed in a tractate of the Mishnah, Taanit, where we unexpectedly encounter the category ya¯hîd, in plural ye˘hîdîm. These ye˘hîdîm ˙ ˙ ˙ were called upon in times of drought to pray and to fast. After nightfall they were permitted to eat and drink, to work, to wash, to anoint themselves, put on sandals, and have marital intercourse. This last permission is taken to imply–– as it was clearly intended to––that they were married. Had anyone protested, ‘But they are single ones!’ the answer could have been, ‘Yes, but if they had been married, the rules would permit marital intercourse’! This permission, it seems to me, is an obfuscating device which has successfully concealed the existence––and thus the problem––of celibates at a time when Judaism was battling against the passion for celibacy in its Christian neighbours.54 Support of a not dissimilar kind, already adduced, is also found in the article ‘The Origins of Monasticism’, cited in the Introduction (§9), in which O’Neill argues that Christian monasticism was a continuation of Jewish monasticism, that is to say, that groups of Jewish ascetics found themselves drawn to the new movement, and that this explains the preservation by the Church of more than sixty different classical Jewish writings, some of them in multiple manuscripts, together with all the works of Philo. But the point at issue here is not these writings, though their being discarded by the Jewish leadership is undoubtedly part of the story. It is rather the concern which would have been felt by the Jewish leaders over a number of years as they learnt of the defection of groups to which, in the normal course of existence, they would probably not have given much thought. But if O’Neill is right, it becomes necessary to visualize the situation which then ensued. These groups would have been, I believe, ‘descenders to the Merkava’––yorde merkava–– understanding the Song of Songs in the light of such practice. I envisage that the majority would have lived in groups in various remote locales, unnoticed and unregarded until, like their later Christian counterparts in the Egyptian desert, they attracted attention by manifesting some deviation from the current orthodox position. We know of the attempts made by the ecclesiastical hierarchy to bring the monks of the desert into line with post-Nicene orthodoxy.55 History does not relate the efforts of the Rabbinic hierarchy to keep

54 See the discussion in Sebastian Brock (1992: 136–9) on the cognate term ihidaya in Syrian proto-monasticism. See also Robert Murray 1975a: 12–16. ˙ 55 See Cassian’s ‘Conference Ten: On Prayer’, which tells how the ‘anthropomorphites of the desert’ were brought into line by the bishop of Alexandria, with a distressing account of the consequences on one of them. For a modern study which relates these anthropomorphites to Jewish mysticism see Alexander Golitzin 2002. 178 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God the yorde merkava under control. We can only speculate that they failed with enough of them to give rise to what Halperin calls ‘the heyday of those who wanted to suppress the merkabah’.56 This crisis––if such it was––could also suggest an explanation for the diﬀerence in tone between the Song and the Merkava literature. The Song belongs to what I am calling the feminine principle, to the ‘bridal’ response to God, the Hekhalot literature almost wholly to the masculine.57 But Morray- Jones provides us with a Hekhalot fragment attributed to Akiva in which the heavenly counterpart of Israel’s daily worship is portrayed as a dialogue between a male angel and a female hayyah (living being), who lead the celes- ˙ tial hosts in praise of God: ‘An implicit parallel must surely be intended with the Song of Songs which, as we have seen, is widely interpreted as an intimate expression of Israel’s worship.’ Morray-Jones goes on to say the text further implies that the angel and the hayyah are seated, presumably on thrones, and ˙ that the epithet ‘one’ is applied to both of them, an allusion to the shema.58 There is a good deal in this work by Morray-Jones which could be drawn out in support of the view that the feminine principle was gradually suppressed in the Jewish mystical literature until its ethos became wholly masculine. This ‘masculinity’ is expressed particularly in the theurgic element, that is, in the desire to make things happen, to force God to show himself in response to the strenuous eﬀorts of the practitioner. And yet, I believe there may be a theurgic element in the Song itself. Which brings us to the passage on the beloved at Cant. 5: 10–16.

56 The possible defection of yorde merkava groups may not only have been to Christianity but to Gnostic groups or ‘schools’ which abounded in this period. See April DeConick 2006: 1–24, especially: ‘What I wish to articulate fully is the opinion that we are dealing with a variety of esoteric Jews and Christians over the course of several centuries who self-identified with different religious communities’ (10). 57 Scholem: ‘The long history of Jewish mysticism shows no trace of feminine influence’ 1961: 57. 58 2009: 567–8. 6

The Beloved

Modern scholarship on the Song of Songs has been obliged, given the consensus on this biblical book, to treat the description of the male at 5: 10–16 as being that of a human ﬁgure. By a comparison with descriptions in other parts of the Bible and with pseudepigraphical literature, I hope to show that, far from being about a human lover, this passage is a metaphorical description of the divine kavod (‘the glory of God’) and, as such, anticipates a wealth of emerging theological speculation on the body of God (shiur koma), or his representative, which may go back to the Second Temple period, and at which we will look in a later section of this chapter. In the ﬁrst section we will look at some biblical and pseudepigraphical parallels.

6.1. ‘This is my beloved, and this is my friend’

The description at Cant. 5: 10–16 is given in response to the question of the Daughters of Jerusalem: ‘What is your beloved [dôd] more than another beloved, O most beautiful among women?’ While bearing in mind that dôd, differently vocalized, is the root of the name David, the question here suggests that it is understood, as at Isa. 5: 1, to denote God.1 There is much that could be adduced to support the view that dôd either has, or is intended to convey, the meaning ‘a god’. It does, in any case, seem clear that the poet intends the reader to understand ‘God’ in some sense by his use of the term which, as we have seen, occurs with first person suffix, ‘my beloved’, only otherwise at Isa. 5: 1. And so Cant. Rabbah expands the question thus: ‘The other nations say to Israel: ‘What is thy beloved more than another beloved? What is thy God more than other deities?’ (V. 9, §1) In the Song itself the question is, I believe, intended to prepare the reader or hearer for the inner meaning of the bride’s reply:

1 See the article DWD by Sanmartin-Ascaso (1978), especially 150: ‘It seems clear in the context of the Song of the vineyard [Isa. 5: 1ﬀ.] that “beloved” in this instance is to be interpreted as an epithet of YHWH.’ But the information in the section ‘In the Bible’ is rendered suspect by its highly charged sexual language, inﬂuenced by the thirty-three occurrences of forms of DWD found in the Song. 180 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

10 My beloved is radiant and ruddy, exalted above ten thousand. 11 His head is the most fine gold; his locks are bushy, and black as a raven. 12 His eyes are like doves by streams of waters; bathed in milk, fitly set. 13 His cheeks are like terraces of spices, yielding perfumes. His lips are lilies, dripping with flowing myrrh. 14 His hands are gold cylinders set with the beryl; his loins are panels of ivory, overlaid with sapphires. 15 His legs are pillars of marble, set upon bases of gold. His appearance is like Lebanon, choice as the cedars. 16 His palate is most sweet, and all of him is precious. This is my beloved, and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem. The first two lines of this passage lead us from one theophanic or apocalyptic text to another. 10 My beloved is radiant and ruddy, exalted above myriads. The adjective, ‘dazzling, glowing, clear’, translated here ‘radiant’, occurs otherwise three times, but the sole occurrence of the verb at Lam. 4: 7 is, I think, the most significant in relation to Cant. 5: 10: Her Nazirites were purer than snow, whiter than milk, they were more ruddy of body than corals, their hair as sapphire.2 Of the ten words in the Hebrew of this verse from Lamentations, four

2 At least two commentators on Lamentations, Delbert R. Hillers, 1972, and Iain Provan, 1991, make a good case for the word translated ‘sapphire’ meaning ‘lapis lazuli’. But, whatever the word sappir means, what is significant about it is the contexts in which it is used which are, in all the fourteen occurrences, in some sense mystical, some extremely so, e.g. Exod. 24: 10. The Beloved 181 occur in the passage we are examining: ‘radiant/white’, ‘milk’, ‘ruddy’, and ‘sapphire’. The combination of red and white occurs widely, from ancient to more modern times, especially in myths and fairy tales. In the biblical and pseudepigraphical literature we find it in apocalyptic: ‘his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne was fiery flames, and its wheels were burning fire’ (Dan. 7: 9). A similar picture is given in Revelation: ‘His head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow; his eyes were like a flame of fire’ (1: 14), while the fragment of a Noah Apocalypse (106) at the end of 1 Enoch begins: And after some days my son Methuselah took a wife for his son Lamech, and she became pregnant by him and bore a son. And his body was white as snow and red as the blooming of a rose, and the hair of his head and his long locks were white as wool, and his eyes beautiful.3 This description also recalls David at 1 Sam. 16: 12: ‘And he was ruddy, with beautiful eyes.’ At Cant. 5: 10 the adjective, a¯dôm, ‘red, ruddy’, is spelt, uniquely, with a vowel letter, which gives it the same spelling as for Edom. The significance of Edom for this passsage will be more easily seen if we look first at the next two words, da¯gûl me¯re˘va¯vâ ‘exalted above myriads’, or ‘dis- tinguished above ten thousand’. The word re˘va¯vâ, ‘multitude, myriad, ten thousand’ (in an indefinite sense), occurs sixteen times in the Hebrew Bible.4 Of these, four occurrences in 1 Samuel link the term to David in repetitions of the claim: ‘Saul has slain his thousands and David his ten thousands.’ But the occurrence of ‘myriads’, which also connects with Edom/Seir, is that at Deut. 33: 2 in the blessing of Moses before his death: The Lord came from Sinai, and dawned from Seir for us;5 he shone forth from Mount Paran; he came from myriads of holy ones; from his right hand a fiery law for us. The cross-references and textual comments which could be made for this one verse are numerous but, focusing on the link with Edom, here is just one: Seir = Edom (Genesis 32: 4 (English numbering 3); Judges 5: 4, etc.). Esau, the ancestor of the Edomites, is red ( admônî) and hairy (sá¯ ¯rı ––word play on Edom and Seir). Edom is linked with Sinai as the source of YHWH’s theophany in Judges 5: 4 [‘Lord, when you went forth from Seir, when you marched from the region of Edom’],

3 R. H. Charles 1913: 278. 4 In the Hekhalot literature forms of reˇva¯vâ occur hundreds of times. 5 Reading ‘for us’ with LXX, Syriac, and Vulgate. Hebrew: ‘for them’, WML. 182 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God while Teman (in Edom) is linked with Paran as the source of YHWH’s theophany in Habakkuk 3: 3 [‘God came from Teman, and the Holy One from Mount Paran’]. Edom was possibly considered to be the location of Sinai in this tradition.6 Thus if the orthography of the word ‘red’, giving it the spelling of Edom, goes back to the author, it would suggest the intention of linking the opening line of the description of the beloved to those of theophanies. That theophanies are being recalled is further suggested by the second half of the line, da¯gûl me¯re˘va¯vâ, as interpreted by Cant. Rabbah: ‘Pre-eminent above ten thousand. R. Abba b. Kahana said: An earthly king is known by his robes, but in the case of God, He is ﬁre and His ministers are ﬁre [Ps. 104: 4], as it says, And He came from the myriads holy (Deut. 33:2)’ (V. 10, §1).

6.2. Links with Daniel

The book of Daniel resonates powerfully with the Song in several places. The ﬁrst of these is the description, 2: 31–45, of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a great statue where the head of pure gold parallels the gold head of the beloved at Cant. 5: 11. The image depicted in the Song similarly resembles a statue, but whereas the statue in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream symbolizes the kingdoms of this world, which begin by being majestic, symbolized by the ﬁne gold of the head, but degenerate until the feet are no more than an unstable mixture of clay and iron, so that the image when struck is instantly and utterly destroyed, the image in the Song, understood as an aspect of God, remains splendid throughout. The image in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream is theophanic, but becomes anti-theophanic as the quality of its elements decline. The parallels, then, are found in the contrast between the silver, brass, iron and clay of Nebuchadnezzar’s image, and the beryl, ivory, sapphires, and marble of the beloved. The bride herself points to this contrast at the conclusion of her praise when she declares: ‘All of him is precious.’7 The book of Daniel is widely dated to the middle of the second century BCE, but seems to be, as Di Lella puts it, ‘a collection of once isolated mini- works brought together by some unknown editor or redactor’.8 Thus the story of the image and its destruction may already have been known in the

6 Taken from the class notes of Dr Jeremy Hughes on Deuteronomy 33. Hebrew transliterated. 7 The word here, OYDMXM, a plural noun from the root DMX, is correctly translated ‘desirable’, but the desire is for what is precious, precious things, treasure, gold, etc., and can equally be translated ‘precious’. 8 1978: 9. The Beloved 183 fourth century, as some commentators think,9 but it is not impossible that the book of Daniel was known in its final form by the author of the Song, if this latter can be dated later than generally thought. The second text in Daniel to which the Song passage is seen to relate, especially in the rabbinical literature, is that at 7: 9–14, here omitting verses 11–12: As I watched, thrones were set in place, and the Ancient of Days took his throne; his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne was fiery flames, and its wheels were burning fire. A stream of fire issued and flowed out from his presence. A thousand thousand served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him . . . I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man. And he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; His dominion is an everlasting dominion, that shall not pass away, and his kingdom shall never be destroyed.10 The ‘second’ figure here, whose kingdom shall never be destroyed, recalls the contrast between the praise of the beloved in the Song and Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in which the kingdoms are destroyed. A third passage in Daniel has links with Cant. 5: 10–16: I lifted up my eyes and looked, and behold, a man clothed in linen, whose loins were girded with gold of Uphaz. His body was like beryl [tarsˇîsˇ], his face like the appearance of lightning, his eyes like flaming torches, his arms and legs like the gleam of burnished bronze, and the sound of his words like the sound of a multitude. (10: 5–6)

9 For example André LaCocque, who states: ‘Daniel 2 in its original form is to be dated to the fourth century, although there are secondary interventions from the second century which give it its present form’ 1979: 35f. Di Lella writes similarly, 1978: 153. The discussions of both these commentators on the image range widely, but for the present purpose the biblical account itself supplies all that is needed for the hypothesis that a conscious parallel between the image in Daniel and that in the Song is being made. 10 The biblical passages in this chapter are based on RSV. 184 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

The phrase ‘gold of Uphaz’, ketem ûfaz, is linked here to the loins and not to the head, as in the similar line at Song 5: 11: ‘His head is the most fine gold’ (ketem paz). Tarshish, to give the word a phonetic spelling, is translated ‘beryl’ here by RSV/NRSV. It is the word used at Cant. 5: 14 and in the description of the wheels of the four living creatures at Ezek. 1: 16: ‘The appearance of the wheels and their work was like the gleam of tarshish’, while in the description at Ezek. 1: 26–7 of the one like a man ‘from the appearance of his loins upward . . . and from the appearance of his loins downward’ there are further resonances linking Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Song. At Rev. 1: 12–16, of which v. 14 has already been quoted, there is a vision which evidently belongs in the same tradition: I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands one like a son of man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden girdle round his breast; his head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow; his eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of many waters . . . and his face was like the sun shining in full strength. The emphasis here on the hair ‘white as white wool, white as snow’ echoes Dan. 7: 9 and several other passages in post-biblical Jewish literature, one of which we saw earlier in the quotation from 1 Enoch 106, where the hair of the child born to Lamech is ‘white as wool’. Another is found in the Apocalypse of Abraham in a description of the great angel Iaoel: ‘The appearance of his body was like sapphire, and the aspect of his face was like chrysolite, and the hair of his head like snow.’11 The body like sapphire in this verse also links with ‘his body is ivory work, encrusted with sapphires’ at Cant. 5: 14b. Another passage at 1 Enoch, 46: 1–3, which links closely with Daniel 7, is particularly important: And there I saw One who had a head of days, and His head was like white wool, and with Him was another being whose countenance had the appearance of a man. And his face was full of graciousness, like one of the holy angels.

And I asked the angel who went with me and showed me all the hidden things, concerning that Son of Man, who he was, and whence he was, (and) why he went with the Head of Days? And he answered and said to me:

11 Rubinkiewicz 1983: 694. The Beloved 185

This is the Son of Man who has righteousness, with whom dwells righteousness, and who reveals all the treasures of that which is hidden, because the Lord of Spirits has chosen him.12 This last line is not unlike the ﬁrst line of the bride’s praise of the beloved at Cant. 5: 10, da¯gûl me¯re˘va¯vâ, translated here ‘exalted above ten thousand’, and by the LXX, ‘having been chosen from among myriads’. The biblical and pseudepigraphical texts we have looked at in this section all appear to be related to each other in terms both of purpose and of imagery employed. The implications of these texts,13 and the future they were to have, is beyond the scope of the present work. All I have aimed to do is to locate the passage in praise of the beloved among its evident relations in the thought world of the last years before the Christian era, with one example from that era itself which suggests the destination of this particular strand of tradition.

6.3. The Shiur Koma14

In 1960 Gershom Scholem published the ﬁrst edition of his Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition, which included the seminal chapter, ‘The Age of Shiur Komah Speculation and a Passage in Origen’. It begins: At the end of his journey the Merkabah mystic beholds not only a vision of the world of the Merkabah and the throne of God, but also a vision of Him who sits upon that throne––a vision in which He appears to the mystic in ‘a likeness as the appearance of a man’ (Ezekiel 1: 26). Whereas all the other visions are of things created, however high their rank, this ﬁnal vision is of the divine glory itself. The doctrine which grew up around this vision, the doctrine of the mystical ‘body of God’, Shiur Komah, is of special importance in establishing the antiquity of some parts of the Hekhalot writings.15

12 R. H. Charles 1913: 214. I have modernized the language slightly. 13 On which there is a mighty literature. But as none of it, as far as I am aware, makes links to the Song, I will have to pass over it. 14 Variously transliterated, as will be seen. It is also variously translated, usually ‘measure of the stature’. I have quoted Morray-Jones extensively in the latter part of this chapter and, for the sake of consistency, have adopted the orthography used in his book written with Christopher Rowland (2009) for this term, and also for the term ‘Merkava’, and the name Akiva. The question of italicizing remains a problem. Morray-Jones italicizes Shiur Koma in titles, but not otherwise. I have italicized shiur koma, and given both words capitals when they are used adjectivally. 15 Gershom Scholem 1965a: 36. This second, improved edition is that from which my quotations are taken. 186 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

Scholem goes on to say that the doctrine consists of the description of the limbs of God in the ﬁgure of a man, giving astronomic measurements of every limb, and of the most minute parts of the head, all of which have secret names constructed of seemingly incomprehensible combinations of letters, always described as nomina barbara. Scholem continues:

The whole doctrine is linked, not only in the separate fragment of it that has come down to us under the title Shiur Komah (literally, ‘The measurement of the body’), but also in the small fragment incorporated into the Greater Hekhaloth, to the description of the ﬁgure of the lover in the Song of Songs: ‘My beloved is white and ruddy . . . his head is as most ﬁne gold, his locks are curled and black as a raven. His eyes are like doves’, etc. (5: 10–16). (37) Then he asks whether this doctrine, which gives a bodily appearance to the kabod, ‘the glory of God’, is an early ingredient of Jewish mystical teaching or a later recrudescence of an extravagant anthropomorphism of which the earlier mystical tradition was innocent. He answers this question by probing the implications of the passage in Origen, the second half of which is worth repeating in this context: they [the Rabbis and teachers] defer to the last the following four texts: The beginnings of Genesis, where the creation of the world is described; the beginning of the prophecy of Ezekiel, where the doctrine of the angels is expounded; the end [of the same book] which contains the description of the future temple; and this book of the Song of Songs. ‘There is no doubt’, Scholem says, ‘but that this quotation refers to the fact that esoteric teachings were connected with the four texts enumerated.’ In the case of the Song it would, due to Origen’s interpretation, be given a Christo- logical interpretation––but that was in the future. Origen refers to something current in Jewish usage. ‘We cannot’, Scholem says, ‘assume that the Syna- gogue in the second century, or at the beginning of the third, could have relegated a book to oblivion because it was given a Christological interpretation that actually came into general use only at a later time’. Scholem then comes to the passage in his chapter which I believe is central to an understanding of the Song:

It seems to me, therefore, that Origen’s statement calls for another explanation. I have said that the Song of Songs––because it contained a detailed description of the limbs of the lover, who was identiﬁed with God––became the basic scriptural text upon which the doctrine of Shiur Komah leaned. But it is clear that the authors of our fragments of Shiur Komah, instead of interpreting the Song of Songs as an allegory within the framework of the generally accepted midrashic interpretations, saw it as a strictly esoteric text containing sublime and tremendous mysteries regarding God in The Beloved 187

His appearance upon the throne of the Merkabah. Indeed, by virtue of these strange revelations, Shiur Komah comes to be considered, in the fragments that have been preserved, as the deepest chapter opened up to the Merkabah mystic for his inspection and speculation. (39–40)

The subject, thus understood––namely, as a description of God––was hailed with enthusiasm, and the chapter generated a learned literature in support of it in the years immediately following its publication. But Scholem had left out of this account the complicating factor he had included in a brief discussion of the Shiur Koma in his earlier Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism: ‘Here we come inevitably to the question whose bodily dimensions are the subject of these fantastic descriptions?’ And he goes on to ask whether there existed among the Merkava mystics––to whom we owe the preservation of the Shiur Koma––a belief in a fundamental distinction between the appearance of God the Creator, the Demiurge, i.e. one of His aspects, and His indefinable essence.16 Nearly twenty years after the publication of Scholem’s Shiur Koma chapter, Joseph Dan published an important article, ‘The Concept of Knowledge in the Shi ur Qomah’, in which, after referring to the Song as ‘the parent text’, he goes on to pick up the term ‘demiurge’ from Scholem’s earlier work, using it when he comes to explain a passage in the Shiur Koma in which is twice repeated: ‘Anyone who knows these dimensions of our Creator, and the praise of the Holy One, Blessed be He, who is hidden from all created creatures . . . ’ (author’s emphasis). Dan continues: ‘The insistent use of the term Creator (yoser) throughout the Shi ur Qomah cannot be explained as an accident, and ˙ there is little doubt that the idea of the demiurge was prominent in the minds of these mystics.’17 The first major work of disagreement, as far as I am aware, was published in 1983. Martin Cohen’s The Shiur Qomah: Liturgy and Theurgy in Pre- Kabbalistic Jewish Mysticism, together with his Shiur Qomah: Texts and Recen- sions, which followed in 1985, evince several years at the whetstone with results that have put all interested in the subject into his debt. Cohen disagrees with Scholem on two crucial points: the question of dating, which Cohen puts not earlier than the sixth century CE, as against Scholem’s second century; and the use in the Shiur Koma of the passage in the Song which describes the male figure, to which Cohen allows little, if any, significance. Nevertheless, he argues that the word qomah is intended to recall the passage

16 Scholem 1961: 65. 17 1979: 71.Whether the term ‘demiurge’ is the right one to attribute to this figure is a question. See the section called ‘The Angelic-Priestly Messiah and the Hierarchy of Worship’ (535–6) in Morray-Jones (2009), to which we shall come shortly. 188 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God at Cant. 7: 8 where this word occurs (see §2.3).18 But in regard to the passage at Cant. 5: 10–16, it is difficult to know on what Cohen’s determination to dismiss its importance in the Shiur Koma is based. Perhaps, as is commonly the case, he is influenced by the trivializing of the Song in modern times and is, consequently, unable to reconcile such an understanding of the Song with a text he rightly regards with great seriousness. Or he may intuitively resist the implications of the passage on grounds of faith. Whatever the reason, the second paragraph of his Introduction to The Shiur Qomah: Texts and Recen- sions suggests that the presence of the male figure of the Song is unwelcome: The assumption on the part of many scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the Shiur Qomah is a mystic midrash, so to speak, on the Song of Songs is not borne out by the texts themselves. The famous description of the lover found in the fifth chapter of the Song is, in fact, cited to varying extents in the various recensions of the text, but its function there is clearly to provide a literary frame for the text, and not to function as a proof-text in the traditional midrashic sense.19 Since the publication of Cohen’s two books there have been a number of studies on the Shiur Koma, notably one by Michael Fishbane, ‘The “Meas- ures” of God’s Glory in the Ancient Midrash’, which is an extraordinary exploration into hidden meanings.20 But the early enthusiasm has given place to a certain wariness as both the complexities of the subject and its potential, not merely for scholarly debate but, more painful, for inner Jewish and Jewish–Christian conflict, emerge. It is, for instance, significant that an exceptional collection of articles, Paradise Now: Essays on Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism (2006) contains no contribution on the subject and only one reference to the Song of Songs, once a familiar ingredient in the discussions opened up by Scholem on early Jewish mysticism. But now, in The Mystery of God (2009), written with Christopher Rowland, Christopher Morray-Jones has given us a study of Merkava mysticism, ‘The Body of the Glory: Approaching the New Testament from the Perspective of Shiur Koma Traditions’, which takes the subject further than ever before, and decisively answers Scholem’s question: ‘Whose bodily dimensions are the subject of these fantastic descriptions?’ It is this work, with its patient and profound probing of the Jewish mystical literature, on which I shall draw for the rest of this discussion.

18 1983: 78. 19 1985: 1. 20 1992b. Appropriately published in a work called Messiah and Christos: Studies in the Jewish Origins of Christianity, a festschrift to a great interfaith scholar, David Flusser. The Beloved 189

6.4. ‘The Body of the Glory’

In a section called ‘The Shiur Koma: Traditions, Texts, Recensions’, Morray-Jones claims that the texts of the Shiur Koma are the outcome of a long and controversial process of development, in the course of which traditions derived from Second Temple apocalyptic and sectarian Judaism were subjected to considerable alteration by redactors who have tried to impose on them a theological structure which conformed to the tenets of rabbinic orthodoxy as this was formulated during the first few centuries CE. (507) Moving on to the texts themselves, Morray-Jones describes the huge measurements of the limbs and members of the kabod pictured in them: ‘These measurements are given in parasangs or Persian miles . . . Several texts state that these are divine parasangs [while the] majority attribute secret names, as well as measurements to the various body parts’ (507). The views of the Church Fathers are cited, notably those of Irenaeus and Origen, who were profoundly opposed to the belief that God can be pictured in corporeal terms (509–10). But both views are seen as ultimately amounting to the impossibility of imagining God: the ‘Greek’ view because God is understood to be incorporeal; the ‘Jewish’ view because his corporeality is unimaginable.21 A section called ‘Shiur Koma as Esoteric Worship’ focuses on the aspect of theurgy in these texts, and the definition proposed by E. R. Dodds is cited: ‘magic applied to a religious purpose and resting on a supposed revelation of a religious character’,22 a definition which describes the use of the term ‘theurgy’ by Martin Cohen. Against this view Moshe Idel is cited, who sharply distinguishes theurgy from magic, and who applies the term theurgy to ‘oper- ations intended to influence the Divinity, mostly in its own inner state or dynamics, but sometimes also in its relationship to man’.23 Morray-Jones refers to other views of theurgic practice, but for the present purpose it is enough to note that the Shiur Koma is widely considered to belong in the category of theurgical works. In the last few lines of this section Morray-Jones writes: By reciting the measurements of the body of the Glory, together with the names of which that body is composed, the shiur komah practitioner participates in this hierarchy of worship at the highest level and so helps to ‘construct’ the visible Image of the formless God. Since that Image is the Maker and Sustainer of Creation, this is a

21 See Andrei Orlov (2006) for a discussion on the ‘complicated polemics for and against an anthropomorphic understanding of God’ in the Old Testament. See also Weinfeld (1972: 191–209), to whom Orlov points. 22 1964: 291. 23 1988a: 157. 190 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God theurgic action of considerable significance: ‘Life depends upon his praise.’ Israel’s worship, of which the shiur koma is the most profound esoteric expression, participates in the divine activity of Creation, and manifests the body of the Glory in the world. (518) In the next four sections, Morray-Jones continues to progress, through detailed textual analysis, to the point where it is possible to make certain claims concerning the second divine figure, called the Youth and also Meta- tron. The sections are: ‘The Angelic Youth’, ‘The Youth and the Holy One: Shiur Koma and the Song of Songs’, ‘The Angelic-Priestly Messiah and the Hierarchy of Worship’, and ‘The Concealment of the Messianic Youth’.24 In the ‘Angelic Youth’ section, Morray-Jones cites a passage from the Siddur Rabbah recension of shiur koma: The appearance of his face and the appearance of the cheeks are as the measure of the spirit and as the form of the soul, which no man can perceive, as it is said: ‘His body is like tarshish’ (Dan. 10: 6 [cf. Cant. 5: 14]). And his face and the brilliance thereof shine forth and give light from the midst of the darkness, cloud and mist that surround him. Yet although these surround him, all the princes of the Countenance are poured forth before him like jugs of water, because of the form of his beauty and splendor. (518–19) In this section, ‘The Angelic Youth’, Morray-Jones analyses a passage from the Siddur Rabbah recension which he believes preserves an early stage of the Shiur Koma tradition. Among the points made, one of particular interest is that the Youth’s crown indicates he is the heavenly representative of Israel. There follows a long and detailed analysis of the names by which God calls the Youth in this recension which leads to ‘the possibility that, at some stage during the development of the shiur koma tradition, when this text was produced, the Youth was sometimes called “the son of God”. Whatever it may have meant in this context’, Morray-Jones concludes, ‘can hardly be post- Christian’ (525). From the section, ‘The Youth and the Holy One: Shiur Koma and the Song of Songs’ I will touch only on the extended passage––again from the Siddur Rabbah recension––which begins ‘This is the stature (koma) of Yedidiah’. Yedidiah means ‘Beloved of Yah’, and was the name given to Solomon at his birth by the prophet Nathan. In this recension, Morray-Jones tells us, the name evidently signifies that the figure described is identical with the male beloved of the Song of Songs, but the redactor(s) identified this figure with the Glory of the Holy One, although the name is inappropriate if applied to

24 This last section begins a new chapter (16) called ‘Shiur Koma Traditions in Jewish and Hellenistic Sources’. The Beloved 191 God, since the ‘Beloved of Yah’ must, by implication, be distinct from Yah himself (532). The next section, ‘The Angelic-Priestly Messiah and the Hierarchy of Worship’, begins: As we have seen, the evidence suggests that the shiur koma tradition was originally concerned with two separate figures: the kavod of God himself, to whom the scriptural throne-theophany verses were applied, and the Youth, who was identified as the Beloved of the Song of Songs. For reasons which are not yet clear, the latter identification was unacceptable to the rabbinic redactors of the tradition, who preserved the character of the Youth but transferred the description of the Beloved to the kavod. (534–5) All that follows in this section is significant from the standpoint of New Testament theology, especially the ‘Son of Man’ who is identified with the occupant of the second throne in Dan. 7: 9–14, and is similarly identified with King David who, in a few manuscripts of Hekhalot Rabbati, occupies a liturgical role parallel to that of the Youth in the Shiur Koma: ‘His [David’s] appearance, like that of the Youth, is said to be magnificent, and the brilliance of his crown irradiates the universe. Most significantly, this messianic representative of Israel has a fiery throne, “forty parasangs high” placed before the throne of God.’ Morray-Jones continues: ‘The angelic-messianic Youth is, then, the leader of the celestial liturgy who summons the kavod to visible appearance on the throne. Since the shiur komah, over which he also presides, is the ultimate expression of that “praise”, his function is to make God’s glory visible’ (537). After all this the title of the next section, which begins Chapter 16, ‘The Concealment of the Messianic Youth’, comes as no surprise. It concludes: There are, then, good reasons for believing that the shiur koma recensions, although heavily censored by their redactors, preserve very ancient traditions indeed. If the arguments above are accepted, the suppressed tradition of the enthroned Youth- Messiah must be at least as old as the tannaitic period. All the evidence points to the late first or early second century as the period when the process of suppression was initiated. The tradition itself must, therefore, be pre-rabbinic. (542) This material, difficult as it is from every standpoint, embodies, I believe, the original understanding of the beloved in the Song as the expected and longed-for messiah. That a shift has taken place from the Song itself to the gigantism of the Shiur Koma material requires another explanation. But, whatever that explanation might be, it should not prevent us from recogniz- ing that the Song, in Dan’s happy phrase, is ‘the parent text’. And it is indeed the parent text in the sense of generating other texts which, however different, owe their inspiration to the begetting power of the parent, the Song of Songs. 192 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

6.5. Akiva again

Finally, on the problems all this material raises, I want to return to Rabbi Akiva and to his role in regard to the Song. As we have seen (Introduction §2), Akiva is the hero of the Song in that by his exclamation, ‘The Song of Songs is the Holy of holies’, he saved the Song from possible exclusion from the accepted books. But he is also––to put it too strongly––the villain in that by the system of biblical exegesis he promoted with the intention of defining the Bible against the Christians,25 he succeeded in reducing the Song to a midrash on the Torah instead of a book in its own right which he himself had described as the holiest in all the Scriptures. In the section ‘The Youth and the Holy One: Shiur Koma and the Song of Songs’, Morray-Jones begins with Alan Segal’s Two Powers in Heaven, in which Segal describes a complex of first- and second-century midrashic traditions concerning the two appearances of God, one as an old man at Sinai and the other as a handsome youth at the Red Sea. Morray-Jones comments: ‘The majority of the sources resist the heretical potential of the tradition by insisting that the Youth and the Ancient of Days are both modes of appearance of the Holy One.’ Later, in the section on ‘The Concealment of the Messianic Youth’, Morray-Jones reflects that it seems to be inconsistent with Akiva’s position on the Song of Songs that he claims it was delivered on Mount Sinai, where God is said to have appeared as the Ancient One, not in the youthful form of the beloved. Morray-Jones goes on: Akiva’s Sinai-theory looks rather like an alternative defensive strategy, which aimed to sever the connection between the Beloved of the Song of Songs and the angelic Youth. As we have seen, the shiur koma redactors seem also to have adopted this strategy. This reconstruction, if accurate, implies that the tradition of allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs may have undergone a similar transformation. (540) This brings us from another direction to the same point we reached in the Introduction: the consequence of Akiva’s system for the Song was that it came to be interpreted in relation to the Exodus from Egypt, rather than as a poem on the love between the messianic Youth and his bride, Israel. A messianic reading of the Song was too much of a threat in the early second century, and Akiva may have foreseen––by what means we do not know––that the ‘bridegroom’ of the Song was destined to be interpreted as the ‘bridegroom’ of all four Gospels and the Apocalypse.26 And so it was that his genius redirected

25 As Louis Ginzberg, in his article ‘Akiva’ (1901), makes clear. 26 It is widely thought that Akiva would not have read the Gospels. The evidence suggests the contrary. He must, in any case, have been well-informed about them. The Beloved 193 the religion in a way that ensured its survival, thus earning him the title ‘the father of rabbinical Judaism’, which, as Louis Ginzberg writes in his Jewish Encyclopedia article, he deserved to be called to a degree beyond any other. Akiva’s life covered the years when the rise of Christianity threatened to render Judaism redundant, when Christianity’s claim that the expected messiah had come and, though killed as predicted, was alive and living among them, had to be countered at all costs. While Christianity was politically powerless, and subject to periods of quite spectacular persecution, it remained a threat at the religious level. But by the time another genius wrote a targum, both brilliantly Rabbinic and ‘intensely messianic’,27 to the Song in the seventh or eighth century, Christianity had long been the dominant religion of the Empire and was now, in its turn, under threat from Islam. If there was evidence that Christians were any the better––or any the better oﬀ––for their ‘messiah’ it was not at all apparent to the Jews, and thus the writer of the targum was able to interpret the Song in accordance with its original expectation of a messiah still to come. That Christianity continued to be a threat to Jews was one thing; that it ceased to be a threat to Judaism was another.

6.6. A fragment from the Chaldean Oracles

Finally, on the description of the beloved at Cant. 5: 10–16, I am unwilling to leave out of account a passage on a fragment in the Chaldean Oracles which, at an early stage of my study of the Song, I encountered in a thesis on Augustine’s Civitas Dei where the subject of theurgy arises. The passage struck me then, and continues to strike me whenever I reconsider it, as describing an aspect at least of what is happening at Cant. 5: 10–16. Here is the passage: The doctrines of theurgy were derived from the theology of the Chaldean Oracles and claimed to teach rituals whose performance intensified the presence on earth of higher beings through a law of universal sympathy, and could ultimately bring the purified soul of the officiant to union with the divine through the transformation of his own soul. Divine powers bind together the living organic unity of a cosmos perceived in terms of a metaphysic of emanation, maintaining ‘sympathies’ between the most disparate areas of the natural realm, so that each animal, plant, mineral or even part of the human or animal body corresponds to a particular planet or god which can be used for the purpose of influence, providing the right procedures and formulae are known. In the teletai [mystic rites] of which Augustine speaks in the

27 Introduction ‘Messianism’, 23, in Alexander. 194 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

Civitas Dei at 10.9, the operative principle of sympatheia assumes a direct correspondence between a given deity and his or her symbolic representative in the animal, vegetable and mineral worlds. Thus by properly fashioning and consecrating the god’s ‘material image’ (and then placing it in the god’s statue), he or she could be persuaded to appear, generally in the form of light, and answer questions put by the theurgist. Hecate gives instructions on how to fashion her ‘image’ of lizards, wild rue, myrrh, gum and frankincense ‘in the clear air under the waxing moon’ in conjunction with a prayer. Theurgy can best be characterized as ‘divine action’ since it involves not only divine actions on the part of men, but the ‘action of the Divine’ on behalf of men.28 The fragment described in this passage is number 224, against which, in Ruth Majercik’s text, translation, and commentary,29 there is an asterisk denoting that its authenticity is thought doubtful by some. For the present purpose its authenticity in relation to the Chaldean Oracles or otherwise is immaterial. What is of interest is the description itself and its theurgical character. The ﬁrst point which seems worth noting is that the description of what sounds like a statue at Cant. 5: 10–16 is given in answer to a question: ‘What is your beloved more than another beloved?’ And although the composition of the beloved lacks lizards, there are ‘spices yielding perfumes’ and myrrh and frankincense. The similarities at this point are, it seems to me, greater than the diﬀerences, and I submit that the poet has some such process in mind. What I am not suggesting is that there is any direct link between the poet and the Chaldean Oracles, although an indirect one, mediated through the theurgist’s trances, is not impossible. Let us take a brief look at what is known about these Oracles. A study by Polymnia Athanassiadi tells us that ‘The “Chaldaean Oracles”30 are a divine revelation in Greek hexameter verse of a cosmological and soteriological system and a set of moral and ritual rules and instructions.’31 That they were delivered to Julian the Theurgist, son of Julian the Chaldean, who probably lived in the eastern part of the Roman empire in the time of Marcus Aurelius, is widely agreed, Athanassiadi writing on this point: ‘I have chosen to accept the evidence on which late antique spiritual orthodoxy was built’ (150). She goes on to describe how the theurgist, after years of training, falls into a trance and speaks in verse in his or her language: ‘Once the link with the supernatural becomes established, those around the “prophet” begin to anticipate the utterances and are ready to take them down. Such was the practice in Babylonian temples, as now emerges from the publication of their archives’ (151).

28 James Lawson, 1996: 69. 29 1989: 134. 30 ‘Chaldaean’ is spelt thus by this writer. 31 1999: 149. The Beloved 195 The extraordinary regard in which the Oracles were held by men of the highest intellect, from Porphyry onwards, cannot be exaggerated. Reading the fragments superficially it is not at first easy to understand why they were so revered, but if one stops to ponder some of them, meanings emerge, and one begins to realize that there are depths which do not meet the eye, or which one is incapable of plumbing. But the intention of the theurgist to make contact with Plato seems to rule out any epistemological or theological links with a book of the Hebrew Bible, as also with the shiur koma literature. And yet, notwithstanding that in the Oracles we are in another world, it is with this literature that we find some striking similarities. For instance, Majercik writes that nomina barbara are a staple of late Antique magical practice. She goes on:

Although a cursory glance at these lists of sounds reveals what appears to be a random selection of so much vocal gibberish, closer scrutiny shows that there are definite patterns not only to the arrangements of the vowels and consonants, but also in terms of numerical equations, all of which had potent magical properties. By rhythmically chanting these sounds (which equalled the ‘hidden’ or divine name of the god), the adept was able to effect the proper conjunction with the god. (25) An earlier passage in Majercik’s Introduction is also of interest: it is clear that the Chaldean system included a complex ascent ritual involving purifi- cations, trance, phantasmagoria, sacred objects, magical instruments and formulas, prayers, hymns, and even a contemplative element, all of which was practised (most likely) in the context of a ‘mystery community’. (5) The fragments in which Eros, the god of love, appears are too Platonist in tone to sound associations with the Song, although Majercik, referring to Eros’ function as an all-pervasive cosmic power which ‘leaps forth’ from God to mankind and the world, claims that the Chaldean Eros goes beyond the ‘normal Platonic “ascending” form of Love, and approaches, in some respects, the Christian notion of agape, wherein God Himself is motivated by love’ (16). But, she goes on, the parallel is not exact for the Oracles have no figure analogous to Christ (or to the Youth in the shiur koma literature). Minor similarities with the vocabulary of both the Song and the Hekhalot literature include ‘seals’ which, in the Oracles, effect the soul’s ascent. And there is much about the One in the Oracles, as also in the Hekhalot literature, and the verse at Cant. 6: 9: ‘She is one my dove, my perfect one, one she is to her mother . . . ’. Whether these similarities amount to anything I am not at all sure. Of what I am convinced, however, is that at an experiential level of a high order the Song and the Oracles share a great deal. In the next chapter on 196 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God the ‘Eros of God’ we will see the evidence, as I understand it, for the contemplative dimension of the Song, and a passage from the Oracles which wonderfully illumines a difficult verse at Cant. 6: 5. 7

The Eros of God

7.1. The imagery of marriage and death

In a dictionary entry called ‘Spiritual Marriage’, Benedicta Ward writes:

The term is generally used to describe the highest degree of contemplative prayer experienced by the mystic. This usage was established by St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross in the sixteenth century, but it is a term which has a much longer history. The use of the image of marriage to describe the union of the soul with God is found in pre-Christian sources, both Jewish and Platonic. Philo of Alexandria, for instance, sees the union of the soul with God in nuptial terms (De Cherubim, 42–52) and Gnostic writings describe the return of the soul to unity with the divine in terms of the marriage of Sophia with the Lord. It is, however, in the OT that the image is most clearly used, in describing the relationship of God to Israel. Later in the entry Ward, writing from the Christian perspective, notes that: The tradition of applying the imagery of marriage more speciﬁcally to the individual soul in its relationship of prayer to Christ has received formulation from commentators on the Song of Songs, beginning with Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, and continuing through St Bernard to St John of the Cross. It is, however, in the Interior Castle of St Teresa that the mystical analysis of spiritual marriage is fully formulated. This degree of union between the soul and God is reserved for the seventh and last mansion, the culmination of the life of prayer. St Teresa does not regard this stage as a passing experience but as the habitual state of union between the soul and the three persons of the Trinity, in which the person acts from that centre henceforward in peace and certainty.1 In Jewish tradition, from the early to the late medieval period, union is accomplished not by marriage but by death,2 whether literal or mystical. In his book The Kiss of God: Spiritual and Mystical Death in Judaism, Michael Fishbane, describing a midrashic account of the death of Moses, writes:

1 1983: 259–60. 2 Though a hard-and-fast distinction cannot be made. There is a great deal about death in the writings of Christian mystics, and a great deal about the marriage between God and Israel in Jewish commentaries on the Song. 198 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

In one poignant scene, near the end, Moses’ soul refuses to leave his saintly body, perfected by the commandments and celibate since Sinai. But no creature born of woman can live forever, and God withdraws the soul by a kiss. Thus does Moses die ‘by the mouth of the Lord,’ a death whose erotic overtones resound.3 Moving from Deut. Rabbah to Cant. Rabbah, Fishbane continues: The kiss is thus the culmination of a spiritual quest, a rapture of the perfected soul into divine bliss. Several puns underscore the point. These too are found in the Midrash, where the verb yishaqeni, ‘let him kiss me,’ is heard to hint at the soul’s purification and cleaving to God . . . Not all later traditions link the kiss of God with spiritual cleaving to God, some stressing only one theme or the other. But their fusion in Songs Rabbah, through a pun on the verb yishaqeni (kiss; cleave), indicates the complex template that later philosophical and mystical traditions could utilize. The further association of these topics with spiritual death entwines eros and thanatos in intricate ways. For the religious seeker, the quest for true life requires death of some sort. The precise nature of this death, and how it may be achieved, are the lessons of the masters.4 We see from these passages that the Song has from early times been understood in relation to prayer and to the mystical path. That the analysis of states of prayer is relatively modern is due to historical factors and is without implications for the timeless capacity of the human person to be brought into such states. Whether such a capacity is inherent in every human being, and has existed from the beginning of the race, are probably not questions to which there can be a definite answer, but that such states have been practised from time immemorial in many parts of the world––India, for instance––is beyond doubt. Equally beyond doubt is the suspicion and hostility which such a capacity may arouse (see 5.§8), not least in the guardians of religion: ‘Woe to you [blind guides], because you shut people out of the kingdom of heaven; for you neither enter yourselves, nor allow those who would enter to go in’ (Matt. 23: 13). The ‘blind guides’ of modern times are, in regard to the Song, to be found in various disciplines, all under the influence of post-Freudian psychology. Historians of medieval monasticism, in particular, treat the monks’ hours of lectio divina on the Song as a very dangerous occupation indeed during which the monk must try to interpret the Song spiritually, ‘so full is it of erotic danger and risk’. The author of this line goes on: Hermeneutical disaster is threatened by a reading of the Song in terms of the sexual intimacies it describes; but the intimate eroticism of the actual describing threatened

3 1994: 19. 4 Ibid. 19–20. This book is a particular treasure except that Fishbane’s apparent conformity in it to the modern consensus on the Song is at curious odds with his subject. The Eros of God 199 personal spiritual disaster. Together with the more general, theological and literary reasons for reading the Song allegorically, a primary ascetical motive was to denature the text itself, to neutralise its power to arouse forbidden passion.5 But in that case, why did they read the Song? Why did they saddle themselves with a text which, on this reading, courted disaster? Such an interpretation assumes a half-wittedness in the tradition that the writings of all who understood the Song in a biblical sense (and all did––Tertullian, Ambrose, Augustine, and the monks of Western monasticism) hardly bears out. No! The very opposite is the case. Divine eros purifies human eros. The monk (or nun) caught in the trap of erotic imaginings can be recalled by a word from the Song. A single antiphon at one of the Hours can renew the monk’s hope, bring cleansing tears, and be a reminder of the love that first brought him or her to the monastery. And the more contemplative the monk, the more will this be so. For the highly metaphorical language of the Song speaks to the soul at a level beyond words, ‘I sleep, but my heart is awake’ (Cant. 5: 2). Any contemplative will understand quite precisely what that means. It was, then, the particular genius of the Western tradition to place the Song in the liturgy. It is worship that provides the hermeneutical key to the Song, though it could do nothing if the original text intended other than to arouse the love of God. To place a work in the context of worship is, in effect, to apply a litmus test of intention.6

7.2. Three witnesses to the eros of God

The application of post-Freudian attitudes to the eros of the Song continues, although with some signs of advance in understanding. In a collection of essays called Toward a Theology of Eros, Part V: ‘Re-reading the Song of Songs’, contains an essay by Richard Kearney, ‘The Shulammite’s Song: Divine Eros, Ascending and Descending’, which indicates such signs of advance. Its sections range from ‘Talmudic and Kabbalistic Readings’ to ‘Reading the Song in the Context of Contemporary Thought’, notably Lacan. The sections on Christian interpretations contain passages on or by Bernard, John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila which are apposite for the present purpose and on which I am grateful to draw.7 Kearney’s ﬁve pages on Bernard’s eighty-four Sermones in Cantica Canticorum present the extraordinary infusions of divine love which Bernard

5 Denys Turner 1995: 161. 6 Drawn from my review of Turner’s book, 1997: 145–7. I am unable to put it any better and the point is central, not only to my understanding of the Song but to my experience of it. 7 2006. 200 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God experienced, and felt compelled to speak about to his not always appreciative monks. Kearney’s tone is inherently hostile to Bernard, but the reader who knows Bernard will be glad to be reminded of his sermons on the Canticle which contain long passages of mystical theology as wonderful as any ever written. From the passages Kearney quotes I take two. The ﬁrst is from Sermon 9: I am in love. I have already received much more than I deserve, but less than I desire. I am motivated not by my head, but by my heart. It may be unreasonable to want more, but I am driven by passionate desire. I blush with shame, but love will not be denied. Love does not listen to arguments. It is not cooled by the intellect. I beg. I plead. I burn. ‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth . . .’ (321) And again, less passionately but more informatively, from Sermon 74: I never notice the precise moment when he arrives. I feel his presence and then I remember that he was with me. Sometimes I have a premonition that he is coming to me. But I have never been able to put my ﬁnger on the exact moment when he arrived or departed. What path he uses to enter or leave my soul is a mystery to me. (320) Bernard has been out of favour for many years,8 but John of the Cross’s mystical experience, as shown forth in his Spiritual Canticle, the poem inspired by the Song, is treated more neutrally, possibly because John is taken seriously as a poet: From the opening verses [Kearney writes], John bears witness to a wound caused by the divine stag. He has already been shot through with ‘the thrust of the lance’ which now leaves him ‘moaning’ and disoriented––sick with love. And yet this wounding, which leaves him in such destitute loss, is also, he avows, something blissful and benign. It is ‘after the taste of some sweet and delightful’ contact with the divine lover that the bride speaks out. In short, the bride’s sense of terrible absence is consequent upon a visitation of fullness and presence. The goal of her desiring is somehow already the origin of her desire. (324) And a little further on: As we proceed through the stanzas, a remarkable shift occurs that, I believe, is typical of John’s mystical experience. The wound of the bride is reversed into the wound of

8 Due partly to the difficulty many readers experience in the face of Bernard’s particular kind of certainty in regard to God, and partly to his undoubted error in preaching a crusade. But Bernard shared the conviction of his times that pagans and infidels were all destined to eternal damnation unless converted to Christianity. Against this it should be remembered that when Bernard was asked to give his approval to a pogrom against the Jews in Germany he refused, declaring ‘No! The Jews are our brothers . . . ’. In gratitude, Jewish mothers called their sons ‘Bernard’, a name which continues to be popular with Jews to this day, although the reason for its adoption has long been forgotten. The Eros of God 201 the bridegroom. The human and divine lovers are now both sufferers of the wound, which unites them in blissful-painful desire. This ‘spiritual betrothal’ as John describes it in stanzas 14–15, is profoundly ambivalent. It speaks of a superabundance of love, comparable to Isaiah’s ‘overflowing river’ where the soul may ‘taste a splendid spiritual sweetness’; but it also speaks of terror and fear before the very force of this mystical ecstasy. The soul is compelled to beg the beloved to ‘withdraw the eyes I have desired’; it is clearly too much for either the senses or mind to endure. This is the boundless ‘abyss of knowledge’, the colorless void of sensation, the dark night of the soul which the bride must endure before she can move from ‘spiritual betrothal’ to ‘spiritual marriage’ proper. (325) Kearney twice refers to Teresa as John’s ‘protegé’ whereas, if the word is to be used at all, it is the other way round. John was twenty-seven years younger than Teresa, and it was he who joined her Reform. But that John is in some respect superior to Teresa is a common mistake, against which we find that a younger contemporary of the two saints wrote: ‘San Juan de la Cruz is for beginners; our Mother Teresa is for the advanced’.9 That is to say, John’s rigour in depriving the soul of every possible prop and comfort on the ascent to Mount Carmel makes him the perfect guide in the early stages of the journey, while Teresa’s analysis of advanced states of prayer, forced on her by her confessors, tends to mislead the inexperienced. In his attitude to Teresa, Kearney manifests male reaction to the feminine pronoun, reinforced by the Freudian/Lacanian schema in which he categor- izes her: ‘Teresa proceeds to make suggestive analogies about the way in which divine eros enters and exits from the center of the feminine being . . . intimat- ing that this is some mysterious experience of pre-phallic jouissance’. He goes on: ‘The associative implications of erotic pleasuring, fecundation and impregnation are powerfully present’. Nevertheless, the six pages on Teresa reveal enough of her experiences to indicate that their source was not in Teresa’s psychology, especially the last major quotation (Sixth Mansion, ch. 2). Kearney introduces this by saying that in it ‘Teresa chooses to deliver her most notorious and audacious account of divine ecstasy, which has so pre- occupied commentators of mystical desire down the ages from prurient redactors and inquisitors to subversive anthropologists (Georges Bataille) and bemused psychoanalysts (Marie Bonaparte, Jacques Leuba, and Jacques Lacan) who coined the term erotic “transverberation”’ (331). Here it is: So powerful is the effect of this upon the soul that it becomes consumed with desire, yet cannot think what to ask, so conscious is it of the presence of God. Now, if this is so, you will ask me what it desires or what causes it distress . . . I cannot say, I know

9 Fra Joseph de Jesus-Maria ODC, 1562–1629. Cited in an account of a Carmelite Sym- posium on John of the Cross by Sister Rosemary SLG 1984. 202 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God that this distress seems to penetrate to its very bowels; and that, when He that has wounded it draws out the arrow, the bowels seem to come with it, so deeply does it feel this love. I have just been wondering if my God could be described as the fire in a lighted brazier, from which some spark will fly out and touch the soul, in such a way that it will be able to feel the burning heat of the fire, but as the fire is not hot enough to burn it up, and the experience is very delectable, the soul continues to feel that pain and the mere touch suffices to produce that effect . . . and just as the soul is about to become enkindled, the spark dies, and leaves the soul yearning once again to suffer that loving pain of which it is the cause’. (331–2) The final section, ‘Reading the Song in the Context of Contemporary Thought’, makes use of the ideas of Lacan and Bataille––‘another French thinker fascinated by what he calls “divine love”’. Fascinated Bataille may have been, and there is clearly an element of genuine enquiry in both these thinkers, but they are ill-equipped for the terrain of encounter with the One in whom neither believe. What, then, equips a person for encounter?

7.3. The necessary equipment

Since the advent of psychology as a discipline at the end of the nineteenth century, and especially since Freud, we have all understood the human person to consist of two levels of consciousness, the level of the unconscious and the level of ordinary, waking consciousness. The study of the workings of the unconscious have been, and continue to be, of enormous importance, such as Freud’s discovery of the compulsion to return to previous states, and the workings of the pleasure–pain principle. But Freud, above all, exemplifies the ignorance of a third level of consciousness, which is not to imply that this level was undeveloped in him, only that he was neither concerned with it nor experienced in it, to judge by a letter he once wrote: ‘On the whole I have not found much of the “good” in people. Most of them are, in my experience, riff raff, whether they proclaim themselves adherents of this or that ethical doctrine or of none at all.’10 Thus there is little general awareness of a third level of consciousness but, when known, it is often given the label ‘supra-conscious’, though it might be what Origen, and others after him, call the ‘spiritual senses’. But whatever we call it, or however we understand it, it is not readily identifiable like the other two. It has to be developed, or revealed, according to different ways of understanding this third level, and this is done not only but most certainly in that type of prayer called contemplation or meditation.

10 Ernest Jones, 1964 edition, 445. The Eros of God 203

There can, then, be no ‘theology of eros’ without the presence of this third level of consciousness, developed by the drawing of the created being to the uncreated Being. Kearney points in a footnote to Rumi and Al-Arabi in the Sufi Islamic tradition; to the Gita Govinda, Saundarya Lahari, and Tagore’s Gitanjali in the Hindu tradition; and to Tantric interpretations of a divine bliss in Buddhist traditions. All these, despite some profound differences, manifest the same development of that third level of consciousness without which there is no real knowledge or experience of the One with whom a relationship is claimed. But, confining myself to Bernard, John of the Cross, and Teresa, what we have seen in the quotations from their writings is that they are powerless in the face of something Other with whom lies the initiative. They are, like Paul, ‘chosen vessels’, but of the eros of God. They are chosen, it seems, to be the recipients of God’s love because the experience of him is safe with them, and will be conveyed to those who need encouragement in the difficulties of the spiritual path, that is, of our return to him. The mistake, at once inevitable and disastrous––if they are to be understood––is to read these mystics from the standpoint of their psychology. All three were celibate, a state which lends itself to psychological speculation, and all three––in their different ways––possessed characters of considerable power. But it was their willingness to suffer the most extreme purification at God’s hands which qualified them as ‘chosen vessels’. Without that willingness, the desire for mystical experience is a dangerous fantasy, as a saying from Hekhalot Zutarti (§335b), addressed to those on a mystical path, warns us: Be careful of the glory of your Creator and do not go into him; and if you have gone into him, do not take pleasure in him; and if you have taken pleasure in him, your end is to be cast out from the world.11 This extraordinary saying suggests that the eros of God is available to the presumptuous, but at the cost of being cast out from the ‘world’ (which in context probably means the ‘world to come’). But if it is dangerous to seek the experience of the eros of God, it is desirable to recognize the description of it, and especially to recognize that the source––in the case of mystics like Ber- nard, Teresa, and John of the Cross––is not in human psychology but in the gift of God. Returning to the text of the Song, I shall focus primarily in what follows on those passages concerned, in my understanding, with prayer, what hinders it, and what promotes it, beginning with a warning which, when similar

11 Cited in Morray-Jones 2009: 274. 204 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God warnings are adduced, appears as potentially severe as the one we have just seen from Hekhalot Zutarti.

7.4. ‘Turn your eyes from me’

Turn your eyes from me, for they frighten me away. That this verse (Cant. 6: 5a) is a warning against presumption or the wrong kind of intensity in prayer is supported by two diverse passages, both from sources as much concerned with mystical prayer as I believe the author of the Song to have been. The first, from the Cloud of Unknowing, leads to the theophany at Mount Sinai and to a verse (Exod. 19: 21) which may have been in the poet’s mind: So take care. For indeed if one should presume to draw near to the high mountain of this exercise in a beastlike way, one will be driven away with stones . . . So beware of these beastlike efforts, and learn to love with true fervour, with a gentle and peaceful disposition, both in body and soul. And wait patiently on the will of our Lord with courtesy and humility, and do not snatch at it hurriedly, like a greedy greyhound, no matter how hungry you may be. And I advise you to play some sort of game, so that you can do all that is possible to contain these great and boisterous movements of your spirit, as though you did not wish him to know in any way how you desire to see him and have experience of him.12 And in the account in Exodus we meet the injunction: ‘And the Lord said to Moses, “Go down and warn the people lest they break through to the Lord to gaze, and many of them perish”’––a verse which recalls the Story of the Four. The second passage, from the Chaldean Oracles, is very different in language and style but evidently similar in thought and experience: For there exists a certain Intelligible13 which you must perceive by the flower of the mind. For if you should incline your mind toward it and perceive it as perceiving a specific thing, you would not perceive it. For it is the power of strength, visible all around, flashing with intellectual divisions. Therefore, you must not perceive that Intelligible violently but with the flame of mind completely extended which measures all things except that Intelligible. You must not perceive it intently, but keeping the

12 James Walsh SJ 1981: 208–9. My emphasis. 13 In Stephen MacKenna’s explanation of terminology, the words Intelligible and Intellectual belong to the Second Hypostasis of the Divine-Triad. See the section ‘Terminology’: ‘it is not very easy, without knowledge and the training of habit, to quiver with any very real rapture over the notion of becoming “wholly identified with the Intellectual-Principle”’ 1969: xxv. The Eros of God 205 pure eye of your soul turned away, you should extend an empty mind towards the Intelligible in order to comprehend it, since it exists outside of mind.14 Perhaps another example of what these passages are pointing to is to be found in the parable of the Publican and the Pharisee (Luke 18: 9–14): ‘But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven . . . I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other.’ But there is, of course, another strand of tradition, in accordance with Ben Sira’s ‘All things are twofold, one opposite the other’ (42: 24), and in this strand we find many examples of seeing God: ‘For I [Jacob] have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved’ (Gen. 32: 30); ‘Then Moses and Aaro, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel went up, and they saw the God of Israel’ (Exod. 24: 9); ‘Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend’ (Exod. 33: 11); ‘I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple’ (Isa. 6: 1); ‘as I was among the exiles, by the river Chebar, the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God’ (Ezek. 1: 1); while the Psalms have a great deal about seeking God’s face, and they affirm that ‘the righteous shall behold his face’ (11: 7).15 It seems that the poet preferred the tradition which advises against desiring to see the face of God. There is no exhortation to the female in the Song to gaze on the beloved, neither does she claim to have done so. But if the poet was cautious about the desire to see God, it is unlikely that he would have approved of developments among the ‘descenders to the Merkava’ who, according to the literature, ‘ascended’ with the specific aim of beholding the divine countenance.

7.5. ‘I am faint from love’

A passage at 2: 4–7 wonderfully conveys the experience of the eros of God: He has brought me into the house of wine, and his banner over me is love. Sustain me with raisin cakes, support me with apples, for I am faint from love. His left hand is under my head, and his right hand embraces me. I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem,

14 Majercik 1989: 49. 15 For the importance of this tradition see Margaret Barker’s chapter, ‘The Vision of God’, 1988. 206 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

by the gazelles or by the hinds of the field, that you stir not up nor waken love ‘til it please. We saw in the discussion on wine (§1.8) that the ‘house of wine’ suggests the Temple, ‘wine’ being a metaphor for the intoxication of worship, and ‘house’ the word most often used for the Temple. The banner (degel) links to Numbers (see Commentary ad loc.), and love is that which causes her to feel faint and must not be stirred or awakened at the end of the passage. There is a comment in the Zohar on the parallel character of the word ‘love’, HBHA, with the letters of the Tetragrammaton, HWHY, which is suggestive in regard to the use of ‘love’ in the Song: [HBHA] these are the letters upon which the Holy Name depends, and upon which the upper and the lower realms depend, and upon which the praise in the Song of Songs depends. And which are they? Alef, he, bet, he. They are the supernal Chariot, and they are the companionship, unison, and wholeness of all.16 On the experience of feeling ‘faint’ or ‘weak from love’, there is an abundance of examples in mystical writings. Here is just one, quoted by Fishbane in his The Kiss of God, from a thirteenth-century Spanish kabbalist, Abulafia: The more the divine influx is strengthened within you, the more your external and internal organs will weaken, and your body will begin to tremble very greatly, until you think you are about to die; for your soul becomes separated from your body due to the great joy in retaining and knowing what you have known. (39–40) Which brings us to the central verse of the passage, the cause of feeling ‘weak’ or, as the word can equally mean, ‘sick’, and in this context, ‘sick from love’: His left hand is under my head, and his right hand embraces me. This verse, and its twin at 8: 3, are the only places in Scripture to allow a left hand to God, or to an aspect of God, the left hand being considered an omen of ill throughout the ancient world. The only exception in the Old Testament is at Prov. 3: 16, and Origen uses that verse to interpret this: ‘The Bride- groom’s right and left hands are the same in this place as those attributed to Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs where the writer says: Length of life is in her right hand, and in her left hand riches and glory.’ Origen goes on to expound the relationship of the verses Christologically, and although he is, it seems to me, right to do so, he fails to convey the sense of the divine eros enwrapping

16 Isaiah Tishby in Lachower, Tishby, and Goldstein 1989: 365. The Eros of God 207 the soul in prayer, and of the pain caused to it in this state by being interrupted: I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles or by the hinds of the ﬁeld, that you stir not up nor waken love ‘til it please.

7.6. ‘I sleep, but my heart is awake’

Has love, then, gone to sleep? At 5: 2 the bride states: ‘I sleep, but my heart is awake’. There is, as far as I am able to discern, only one other verse in the Hebrew Bible, in Psalm 127, where ‘sleep’ has, I believe, the same meaning as at Cant. 5: 2: Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labour on it in vain. Unless the Lord guards the city, the guard keeps watch in vain. It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for so he gives to his beloved sleep. Apart from the last line, which baﬄes translators and commentators, this psalm yields good sense read literally. But the vocabulary suggests that it is a wisdom psalm, and that while it may on one level mean what it is taken to mean, on another something else is being described, not least in the second half––‘Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them’––where the few other occurrences of ‘quiver’ open up quite diﬀerent levels of meaning (cf. Isa. 49: 2 and Lam. 3: 13). But it is the line ‘so he gives to his beloved sleep’ which is the issue here. Psalm 127 is one of only two which has Solomon in its heading, the other being Psalm 72, where the superscription is simply ‘to, for, belonging to Solomon’. The superscription for Psalm 127 is ‘A Song of Ascents for [to or by] Solomon’. One commentator explains it thus: An editor searching for allusions in the historical books ascribed the psalm to Solo- mon in the title (absent from some LXX MSS), probably through taking the ‘house’ as the temple, relating ‘beloved’ with Solomon’s other name, Jedidiah (2 Sam. 12:25), and perhaps seeing in ‘sleep’ an allusion to Solomon’s dream (I Kings 3:10–15).17 It seems to me, however, that the line ‘and so he gives to his beloved sleep’

17 C. S. Rodd 2001: 400. 208 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God is referring to the same state as ‘I sleep but my heart is awake’ at Cant. 5: 2, that is to say, to a state of prayer. It is not often described, but Gregory of Nyssa in his Homilies on the Song of Songs gives us a remarkable description: This sleep is quite extraordinary and diﬀerent from one’s natural habit, for in natural sleep one is not awake. Both are opposed to each other, for sleep and waking succeed and follow one another. We see in the bride a new, paradoxical mixture of the oppos- ites: ‘I sleep’, she says, ‘and my heart is awake.’ What can we understand by this statement? This sleep is like death. In it each sensory function of the body is lost: there is no vision, hearing, scent, taste, nor feeling, but the body’s tension is loosed . . . Once all these senses have been put to sleep and are gripped by inaction, the heart’s action is pure; reason looks above while it remains undisturbed and free from the senses’ movement.18 Evagrius, Chapters on Prayer 120, evidently knows the same state: ‘Happy the spirit which attains to total insensibility at prayer.’19 Bamberger, in the same footnote from which I have taken this translation, goes on: ‘This teaching . . . conveys the teaching of the desert, for St Anthony had taught : “That prayer is not perfect in the course of which the monk is aware of the fact that he is praying.”’20 Neither Anthony nor Evagrius, as far as we know,21 attach this state to Cant. 5: 2. Nor does Teresa, for reasons we will see, but her analyses of states of prayer, required of her by her confessors, as we have already noted, make her a lucid and important witness: Indeed the soul does not even ﬁnd itself awake in order to love. But blessed sleep, happy inebriation that makes the Bridegroom supply for what the soul cannot do . . . For while the faculties are dead or asleep, love remains alive.22 ‘While the faculties are dead or asleep, love remains alive.’ The ‘sleep of the faculties’ occupies a place of fundamental importance in Teresa’s descriptions of states of prayer, not least in her Meditations on the Song of Songs, where she refers to the state several times. But it is clear from this work that she had not read the verse at 5: 2, ‘I sleep, but my heart is awake’, for she comments on no more than nine verses, and 5: 2 is not among them.23 Had she known it she

18 Trans. Casimir McCambley OCSO 1987: 194, 195. 19 Trans. John Eudes Bamberger OCSO 1970: 75 n. 54. 20 Ibid. Bamberger is quoting Cassian’s Conferences for this famous saying. 21 Evagrius wrote on the Song, but the work is lost, as also his other works on OT books. 22 Rodriguez and Kavanaugh 1980: 252. 23 The nine verses (if I have not missed any) are: 1: 2, 3; 2: 4, 5, 16; 4: 7; 6: 9; 7: 10; 8: 5. Spain continued to include the vernacular versions of the Bible on its index even after the Council of Trent decided not to legislate against translations, and Teresa did not read Latin. Her sources for the Song would have been the Monastic Office, especially the Office of Our Lady, and books on prayer and the spiritual life which quoted verses from the Song in the vernacular––which was permitted. The Eros of God 209 would have rejoiced in it for the state she calls the sueño, ‘sleep’, or suspensión de las potencias, ‘suspension of the faculties’, is one that the verses of the Song on which she does comment all lead her to speak. Neither does she know the verse, ‘His left hand is under my head, and his right hand embraces me,’ although it is just such language that she uses in her writings on the relationship of the contemplative soul to God. Not that the soul knows what is going on in it when the faculties are held in prayer. It is only afterwards that some kind of picture––such as that evoked by ‘His left hand is under my head’–– is filtered through from the supra-conscious level to that of ordinary consciousness and is recognized as how it was. Again, Teresa does not know of the charge to the Daughters of Jerusalem ‘that you stir not up nor waken love ‘til it please’, a hazard while praying she does not discuss in her Meditations, and I may have missed it in her other writings.24 The exhortation occurs a third time at the conclusion of the passage beginning ‘Upon my bed by night’ (3: 1–5), which we will meet when we come to the section ‘The seeking/calling motif ’.

7.7. ‘My beloved is mine and I am his’

This verse occurs, with variations, three times, first at 2: 16: My beloved is mine and I am his; he who feeds among the lilies. Second at 6: 3, with differences in the first half: I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine; he who feeds among the lilies. And a third time at 7: 11, with a difference of particular importance in the second half: I am my beloved’s, and upon me is his desire. Commentators who notice connections with other parts of the Bible see links between these verses and the prophetic or covenant formula: ‘I will be their God and they will be my people’ (Lev. 26: 12; Jer. 7: 23; etc.) Yes, but these references (and there are many more of them) leave one with a sense that, even if we can agree they are saying the same thing, the tone is different.

24 The clearest account known to me of the pain caused to someone by being disturbed when in this state of prayer is a description in John Saward of a well-meaning lady arousing from deep prayer the beggar saint Benedict-Joseph Labre, in order to invite him to dinner (1980: 201–2). 210 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

This is because they all issue from what I have called the masculine principle, or ‘Friend’ type of response to God in the biblical writings, while the Song, as I have suggested, issues from the feminine principle, or ‘Bride’ type of response to God. But two references seem particularly to link with the two verses at Cant. 2: 16 and 6: 3. The first is at Ezek. 34: 30–1, in the statement by God that Israel is ‘my flock, the flock of my pasture’. Ezekiel 34 describes the false shepherds who feed themselves and not the flock, and goes on to declare: ‘I [God] will feed them in a good pasture . . . I will feed my flock, and I will cause them to lie down’ (14–15), which has links with both ‘My beloved is mine and I am his; he feeds among the lilies’, and Cant. 1: 7, ‘Tell me . . . where you pasture your flock, where you make it lie down at noon.’ The second reference is from Psalm 95: ‘He is our God, and we are the people of his pasture and the flock of his hand,’ transformed by the poet into: ‘My beloved is mine and I am his; he pastures his flock among the lilies’, a good example of the way the author of the Song takes the more common idiom and gives it warmth and that degree of intimacy which belongs to the feminine principle, and thus of eros. The verse at 7: 11, ‘I am my beloved’s and upon me is his desire’, is a striking reversal of Gen. 3: 16: To the woman he said, I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, and your desire shall be for your husband, and he will rule over you. The word te˘sˇûqâ, ‘desire, longing’, occurs only three times: Gen. 3: 16 and 4: 7, and here in the Song. At Gen. 4: 7 it is sin itself which suffers desire: The Lord said to Cain, Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin lies at the door; its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.25 The similarities between the second halves of Gen. 3: 16 and 4: 7 render both equally impenetrable. At 3: 16 the ‘desire’ of the woman for her husband results in her subjugation, and at 4: 7 the ‘desire’ of sin for Cain similarly threatens its subjugation––except that, in the event, sin prevails and the first murder recorded in the Bible is committed. The form of ‘desire’ here is identical with that in the Song, te˘sˇûqa¯tô, so that this difficult verse must, it seems, be part of the poet’s tapestry. But how are we to understand the claim

25 NRSV, except that this version has ‘but you must master it’, which obscures the important link provided by the verb ‘to rule’ in both passages. The Eros of God 211 of the woman in the Song that, contrary to the curse of Genesis, the man’s desire is upon her? And how, indeed, are we to understand what is meant by ‘desire’ in both these contexts? It can hardly be limited to the sexual realm at Gen. 3: 16 since men are no less liable to desire in this sense than women. And that this is not how it is to be understood is suggested by its use in the Cain passage. Leaving this difficulty aside, I will suggest a way of looking at its use in the Song. But first, the claim suggests that the poet is reversing the consequences of the Fall at the level of gender. Since, in regard to human beings, it is on this rung of the ladder that the consequences of the Fall are thought to have fallen, such a view is the natural one. And, certainly, if the consequences of the Fall were to be reversed, it is here that the reversal would be immediately and dramatically apparent. But if we read the Song in the vertical, as between the creature and the Creator, then the poet must mean something even more far- reaching than the reconciliation of the sexes; he must be implying the restoration of the female principle in its relation to God. According to this view, it is the female principle––not a female person––which is seduced into disobedience by the serpent in the Genesis account, and is consequently vulnerable to seduction, as the history of this principle in the writings of the prophets bears out. Thus the verse ‘I am my beloved’s, and upon me is his desire’ is, I believe, about the restoration of that aspect of our humanity which the prophets in particular so often describe as ‘playing the harlot’. Since, in the Genesis account, the male principle meekly follows suit on the sin of the female, it might be expected that the same is destined to happen in reverse. If this is so, much depends on the restoration of the female principle. And so we come to the difficulties of its restoration.

7.8. The seeking/calling motif

1 By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loves; I sought him, but I found him not. 2 I will rise now and go about the city; in the streets and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loves. I sought him, but I found him not. 3 The watchmen who go about the city found me. ‘Have you seen him whom my soul loves?’ 4 Hardly had I passed from them when I found him whom my soul loves. I held him and would not let him go 212 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

until I had brought him into my mother’s house, and into the chamber of her who conceived me. 5 I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles or by the hinds of the field, that you stir not up nor awaken love ‘til it please. (Cant. 3: 1–5) The theme in this passage is the search of the female for the male, and it begins here on her bed and ends at v. 5: ‘stir not up, nor awaken love ‘til it please’, forming an inclusio, which agrees with the Masoretic paragraph breaks. The bed here represents the repose of prayer.26 But he whom the bride’s soul loves and seeks remains absent. No ‘sleep of the faculties’ enfolds her, and she is constrained to seek the beloved actively, ‘in the streets and in the broad ways’. We are told explicitly that she finds him, which we would deduce from the adjuration to the daughters of Jerusalem not to awaken love ‘til it pleased. In a chapter called ‘Seeking, Finding’, Ellen Davis similarly sees that ‘in biblical idiom the bed signifies more than sleep and lovemaking. It is also a place of prayer, where God is sought, intently and sometimes in great anxiety, and revelations are granted’ (255). And she cites six texts, of which three use the same word for bed (misˇca¯b): ‘Be angry, but sin not; commune with your hearts upon your beds, and be silent’ (Ps. 4: 5), ‘Let the saints be joyful in glory; let them sing upon their beds’ (Ps. 149: 5), ‘In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls upon men, while they slumber on their beds . . . ’ (Job 33: 15). And Mary Carruthers, in The Craft of Thought, succeeds in taking us back to an earlier world when she shows the bed to be the place to which thinkers retired for the purpose of concentrated and creative thought.27 The repetition of the word ‘soul’, in the female’s description of ‘him whom my soul loves’, is seen by Davis (255) ‘to be a deliberate and insistent echo of another biblical passage . . . “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deut. 6: 5)’. And she sees the model for the Song’s linking of the soul with the seeking and finding motif in such verses as ‘you will seek the Lord your God, and you will find him if you search after him with all your heart and soul’ (Deut. 4: 29). The second passage in which the female searches for the male and encounters the watchmen begins at 5: 2: ‘I sleep but my heart is awake’. Here

26 That most commentators in recent times read the verse differently need hardly be said. For a pictorial representation of what is too often suggested, see picture Two of the five by Chagall in his series on Le Cantique des cantiques. 27 1998: 176–9. The Eros of God 213 she is enfolded in the sleep of the faculties and is unwilling to rise in response to the knocking of the beloved, which might be understood as some kind of unexpected demand. I shall return to these verses. For the moment I shall focus only on 3: 1–3 and 5: 6b–7 so that the two themes, the search and the watchmen, can be looked at together. I sought him, but I found him not; I called him, but he did not answer me. The watchmen who go about the city found me; they smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took my veil from me. I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if you find my beloved, what will you tell him? Tell him that I am sick from love. (Cant. 5: 6b–7) The themes of seeking and finding, or not finding, of calling and being answered, or not being answered, occur in many contexts, but the books which provide the most examples in relation to God are the Psalms, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. ‘He will call me, and I will answer him’ (Ps. 91: 15). In Isaiah it is God who calls, but there is no answer (50: 2; 65: 12; 66: 4), and similarly in Jeremiah: ‘I called you, but you did not answer’ (7: 13). Or God declares that Israel will seek him, but will not find him (Hos. 5: 6). Wisdom declares the same thing: ‘Then they will call upon me, but I will not answer; they will seek me diligently, but will not find me’ (Prov. 1: 28). Or, again, God declares that Israel will seek him: ‘Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me; when you seek me with all your heart, I will be found by you, says the Lord’ (Jer. 29: 12–14a). Examples abound. A rather different passage from Jeremiah, 5: 1, 3, links first with the Watchmen passage at Cant. 3: 1–2 and secondly with Cant. 5: 7–8: Run to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem look, I pray you, and know, seek in her broad ways and see, if you can find one person who acts justly, and seeks truth that I may pardon her [Jerusalem] . . . O Lord, do not your eyes look for truth? You have struck them, but they are not sick; you have consumed them, but they refused to take correction. In these lines we see the obduracy of Jerusalem depicted in harsh terms. The particular link with the Song verses at 5: 6b–7 is the accusation of her people 214 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God made to God: ‘You have struck them, but they are not sick.’ In the Song passage, on the contrary, the female claims in effect: ‘I have been struck, and I am sick’.28 Thus, she implies, ‘you have consumed me, and I have willingly taken correction’––which links with the part played by the watchmen. The function of the watchmen is unique to the Song in the biblical literature, but there are one or two resonances elsewhere. In Psalm 127 which, as we have already seen, has a strong link to the Song, it is God who is the keeper of the city. At Isaiah 62: 6, in the context of the bridegroom rejoicing over the bride, God declares that he has set watchmen upon the walls of Jerusalem, and these watchmen are, I think, to be identified with the ‘keepers of the walls’ who rob the bride of her veil at Cant. 5: 7. The word ra¯dîd, meaning ‘wide wrapper’, ‘large veil’, or ‘female garment’, only occurs twice in the Hebrew Bible, at Isaiah 3: 23 and here at Cant. 5: 7. The passage at Isa. 3: 16–26 is a particularly virulent example of the castigation of the female principle: 16 The Lord said: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty and walk with outstretched necks, glancing wantonly with their eyes, mincing along as they go, and tinkling with their feet; 17 The Lord will afflict with scabs the heads of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts. 18 In that day the Lord will take away the finery of the anklets, the headbands, and the crescents; 19 the pendants, the bracelets, and the scarves; 20 the head-dresses, the armlets, the sashes, the perfume boxes, and the amulets; 21 the signet rings and nose rings; 22 the festal robes, the mantles, the cloaks, and the handbags; 23 the garments of gauze, the linen garments, the turbans, and the veils. The passage continues in terrible vein, but the concern here is to note that the last item of which the daughters of Zion are stripped are their veils. Likewise in the Song, the watchmen, the keepers of the walls, appointed for the task (cf. Isa. 62: 6), strike the female as she searches for the beloved,29 and

28 This comparison depends on WLX at Jer. 5: 3 and the construct form TLWX at Cant. 2: 5 and 5: 8 both deriving from the root HLX, ‘to be weak, sick’. See the thesis, 2002: 203 n. 30, for a full discussion. 29 Gregory of Nyssa compares this being struck with the advice at Prov. 23: 13, and he goes on: ‘The Song’s text, “they struck me”, now suggests immortality in light of “If you strike him with a rod he will not die.”’ McCambley 1987: 222. The Eros of God 215 strip her of her veil, her last bulwark, the use of the word implies, against total vulnerability, but which is hindering perfect union with the beloved. To understand why this ﬁnal stripping is necessary we must go back a few verses to 5: 3.

7.9. ‘I have put off my tunic’

2b A sound! My beloved is knocking! Open to me, my sister, my companion, my dove, my perfect one; for my head is full of dew, my locks with the drops of the night. 3 I have put off my tunic, how shall I put it on? I have washed my feet, how shall I defile them? 4 My beloved put his hand through the opening, and my inward parts were moved for him. 5 I rose up to open to my beloved, and my hands dripped with myrrh, my fingers with flowing myrrh, upon the handles of the bolt. 6 I opened to my beloved, but my beloved had turned and gone. My soul went forth when he spoke. I sought him, but I found him not; I called him, but he did not answer me. (Cant. 5: 2–6) From the perspective of the spiritual life this passage describes an advanced state which fails through a desire to remain in it. The beloved knocks and urges the bride to open to him.30 But the bride interprets the demand as a threat to her state of hard-won purity: ‘I have put off my tunic (ku¯tto¯net), how shall I put (la¯basˇ) it on? I have washed my feet, how shall I defile them?’ The vocabulary of the first question again reflects (like the use of teˇsˇûqâ, ‘desire’) the passage in Genesis where God describes to Adam and Eve the consequences of their sin and which concludes: ‘And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife tunics (ku¯tta¯nôt) of skin, and he clothed (la¯basˇ) them’ (3: 21). This link is, it seems to me, so significant, that we must look into it, if too briefly for such a large subject.

30 The Greek of this verse and that of Rev. 3: 10 is very similar, as has often been noticed. 216 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

There are, as far as I am aware, only two other instances in the Hebrew Bible of allusions to the vocabulary of Gen. 3: 21, both in Job, 10: 11 and 30: 18. At 10: 11 Job speaks to God: ‘You clothed me with skin and flesh, and knit me together with bones and sinews.’ Although ancient commentators seem to have taken the verse as praise, it could no less be taken as complaint. The verse at 30: 18 occurs in the middle of a long lament by Job: ‘With great force my garment is disfigured; according to the measure of my tunic it binds me about.’31 These verses suggest a developed doctrine of the ‘tunics of skin’ in pre-Rabbinic and pre-Christian times, and the verse in the Song confirms such a doctrine.32 The ‘tunics of skin’, understood to represent an alteration of state from bodies which originally enjoyed incorporeality and were destined for immortality to bodies confined in a corporeal structure and subject to mor- tality,33 were understood in early Christianity to have been cast off by the sacrifice of Christ, and our original nature revealed by his capacity, after the resurrection, to enjoy the benefits of incorporeality (cf. especially Luke 24: 39–44 and Acts 10: 41).34 An important study by Gary Anderson, ‘The Gar- ments of Skin in Apocryphal Narrative and Biblical Commentary’, explores early exegesis of Gen. 3: 7 and 21 in both Rabbinic and Christian tradition, and from the latter, especially from Ephrem, finds that the punishments inflicted on Adam and Eve (Gen. 3: 14–19) were understood ‘as specific penitential disciplines intended to counterbalance the decree of death imposed on the body’.35 But the discovery of recent years that Jewish asceticism flourished in the pre-Christian centuries allows us to speculate that long before Christian ascetics practised ‘penitential disciplines intended to counterbalance the decree of death imposed on the body’, the implication of Cant. 5: 3 is that Jewish ascetics were practising the same. The author of the Song, it seems to me, is addressing those who envisage the possibility that a life of sufficient virtue can achieve the casting off of the

31 This verse is widely considered to be impenetrable, and is either ignored by Hebraists or, to quote one: ‘The difficulty of giving an acceptable interpretation is sufficiently apparent from the paraphrases to which commentators have been obliged to have recourse’ (Dhorme 1967: 442). 32 This doctrine, suppressed in the West but which survived in the East, Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor being its most orthodox exponents, is expounded in Panayiotis Nellas (1987). For a detailed account of the ancient sources of this doctrine see P. F. Beatrice (1985). There are other allusions to this doctrine in the OT but with quite different vocabulary. See for example Isa. 25: 7. 33 The Gnostics interpreted ‘tunics of skin’ similarly except that they identified them with the body alone instead of with the whole person, a depreciation of the body which aroused powerful attacks from the early Fathers. Origen, inevitably, came under attack for taking the wrong view, although it is by no means certain that he did. See Contra Celsum 4.40 in Henry Chadwick’s translation (1965), and his note 5, p. 216. 34 See Sister Edmée SLG 1990. 35 Gary Anderson 2001: 135. The Eros of God 217

‘tunic of skin’, though he disabuses such a hope by going on to indicate that there yet remains a covering on the bride which can only be removed by others, by the watchmen, as he calls them. The claim made next by the bride, to have washed her feet so that she cannot therefore be expected to deﬁle them, seems also to belong to the poet’s view that rising up in response to love’s demands and not settling down with ideas of perfection is what is being asked of her. In the Bible as a whole, there are about a dozen references to the custom of washing the feet, especially in showing hospitality by washing the feet of a guest on his entering a house or by providing water for the purpose. But it is only in John’s Gospel that it is explicitly said that someone who has already bathed need only wash his feet to be clean all over (13: 10). This is exactly the idea being conveyed in the Song and, as in John, there is the sense of a hidden meaning.36 But the bride’s reluctance to function at a level which might imperil her perfection is overcome when the beloved puts his hand through the keyhole and moves her ‘inward parts’, the line which, of all lines in the Song, is the most redolent of eros––at whatever level one might understand it. How might one understand it?

7.10. The Qumran Psalm scroll of Sirach 51

The words me¯îm, ‘bowels, belly, the seat of the emotions’, and ha¯mâ,‘mur- mur, growl, to be moved’, as here at Cant. 5: 4, occur together in two other places. At Isa. 16: 11, in an oracle against Moab, God declares: ‘Therefore my inward parts are moved like a lyre for Moab.’ At Jer. 31: 20 God is troubled for Ephraim: ‘therefore my inward parts are moved for him’. A third occurrence, in a manuscript from the Cairo Genizah of the Hebrew of Sirach 51, known as MS B,37 includes both ‘my inward parts were moved’ and ‘my hand opened’ in a hymn which is plainly about the love of the soul for wisdom, because it says so, and in which there are two explicit references to God. But this hymn is a version of the Psalms scroll of Qumran Cave 11 (11Q Psa) which preserves Sir. 51: 13–30, and although the Psalms scroll does not contain the overlapping phrases, the implications of this scroll for reading the Song are so important it is worth quoting part of it. The following is a translation of the Hebrew in Beentjes of verses 13–20:

36 A person who has experienced a reflexologist describing, while handling the feet only, what is going on in the rest of the body, might wonder if reflexology offers a clue to the meaning of these passages. But see Augustine’s Homilies on the Gospel According to John, for his profound exposition of John 13: 6–10. 37 See Pancratius Beentjes 1997: 5 n. 12 and 93 for MS B. 218 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

I was a youth before ever I went astray, and I sought her. She came to me in her beauty, and to the end I will seek her. Although blossom drops in the ripening of grapes, they gladden the heart. My foot trod in uprightness, for from my youth I had known her. I inclined my ear but a little, and I found much instruction. And she was to me one who suckles; to my teacher I will give my vigour. I considered, and I made sport with her. I was zealous for good, and I did not turn back. I have kindled my soul for her, and have not turned back my face. I have stirred up my soul for her, and in her upper places I will not go astray. My hand ope[ned . . . ] and I understood her secrets . . . 38 A translation of this passage by J. A. Sanders, published in 1965, intensified its erotic feeling excessively.39 In 1979 T. Muraoka published a paper, ‘Sir. 51, 13–30: An Erotic Hymn to Wisdom?’, in which he went considerably further than Sanders, writing in language and imagery which, in the common phrase, is ‘home from home’ for any student of modern interpretations of the Song, providing a further example of the effect of the feminine pronoun on male imagination. For instance, in place of Sanders’s ‘on her heights I do not waver’, Muraoka thinks it would make better sense if it were rendered: ‘in the moments of her exaltation, i.e. orgasm, I will not let up, put the brake’, while his next suggestion includes the inevitable mons veneris, as well as a good deal besides on the same lines for another page or so. And yet he goes on to declare: There is absolutely no question, however, of the poem being originally a purely secular, erotic love-song. Whatever points of contact one might detect between our canticle and the canonical Song of Songs, the affinity stops there. Despite the intriguing fact that, in the preserved portion of Heb-T [the Qumran scroll], Wisdom is never mentioned explicitly, there is no mistaking the author’s real concern about a

38 Ibid. 177–8. Translation by Dr Jeremy Hughes. 39 A similar translation to that of Sanders is printed twice in The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible (Abegg, Flint, and Ulrich 1999: 570 and 600). The first comes at the end of the Great Psalms Scroll, where some think it may have originated, and the second at the end of the relatively small amount of Sirach found at Qumran. The Eros of God 219 search for Wisdom and deep devotion to it, only he saw an extremely close analogy between this religious, ethical zeal and a man’s intimate association and physical union with his female companion. (173–4) But if the Psalms scroll why not the Song? Muraoka is here making the usual assumptions about the Song although the discovery of four scrolls of the Song at Qumran surely provides sufficient evidence that it was read by the Qumran Community in a way similar to that of the Psalms scroll? The language of ardent love, the overwhelming sense of human eros responding to divine eros, was, it appears, an element in the teaching of the ascetics of the Judaean desert, just as in the history of Latin monasticism the Song would become an element––a particularly important one––in the lives of the monks. But there is a difference between the Song and the Qumran psalm. This latter is addressed to Wisdom as a female figure, as in Proverbs and Sirach. There are several places in the Song where the female seems to stand for Wisdom, for instance, at 6: 9–10 where, as we have seen (§1.13), the poet uses similar language to describe the female as that used at Prov. 31: 28 to describe Wisdom / the Perfect Wife, while the next verse, ‘Who is she who looks forth . . . ’ likewise suggests Wisdom. But it is difficult to see the female in the Song as representing Wisdom throughout. She is the one who seeks, and it is the bridegroom who fulfils the role of Wisdom as the one sought. Such a view of the male figure links directly with later tradition as it developed in Christian- ity where the bridegroom of the Song is seen to be Christ, and Christ is seen to be Wisdom. Somewhat later, Mary also emerges as the representative of Wisdom, both understandings being held in tension and central in the history of mystical theology.

7.11. The wound of love

Finally, to conclude this chapter on a note from that history, the exegesis of the Song by Origen is a witness to a profoundly biblical interpretation, illu- mining the Song primarily at the level of spirit but also, because the compiler of the Hexapla was passionately interested in the letter, at the textual level to an extent rare before the rise of textual criticism. In his The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition, Andrew Louth has a chapter on Origen which provides a masterly account of Origen’s inﬂuence and the reasons for it. Early in the chapter Louth writes:

It was, then, as an interpreter of the Bible that Origen exercised his greatest influence on later theologians; here was a wealth of reflection on Scripture that could not be 220 The Song of Songs and the Eros of God ignored and, as the ground of his mystical theology, was to be deeply pervasive in its influence. For him the Song of Songs was the book on the summit of the mystical life, the union of the soul with God. This judgement Origen bequeathed to later theology, along with many of the themes he draws out in his interpretation of the Song, in particular, the idea of the three stages of the mystical life––the three ways later called purificatory, illuminative, and unitive––and the notion of the spiritual senses.40 There is, indeed, much in Origen’s exegesis which no longer speaks to us, but there is more that is timeless, in particular his passages on the ‘wound of love’. His exegesis on 5: 8, where the bride declares, ‘I am sick from love’, does not survive, but a similar phrase also occurs at 2: 5. BDB puts the verb under ha¯lâ, ‘to be weak, sick’, but the LXX reads it as coming from ha¯lal, ‘to bore, ˙ ˙ pierce’ and so to wound. And although this would appear to be mistaken, the reading is not without justification and is, in any case, a most happy fault: Strengthen me with perfumes, heap me up with apples, for I am wounded by love. Three passages of Origen on this verse survive in Latin, one in his Prologue to the Commentary, one at 2: 5 in Book Three of the Commentary, and one in the Second Homily. The first, from the Prologue, shows Origen taking great pains to set out biblical texts which will leave his readers little option but to rise from the letter to the spirit in their reading of the Song. He uses, as his primary witness to the creation of both an outer and an inner person, the two accounts at Gen. 1: 26–7 and 2: 6–7, the first of which describes the inner person, destined for eternal life, while the second describes the outer person, subject to corruption. Having established this distinction with a string of texts, Origen comes to the crux of the matter, and to one of his most beautiful passages: This being so, it follows that, just as there is one love, known as carnal and also known as Cupid by the poets, according to which the lover sows in the flesh; so also is there another, a spiritual love, by which the inner man who loves sows in the spirit. And to speak more plainly, if anyone still bears the image of the earthly according to the outer man, then he is moved by earthly desire and love; but the desire and love of him who bears the image of the heavenly according to the inner man are heavenly. And the soul is moved by heavenly love and longing when, having clearly beheld the beauty and the fairness of the Word of God, it falls deeply in love with His loveliness and receives from the Word Himself a certain dart and wound of love.41

40 1981: 54–5. 41 Trans. R. P. Lawson 1957: 29. The Eros of God 221 All this leads to the doctrine of the spiritual senses which Origen promotes with such ardour throughout his writings, and especially in his Commentary on the Song, seeing, as he does, that unless our spiritual senses are being developed we will not rightly be able to understand the hidden meanings of the Scriptures. This page intentionally left blank Commentary Looking at the Whole

Throughout the preceding seven chapters we have looked at the Song from the standpoint of its major themes, beginning with the defining theme of wisdom, continuing with its imagery, symbols, mythical and esoteric elements, and concluding with a chapter in which motifs relating to the drawing, that is, the eros of God, are gathered. Thus for some readers the book proper ended with the conclusion of Chapter 7. But for the sake of those readers who are interested in the text of the Song, and desire to see all the verses covered, we will in this much shorter second part look at every verse as it occurs, focusing especially on those which have so far escaped notice, with reference back to earlier discussions of verses already com- mented upon by means of chapter and section number.1 This second part, therefore, provides the opportunity, not for a detailed commentary, since the constraints of space preclude anything so thorough, but for the acknowledgement at least of some important points not yet touched upon, and in order to gain a sense of the Song as a whole. But first I should like to begin this part with a quotation from John of the Cross, whose poem The Spiritual Canticle is imbued with the imagery of the Song. And although the influences which formed John produced a more rarefied atmosphere than did the influences which formed our author, the direction and intensity of eros is the same. And what John writes about the Spiritual Canticle in the Prologue to his prose explanation applies equally to a prose explanation of the Song:

Since these stanzas, then, were composed in a love ﬂowing from abundant mystical understanding, I cannot explain them adequately, nor is it my intention to do so. I only wish to shed some general light on them . . . As a result, though we give some explanation of these stanzas, there is no reason to be bound to this explanation. For mystical wisdom, which comes through love and is the subject of these stanzas, need not be understood distinctly in order to cause love and

1 For example a reference in parentheses (§1.6) refers to Chapter 1, Section 6. 224 Commentary aﬀection in the soul, for it is given according to the mode of faith, through which we love God without understanding Him.2 That is to say, what speaks to the soul, whether understood by the rational mind or not, is the poetry of the Song. If John is unable to explain his own poetry adequately there cannot be any hope of one not the author explaining poetry no less exalted. What precedes in the Introduction and seven chapters of the ﬁrst part, and what now follows is, then, at best, faltering indications of what I believe the genius who created the Song intends, supported by whatever biblical or extra-biblical texts it seems appropriate to adduce.

CHAPTER 1

1 The Song of Songs which is Solomon’s. 2 May he kiss me from the kisses of his mouth, for your breasts are better than wine. 3 For fragrance your oils are good; your name is oil poured forth, therefore the maidens love you. 4 Draw me, we will run after you; the king has brought me into his chambers. Let us rejoice and be glad in you, let us praise your breasts more than wine; righteous ones love you.

We will look at a few verses at a time, following the Masoretic paragraph divisions, except where it is necessary to make further divisions to facilitate comment. We saw, in the Introduction, that the title could as well be translated ‘The Hymn of Hymns’ and, at §1.1, that the signiﬁcance of the name Solomon is that it declares the work to be sapiential, and, no less fundamentally, citing Ellen Davis, points to the association of the Song with the Temple. The verse, ‘May he kiss me from the kisses of his mouth’, coming directly after the declaration, implicit in the title, that what follows is to be understood as wisdom in the context of worship, sets the tone for the entire Song. It speaks directly to that part of the soul which relates readily to God. For these kisses are desired by the one who is drawn by the eros of God, who yearns to be ravished by him at a level beyond sensation but no less intense, to which the literature generated by the mystics of the great world religions provides ample witness (§7.2). If the Song is unique in the Bible in portraying this intensity of eros for God it is

2 Translation by Kieran Kavanaugh OCD and Otilio Rodriguez OCD 1966: 409. Commentary 225 nevertheless consistent with the rest of the Hebrew Bible, which nowhere uses the verb na¯sˇaq, ‘to kiss’, of lovers’ kisses. Neither is ‘mouth’ used with sexual connotation. BDB manages to produce only three references under peh, ‘mouth’, for ‘organ of kissing’ and the other two, apart from our verse, are references to idol worship (1 Kgs. 19: 18: ‘all the knees that have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him’, and Job 31: 27: ‘if I have looked at the sun when it shone . . . and my mouth has kissed my hand’). ‘Mouth’ in biblical language stands primarily for the vehicle of speech, especially for that into which God puts words.3 Some commentators think ‘mouth’ is redundant here, but the reading ‘your breasts are better than wine’ (noting the word for ‘breasts’ here is dad, ‘teat, nipple’, namely, that which goes into the mouth), suggests a play on these images, and enables us to agree with those commentators who see a hidden pun in yisˇsˇa¯qe¯ni, ‘Oh that he would kiss me’, for ‘Oh, that he would let me drink’, yasˇqe¯ni,4 a reading which goes well with ‘your breasts are better than wine’, and supports my suggestion that ‘breasts’ had, at some stage in the history, a cultic significance which the poet wishes to recall. The change in person ‘May he ... for your breasts’, known by the term enallage, that is, the substitution of one grammatical form for another, occurs in the Bible in poetry and usually takes the form of shift in person, as here. The AV retains such shifts; the RSV and other modern versions generally amend them, but the NRSV has restored this one in the Song. Such shifts usually occur in relation to God, and a reader familiar with shift in person would be likely to take God as the subject of the verse in which it occurs unless a subject other than God is explicitly mentioned. And once God is understood to be the subject of this verse, a vertical reading follows unhindered.5 The reading ‘breasts’ is found in the LXX and the Vulgate, and the evidence reveals Hebrew ‘love’ as being a later reading supplied by the pointing of the Masoretes (§2.4). The use of breast imagery as a symbol of nourishment––especially the nourishment of the Torah––is explored in Chapter 2, and is found to be confined to this meaning throughout the Bible. Thus ‘wine’ is seen here as being in parallel to the milk implicit in the breasts. ‘Fragrance’ is a keyword in the Song. Here, at 1: 3, it is in a form always used in the context of sacrifices, and thus gives support to the suggestion (§2.5) that the opening verses of the Song ‘imply a procession and thus plunge us into its liturgical activity from the beginning of the book’. If so, the ‘oils’, of which the fragrance is good, would be anointing oils, though these were lacking in Second Temple times, a lack I believe the poet is supplying, as we shall see shortly.

3 Some typical examples are: Exod. 4: 15; Num. 12: 8; 22: 38; 23: 5, 12; Deut. 18: 18; Jer. 1: 9; Ps. 40: 3. 4 See for example Michael Fox 1985: 97. More recently, Stoop-van Paridon makes a good case for ‘O that he would let me drink’, but undermines it when she goes on: ‘It is certainly conceivable that the author of the Song of Songs is alluding to “l’embrassement sur les lèvres”, “French kiss”.’ 2005: 22. 5 Unless one thinks that Solomon, as a man, is the object of the bride’s desire, as some commentators do. 226 Commentary

The next line is difficult, literally: ‘Oil you are poured forth your name’, taking tûraq as second masculine singular (it is also third feminine singular) of the verb ‘to be poured/emptied out’, since both ‘name’ and ‘oil’ are masculine. To add to the difficulty, the form (hophal) does not otherwise occur. The reader who has taken God to be the subject of the shift in person in verse 2 would also expect direct address combined with ‘name’ to be a further reference to him because, of the 109 occurrences of the forms ‘your name’ and ‘my name’, 92 are direct address to God and eleven are direct address from God or his angel. Thus God is confirmed as the likely subject for the attentive reader who reads ‘oil poured forth is your name’. There is an obvious play on sounds in the Hebrew (sˇe¯m = name, sˇemen = oil), and we may wonder whether there is an allusion here to oil as one of the five missing elements in the Second Temple,6 with the implication that the pouring forth of the holy Name is all the oil that is needed for true sanctification. We have seen (§2.3) one instance which suggests that the poet is a defender of the sanctity of the Second Temple in the defence of the ‘little sister’ against the charge at Cant. 8: 8 that she has no breasts. I believe this is another, and that there are two more (that I have discerned) which we will see when we come to them (Cant. 3: 6 and 8: 6). The plural form of maidens, a˘la¯môt, occurs again at Cant. 6: 8 in a context which is also, I believe, liturgical (§2.5)). Here, in the opening verses, a procession is implied by the use of a˘la¯môt who appear in procession both at Ps. 68: 25 and, in the form al-a˘la¯môt, in the procession of the ark at 1 Chron. 15: 20. The verb ‘to draw’ is much used in the Hebrew Bible. Pope writes: ‘The verb ma¯sˇak is used of the drawing power of divine love in Hosea 11: 4, “I drew them (Israel) with bands of love”, and Jeremiah 31: 3, “I loved you (Israel) with an eternal love, therefore I drew you (with) constancy [heséd].”’ 7 ˙ As noted at the conclusion of §1.10, ‘The king has brought me into his chambers’ is redolent of the Jewish mystical literature (Hekhalot) in which ‘king’ occurs hundreds of times, and forms of heder, ‘chamber’, are numerous. Alexander has a long note on ˙ this verse of which here is a part: God’s ‘chambers’ have been doubly identified as (1) Mount Sinai, and (2) the heavenly treasury where he kept the Torah. Tg. rather pointedly avoids a mystical interpretation here. It makes no reference to the idea that Moses at Sinai actually ascended into heaven to receive the Torah, a tradition which it knew . . . and that is easily attached to the words ‘the king brought me [Moses] into His chambers.’ The Merkabah mystics may have had this same phrase in mind when they spoke of the ‘chambers’ of the Merkabah (3 Enoch 18: 18; 38: 1), or of God’s heavenly palaces being ‘chamber within chamber’ (3 Enoch 1: 2). Note how Cant. R. 1.4, §1 attaches the story of the four who entered Pardes to the words, ‘the King has brought me into His chambers.’8

6 See Cant. Rabbah VIII. 9, §3, and, for a complete list of rabbinical literature on this topic, C. T. R. Hayward 1999: 38 n. 23. 7 1977: 302. Pope goes on: ‘Cf. John 6: 44 [and] 12: 32 which use the same verb as the LXX in the present passage.’ 8 Alexander 80 n. 26. Alexander concludes the note by directing the reader to his Introduc- tion (6. 2, n. 15) where, however, he no less pointedly avoids attributing a mystical meaning to the Song. He cannot help noticing connections because he knows the mystical literature so well, Commentary 227

‘Chambers’ is followed by ‘Let us rejoice and be glad in you’, a frequent combination of verbs, always in address to God, while ‘let us praise your breasts more than wine’ shows a preference, in conjunction with the first person plural, for the nourishment of milk/Torah over the intoxication of wine. At Cant. 2: 4, however, in conjunction with the first person singular, the female claims, ‘He has brought me into the house of wine.’ The first might be interpreted as reinforcing the idea of public worship, suggesting the greater suitability of milk for the congregation generally, while the similar verse at 2: 4 conveys the intoxicating character of the personal relationship with the One worshipped. I am following the Targumist for the translation of me¯sˇa¯rîm as ‘righteous ones’, which seems to me far likelier than ‘rightly’, the favoured translation of me¯sˇa¯rîm here.9 How, then, might these four opening verses be understood? Taking the title as the Hymn of Hymns and therefore an invitation to join the procession entering the Temple to worship and to praise, the alternation which follows between first person singular and first person plural could be understood to reflect the experience of the worshipper who naturally shifts between identification with the individual self––‘Oh, that he would kiss me’, ‘the king has brought me into his chambers’––and identification with the congregation––‘let us rejoice’, ‘let us praise’––the two combining in ‘Draw me, we will run after you.’ Thus the Talmudic versions of the Pardes story conclude with: ‘Draw me, we will run after you’, which includes both ‘me’ and ‘we’, while Cant. Rabbah concludes, ‘the king has brought me into his chambers’––the essence of the Song in half a verse. The Masoretic text provides a paragraph break after these verses, and v. 5 clearly embarks on a different aspect of the poem.

but at the time of working on the Targum he was evidently identified with the exoteric outlook of the Targumist. His more recent writings manifest a move ‘inwards’, notably his remarkable study which compares The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice and the Celestial Hierarchy of Dionysius the Areopagite (2006b), and I yet cherish the hope he might produce a commentary on the Song itself in which he would make up––and much more––for all the deficiencies of this one. 9 Alexander 80 n. 29: ‘Tg. takes Heb. mesharim (“rightly”) as = “the righteous”, possibly through repointing as meyashsherim.’ This form occurs at Prov. 9: 15 plus the definite article. 228 Commentary

These lines introduce the hearer, or reader, to the intention of the poet in writing this work. His concern is to present a paradisal picture in which Israel’s long history of unfaithfulness is shown to be forgiven, and the ragings of the prophets over the sins of Jerusalem are in the past. We may, I think, read the first two lines with Luther: ‘I am black . . . like the tents of Kedar; I am comely . . . like the curtains of Solomon.’10 The first adjective ‘black’ used here occurs again at Cant. 5: 11 in reference to the black locks of the beloved. The second adjectival form, ‘blackish’, only occurs here. André Robert points out that the verb sˇa¯har˙ and the noun sˇe˘hôr are used, the one at Job 30: 30 and the other at Lam. 4: ˙ ˙ 8, to designate the colour of skin which results from a state of great suffering, both physical and mental.11 That the strength of the sun can entail suffering is implied by several texts, for instance: ‘They shall not hunger nor thirst, neither shall the burning heat nor sun strike them’ (Isa. 49: 10), and: ‘The sun shall not strike you by day nor the moon by night’ (Ps. 121: 6). The ‘tents of Kedar’ provide a double simile for blackness.12 First, the tents are them-selves black, being woven from the wool of black goats, and, second, the root of qa¯dar means ‘to be dark’. As a proper noun it refers to an Arab tribe, descended from Kedar, the second of Ishmael’s twelve sons, according to Gen. 25: 13, and is mentioned otherwise eleven times, notably Ps. 120: 5, where the phrase ‘tents of Kedar’, in a context of suffering, also occurs. Elsewhere we learn that the tribe was rich in flocks and powerful in its mighty men. Isaiah prophesies that ‘all the glory of Kedar will come to an end, and the remaining bows of Kedar’s warriors will be few’ (21: 16–17), while Ezekiel, in his lamentation over Tyre, notes that: ‘Arabia and all the princes of Kedar were your favoured dealers in lambs, rams, and goats’ (27: 21). Goats are implicit both in the ‘tents of Kedar’ and in the ‘curtains of Solomon’ made for the Tabernacle, and their significance is suggested by their fate to be offered on the one hand as a sin offering and on the other––with oxen, rams, and lambs––for a peace offering,13 the former linking with the black tents and the latter with Solomon, the name which stands for peace.14 If the claim of the speaker to be ‘black . . . like the

10 Luther’s Works, vol. 15, 1972: 201. 11 RTF, 69. 12 The preoccupation of recent commentators with negritude in the light of the lady’s claim to be black, and, consequently, how to express comments on the subject with all necessary ‘correctness’, is, it seems to me, too anachronistic to merit comment. In any case, Pope has covered the subject for all time and for all commentators with his eleven pages on it (307–18). (In contrast, he entirely overlooks mention of the next word, ‘comely’.) 13 See especially Numbers 7, in which goats for peace offerings always follow goats for a sin offering. 14 The widely favoured emendation, in the interests of parallelism, of ‘Solomon’ to ‘Salmah’, the name of an Arabian tribe mentioned in ancient non-biblical sources and later Jewish sources, notably Targum Onqelos, provides better parallelism. Nevertheless, the Masoretic pointing, with its strong suggestion of the Temple, conveys the interests of the text. I am encouraged to resist the assumption that parallelism is invariable by a paper ‘Repetition, Vari- ation, Metaphor: Some New Insights into the Nature of Biblical Parallelism’, given by Knut Heim at the Society for Old Testament Study, Oxford, 2004. Commentary 229 tents of Kedar’ is a confession of sin, the contrasting claim to be ‘comely . . . like the curtains of Solomon’ is an acknowledgement that nevertheless she enjoys ‘peace with God’. But the word ‘comely’ must be examined before the picture I believe to be there can properly be seen. ‘I am . . . comely’, na¯ wâ,‘comely, befitting, seemly’. This word is another of those which suffer seriously in translation unless used as at Isa. 52: 7: ‘How fitting upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace’, or as at Ps. 93: 8: ‘Holiness befits your house, O Lord.’ As an adjective it occurs ten times, four of them in the Song, three in Proverbs, twice in the Psalms, and once at Jer. 6: 2, this last being, I think, the text the poet is here reversing. The occurrences in Proverbs and Psalms indicate a wisdom term, for instance, Ps. 33: 1: ‘praise is befitting for the upright’. There are moral and spiritual elements invariably present in the word which have implications for its use in the Song. The verse at Jer. 6: 2 reads: ‘The comely and the delicately bred daughter of Zion I will destroy.’ The vocabulary of this verse presents several problems, and is variously translated in consequence. First, a letter has dropped out of ‘comely’, which has led NRSV to translate ‘pasture’ here;15 second, ‘delicately bred’ (or ‘daintily bred’, BDB, 772), fails to convey to a modern reader that Jerusalem has been bred to take ‘exquisite delight’ in God; but third, the main crux is whether to translate da¯mâ as ‘be like, resemble’ (BDB, I at p. 197) or ‘cease, cut off, destroy’ (BDB, II, ‘cause to cease, cut off, destroy’, at p. 198). BDB cites Jer. 6: 2 under II, and this not only fits the context exactly but does not introduce the problems raised by ‘to be like’.16 More difficult still is how to interpret the tone of the verse. It is generally taken to be insulting of Jerusalem. For instance, Brueggemann, who well conveys God’s eros for Israel/Judah/ Jerusalem in his commentary on Jeremiah––the term he repeatedly uses is ‘yearning’––writes on this verse: ‘The prophets, who seem to harbor great resentment against the urban elite, delight in mocking and caricaturing the women who are the quintessence of such self-indulgent well-being’,17 and he points to texts which, he believes, support this view, notably Isa. 47: 1: ‘Come down, and sit in the dust, virgin daughter of Babylon . . . for you shall no more be called tender and delicate.’ Here ‘delicate’ is in parallel with the adjective ‘tender’, the uses of which confirm that ‘delicate’ is being used in its negative aspect in the context of Babylon. But for Ps. 37: 4, for instance, BDB gives: ‘take exquisite delight in the Lord’, and similarly at v. 11: ‘The meek shall inherit the land and take exquisite delight in abundant peace.’ Again, at Isa. 66: 11, in reference to Jerusalem restored to her former place and glory: ‘Rejoice with Jerusalem . . . that ye may suck, and be satisfied from the breast of her consola- tions . . . and be delighted with [or: ‘take exquisite delight in’] the abundance of her

15 ‘I have likened daughter Zion to the loveliest pasture.’ The absence of the A in ‘comely’ has produced this translation. But see BDB under II, HWN, also I, HWN and HWAN. 16 The Vulgate has assimilavi: Speciosae et delicatae assimilavi filiam Sion, ‘To a lovely and delicate woman I have likened the daughter of Sion.’ The LXX is altogether different: Και- α φαιρεθσεται τ$ ψο θγατερ Ζιν, ‘the [your] eminence will be taken away, O daughter of Zion’. 17 Walter Brueggemann 1988: 66. 230 Commentary glory.’ Thus a study of the two words na¯’weh, ‘comely’ and a¯nôg, ‘delight’ suggest a rather different reading to that offered by Brueggemann for Jer. 6: 2, one that intensifies the tragedy of God’s decision to destroy Jerusalem, the special object of his yearning love. For the very one who was ‘seemly’, ‘suitable’, ‘appropriate’ (na¯ weh), for his great purposes, who had been ‘delicately nurtured’ to respond with ‘exquisite delight’ (a¯nôg) to the one who is both husband (Jer. 2: 2; 3: 1, 14, 20, etc.) and father to her (Jer. 3: 4, 19, etc.), whom he planted a noble vine of wholly good seed, turned and rebelled against him, like an alien vine (cf. Jer. 2: 21). What follows in Jeremiah has similarities with what follows in the Song at 1: 7–8, though the differences are equally marked. In the Song there are shepherds, flocks, and tents, and the occurrence of ‘at noon’––as in the Jeremiah passage––and the setting is one above all of peace and security. In Jeremiah, following the intention to destroy the comely and delicate daughter of Zion, there are shepherds and flocks, but they have come up against her, and the setting is one of war and destruction. All these connections confirm the view that the speaker at Cant. 1: 5–7 is Jerusalem, Jerusalem personified as in Jeremiah above all, but no less in Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Lamentations. Her opening statement, ‘I am black like the tents of Kedar’, is the confession of sin required at Jer. 3: 13: ‘Only acknowledge your iniquity, that you have transgressed against the Lord your God’, while ‘I am comely like the curtains of Solomon’ conveys that she is now at peace with God. But the confession is not yet over, for she goes on: ‘My mother’s sons were incensed against me; they made me keeper of the vineyards’––the relationship of Jerusalem to the rest of Israel––‘but my own vineyard I have not kept.’18 Thus the vineyards in the Song represent Israel which, collectively, is ‘the vine brought out of Egypt’. It was the role given to Jerusa- lem to be ‘keeper of the vineyards’, that is, to have been a model for the whole vine, but she failed to keep her own vineyard, and thus the prophets, ‘my mother’s sons’ of v. 6, speaking on behalf of the one whose love for her she had betrayed, were incensed against her. But now she is forgiven and there is a sense of restoration taking place.

7 Tell me, you whom my soul loves, where you pasture your flock, where you make it lie down at noon, lest I be like one going astray19 by the flocks of your companions. 8 If you do not know, O fairest among women, go forth in the footsteps of the flock, and pasture your kids beside the shepherds’ tents. 18 Modern commentators, with the exception of André Robert, take the vineyard which the female claims as her own to be her body. Pope’s treatment is typical (323–7). 19 See HEU, ‘wander, astray’, BDB, 380, in preference to the Hebrew form derived from HUE, ‘wrap, envelop oneself’, BDB, 741. The former is supported by Syriac, Symmachus, Vulgate, and Targum, according to BHS, and makes sense in relation to the propensity of sheep for going astray, taking the woman here as herself representing the flock of Israel. Commentary 231

This passage is discussed at §3.13, where it is suggested that it depicts the central relationship of the entire Bible, that between the Shepherd of Israel and his chosen flock. ‘Companions’ are found also at Cant. 8: 13: ‘You who dwell in the gardens, the companions hear your voice.’ Joüon (138) interprets the companions in both places as the angels, which would make ‘the flocks of your companions’ here a poetic way, in the context of shepherds and sheep, of referring to the heavenly hosts, that is, God’s associates in the care of his creation. But the word ha˘be¯rîm, ‘companions’, could mean ˙ those associated in the worship of God, as in the Jewish mystical literature, where it is much used. The shepherd replies in terms which suggest that ‘the fairest among women’ ought to know where to find the place of food and rest but if she does not she must go forth in the footprints of the sheep, that is, those faithful followers of the shepherd who have gone before. And, walking in the same, she––now Jerusalem––is to pasture her kids (a feminine form which only occurs here in the Bible) ‘by the shepherds’ tents’. ‘Kids’ are generally kids of goats, and there is no reason to suppose they are otherwise here.20 But the meaning of goats rather than sheep must then be sought in the next two words, the ‘shepherds’ tents’. The word translated ‘tents’ here is misˇka¯nôt, a plural, and poetic, form of the word which, in the singular, is used for the Tabernacle in the Pentateuch, where it is specifically the ‘dwelling-place’ of God. The plural form occurs twenty times, and the context of most of its occurrences confirm the sacred sense of the word, especially in the Psalms, for instance, 43: 3, 46: 5, and 84: 2: ‘How lovely21 is your dwelling place (misˇke˘nôtêkâ), O Lord of hosts.’ Modern translations give the word in the singular on the basis of a theory that it sometimes occurs in plural with singular meaning. If this is so, the misˇke˘nôt at Cant. 1: 8 may represent the Temple itself, and the kids the goats for sacrifice, both for sin-offerings and peace-offerings, which would continue the thought we found in the ‘curtains of Solomon’ three verses earlier. Thus the choice of the word misˇke˘nôt conveys a sense both of the kind of ‘tents’ intended, and also the kind of shepherds who occupy them. In the prophetic literature, Jeremiah and Ezekiel above all, the shepherds are the human guardians of the flock who miserably fail in their calling by feeding themselves and not the sheep. In the Song, on the contrary, the implication is that the shepherds are fulfilling their designated role in harmony with the chief shepherd, the Shepherd of Israel. The Masoretic text provides a second paragraph break at the end of v. 8, with good reason as the following verses take us into another area of the subject.

20 The Targum interprets the kids here as young scholars, a commonplace, Alexander notes, in Rabbinic literature, 85 n. 60. 21 ‘How lovely’ is the usual translation here for TWDYDY-HM, but DYDY means ‘beloved’ not ‘lovely’, cf. LXX: Ω α γαπητα` = ‘How worthy of love’. 232 Commentary

9 To my mare among the chariots of Pharaoh I have likened you, my companion. 10 Your cheeks are comely with circlets, your neck with strings of beads. 11 Circlets of gold we will make for you with studs of silver. At Cant. 1: 9 the male figure calls the female ‘my companion’, for the first of nine times, the word meaning also ‘friend’, ‘fellow’. Perhaps it could by extension mean a very special friend, but translations such as ‘my love’ are hardly justified. The loveliest translation is found in the Latin, amica mea. The arguments in favour of reading ‘to a mare’ and not ‘to my mare’ are set out by Pope: ‘The î ending of lesûsatî has nothing to do with the possessive suffix but is, as many commentators have recognized, the survival of the old genitive case ending dubbed hireq compaginis by early grammarians’ (338). This reading may well be the correct one, but I am inclined to think that ‘my mare’ is intended, and that she represents the people of Israel in Egypt. But if this is the intention of the poet, the view he proposes––though consistent with his taking the opposite view to the prophets throughout––is, I believe, unique. Is he viewing the entire history of the Israelites eschatologically, showing them to be redeemed from the heavenly standpoint from the very beginning of their history? The Targumist is unable to enter into the poet’s spirit here and expounds the verse as an allusion to the rebellion of the Israelites at the Red Sea.22 But the Targumist, I believe, perfectly understands the next two verses as being of the very stuff of which rabbinical exegesis is able to make sense because the meaning is dependent on the Hebrew text. For this purpose, therefore, I will draw on Alexander’s notes to these two verses. The word for ‘circlets’, tôrîm, suggests a plural form of Torah to the Targumist, thus the Written and the Oral Torah, and thus also ‘words of Torah on the cheeks’ suggests that Torah is being compared to a horse’s bridle: just as a bridle stops the horse from straying, so the words of Torah keep Israel from straying. The ‘beads’ similarly are taken by the Targumist as symbolizing the precepts of the Torah, although another way of understanding them is given (§2.5) where the musician-priestesses of Egypt, impersonating the goddess, hold out their bead necklaces for the onlookers to touch. But to continue with the Targumist: Torah upon the neck suggests the common image of Torah as a yoke. ‘Yoke’ in turn generates the image of the ploughing ox, which is reinforced by the tôrâ/Torah wordplay.23 ‘Circlets of gold’ are seen to relate to Ps. 19: 11: ‘More to be desired are they [the judgements of the Lord] than gold, yea more than much fine gold’, and ‘studs of silver’ to ‘The words of the Lord are pure words, as silver tried in the crucible’ (Ps. 12: 7). Alexander adds: ‘Here the “gold” is the inner sense (derash) of the Torah, the “silver” the outer sense (peshat).’24 There is

22 Alexander 86 n. 68. 23 That is, for the Targumist, who was writing in Aramaic. The word RWT for ‘bullock’ is Aramaic and occurs in the Bible only in the Aramaic portions of Ezra and Daniel. 24 Alexander 86–8 nn. 68, 77, 78, 81, 82. Commentary 233 much more which could be drawn out from these two verses, and a study of Alexander’s notes to the Targum on them is particularly rewarding. The Song and the Targum are talking largely in the same tradition and in the same language at this point, both equally obscure to those not versed in either. To summarize, verses 9–11 begin with a reference to ‘the chariots of Pharaoh’, which is an allusion to the time of bondage in Egypt. Contrary to the earthly history as recounted in Exodus, but even more as envisaged by Ezekiel, especially in chapter 23, the bride, under the metaphor of a mare––the only occurrence of the feminine form of ‘horse’ in the Hebrew Bible––is pictured as gloriously arrayed in the trappings of the commandments. Is it a diﬃculty that, according to biblical chronology, they had not yet been given? Perhaps not since the poet seems to be presenting a heavenly reality, not an earthly one.

12 While the king reclined at his table, my nard gave forth its fragrance This verse is set out by itself in BHS, and as any connection with either the previous or the following verse is not clear, we will look at it on its own. The word ‘king’ occurs in the Song four times, twice alone, 1: 4 and 12, twice combined with Solomon, 3: 9 and 11.25 Both occurrences of ‘king’ alone suggest being brought into a state of prayer, that is to say, into relationship with the One to whom prayer is made. The first, ‘the king has brought me into his chambers’, links with the chambers of the Temple, as we have seen, while this occurrence, linked to ‘fragrance’, also denotes a state of prayer. ‘Fragrance’ is, as we have seen (§3.5, and above at Cant. 1: 3), a key word in the Song, occurring eight times. ‘Nard’ occurs three times, here at 1: 12 and at 4: 13 and 14, and twice in the Gospels, Mark 14: 3 and John 12: 3, where the word is the same, nardos. The situation here, at Cant. 1: 12, and in these Gospels is also the same: As he reclined, a woman came with an alabaster jar of ointment, pure nard, very costly . . . (Mark 14: 3) There they made him a supper . . . Mary took a pound of costly ointment, pure nard . . . and the house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment. (John 12: 3) The same scene is found also in Matt. 26: 7–13, but the word ‘nard’ does not there occur. Of the two Gospels in which it does, only John has ‘fragrance’, osmeh. That the word ‘nard’ is used in the Gospels to point to the nature of Jesus as king and messiah is evidently known to the Targumist for he contextualizes this verse (Cant. 1: 12) to the Golden Calf episode, identifies the king not with God but with Moses, and instead of nard ‘giving forth its fragrance’ he claims it gives forth a stink: ‘the wicked of that generation . . . arose and made the Golden Calf . . . Whereas formerly their fragrance

25 A fifth occurrence at Cant. 7: 5 is given a different translation. See §4.9. 234 Commentary had spread through all the world, after that they stank like spikenard, the odour of which is very bad.’26 That the Targumist is employing anti-Christian polemic here is confirmed at 4: 13–14, where ‘nard’ again occurs but interpreted by him as one of the spices of paradise, for which purpose he translates it by a different word meaning ‘crocus’. Three passages in relation to prayer suggest a reason for ‘fragrance’ being a key word in the Song. The first is from Teresa of Avila: The whole creature, both body and soul, is enraptured as if some very fragrant ointment, resembling a delicious perfume, had been infused into the very centre of the being [marrow], or as if we had suddenly entered a place redolent with scents coming not from one, but from many objects; we do not know from which it arises nor what it is, although it entirely pervades our being.27 The second, written more than a thousand years before Teresa, is from Cassian, in his Conference IV: Often by the sudden visitation of God, we are filled with perfumes sweeter than any made by man, so that the soul is enraptured with delight and, as it were, caught up into an ecstasy of spirit, becoming unconscious that it still dwells in the flesh.28 Thirdly, St Augustine in the Confessions (10: 27), in the famous ‘Late have I loved thee’ passage, exclaims, ‘Thou didst send forth thy fragrance, and I drew in my breath . . . ‘29

13 A bundle of myrrh is my beloved to me, that abides between my breasts. 14 A cluster of cypress is my beloved to me in the vineyards of En-gedi. The ﬁrst of these two verses suggests the opposite situation to that in Hosea at 2: 2: ‘Plead with your mother [Israel] . . . that she put away her harlotry from her face, and her adultery from between her breasts’ (§2.3). The Targumist makes a connection between the ‘bundle of myrrh’ and the ‘binding of Isaac’. This is explained by a study of the Hebrew. The word for ‘bundle’, se˘rôr, which BDB (865) tells us means ‘prop. a ˙ binding, i.e. something bound up’, is related to words for ‘straits’, ‘distress’, and, combined with myrrh, which is closely connected to a number of nouns all denoting

26 At 91 n. 95 Alexander observes: ‘Spikenard is normally regarded as sweet-smelling.’ He goes on: ‘Tg. may reflect a puritanical attitude towards perfume and cosmetics in general.’ Alexander does not share Raphael Loewe’s (entirely justified, it seems to me) suspicions of the Targumist’s Zweifrontenkrieg against Christianity on the one hand and Jewish esotericism on the other. 27 Benedictines of Stanbrook 1913: 158. 28 Ibid. in a footnote provided by the translators. 29 Trans. Vernon J. Bourke 1953: 297. Commentary 235 bitterness, whether of taste or spirit, suggests something more than Pope’s ‘a sachet of some perfumed substance’ (351). The combination leads to the story of the binding of Isaac at Gen. 22: 1–14. Thus the meaning of Cant. 1: 13 might be that while, in Hosea, it is Israel’s unfaithfulness which lies between her and God’s Torah, symbolized by the breasts, in the Song it is Israel’s faithfulness in the figure of Abraham, symbolized by the ‘bundle of myrrh’, which enables her beloved, that is, the divine presence, to abide in her midst. Looking well below the surface of these verses it is possible to catch a glimpse of a poetic compression intended to suggest the span of Israel’s history, from the obedience of Abraham to the promise of a messiah, this latter suggested by the development of symbolism attached to esˇkôl, ‘cluster’, in early Syriac theology (§3.9), rooted in Isaiah:

Thus says the Lord, when the new wine is found in the cluster, then he will say, Do not destroy it, for there is a blessing in it. So will I do for my servants’ sake, and not destroy them all. I will bring forth a descendant from Jacob, and from Judah an inheritor of my mountains; my chosen will inherit it, and my servants will dwell there. (65: 8–9) The noun ko¯per, translated ‘cypress’, a shrub which grows eight to ten feet in height,30 occurs only here, 1: 14, in the singular, twice in plural at 4: 13 and 7: 12, and not otherwise in the Bible with this meaning. The existence of such a shrub need not be doubted, but that the poet intended a literal understanding may be questioned, especially here in the singular. The verb ka¯par means ‘to cover over’ in regard to sin, ‘to make propitiation, to atone’.31 In the majority of cases it is applied to humans atoning for sin, but BDB gives examples of God as subject, and adds somewhat ponderously: ‘It is conceived that God in his sovereignty may himself provide an atonement or covering for men and their sins which could not be provided by men’ (497 under the Piel form). If dôd represents an aspect of God in the Song, the exclamation of the female that he is a cluster of ko¯per may be a play on words meaning he is the source of forgiveness for Israel, the one who covers over her sins and, in the next verse, consequently, sees her as wholly ‘fair’. En-gedi, meaning ‘eye’ or ‘spring of a kid’, does not otherwise occur in the Song but as a place name it is cited seven times in the Bible, notably at 2 Chron. 20: 2 where

30 See Pope, 352, for a good passage on this shrub. 31 Cf. RWPK OWY––‘Day of Atonement’. It appears unlikely that the verb and the noun meaning a shrub are related, but that would not have weighed with the poet, who is, I think, using RPK precisely because in an unpointed text the two words would look identical. 236 Commentary it is stated that the place Hazazon-tamar (= ‘dividing of the palm’) is En-gedi, which links with Sir. 24: 14: ‘I grew tall like a palm tree in En-gedi’, and in turn links with Cant. 7: 8: ‘This your stature is like a palm tree / and your breasts like clusters.’ Thus, it appears that Wisdom, who speaks in the ﬁrst person in Sirach, is similarly the one addressed at Cant. 7: 8, an identiﬁcation supported here at 1: 14 by the address of the beloved which follows in the next verse: ‘Behold you are fair, my companion.’

15 Behold you are fair, my companion, behold you are fair; your eyes are doves. 16 Behold you are fair, my beloved, pleasant indeed. Truly our couch is luxuriant. 17 The beams of our house are cedar, our rafters are fir. The exchange between the male and the female in these verses suggests a perfect equality between them, of like calling to like. The beloved declares his companion to be fair and to possess doves’ eyes. The companion declares the beloved to be fair, pleasant indeed, using a wisdom word which conveys much when its other uses resonate in the reader’s mind, as well as suggesting David, ‘the anointed of the God of Jacob, and the pleasant psalmist of Israel’ (§1.12).32 That the couch is ‘luxuriant’ confirms the connection with worship, whether true or false (3.§6) and also with God, to whom the phrase ‘luxuriant fir’ is applied at Hos. 14: 9. Between the words ‘luxuriant’ and ‘fir’ in our passage comes ‘The beams of our house are cedar’, which hardly needs the verse at 1 Kgs. 6: 15 to indicate its meaning (§3.6). Thus at the end of the chapter (although the chapter divisions are medieval they make good sense) we are back where we started, in the Temple.

CHAPTER 2

1 I am a bud of the plain, a lily of the valleys. 2 As a lily among the thorns, so is my companion among the daughters. 3 As an apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. In his shade I delight and will abide, and his fruit is sweet to my taste. These verses are spoken alternately, ﬁrst by the woman, second by the male and third by the woman again. The translation, ‘I am a bud of the plain’, deprives us of AV’s

32 The adjective OYEN, ‘pleasant’, is often translated ‘sweet’ in this line from 2 Sam. 23: 1. Commentary 237 lovely ‘rose of Sharon’. But we have already learnt (§3.2) that the habazelet is under- ˙ ˙ stood in Cant. Rabbah to be the same flower as the˙ lily, but at an early stage of its development, namely, when it is in bud. ‘Sharon’ (sˇa¯rôn) is both a proper name and a common noun meaning a ‘plain’. Neither the LXX nor the Vulgate took the word to refer to the place, but the place cannot be ruled out. BDB puts sˇa¯rôn under ya¯sˇar, ‘straight, right’, all forms of which include connotations of uprightness. Jewish commentators, as far as I can discover, always read the first verse as spoken by the female. Christian commentators from Origen onwards, though not without exception, read the verse in the light of the Incarnation and therefore as spoken by the bridegroom. For the Christian reader this view is attractive but yields to the Jewish reading when the symbolism of the lily is taken into account. The words sˇa¯rôn, ‘plain’, and ama¯qîm, ‘valleys’, with first ‘bud’ and then ‘lily’ suggest that the bride is not yet fully developed in righteousness (ya¯sˇar) but is fully developed in the depths (valleys) of tribulation. The vocabulary leads to two verses in Isaiah: ‘It [the bud] shall blossom abundantly, even with rejoicing and singing; the glory of Lebanon shall be given to it, the excellency of Carmel and Sharon will see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God’ (35: 2). And, ‘Sharon shall be a pasture for flocks and the valley of Achor [‘trouble’] a place for herds to lie down, for my people have sought me’ (65: 10). The male responds indirectly to the female, ‘As a lily among the thorns, so is my companion among the daughters’, that is, the nations, though the meaning of ‘daughters’ varies (§3.12). She responds similarly by likening her beloved to an apple tree, and just as he has declared that among the daughters she is as superior to the ‘thorns’ among whom she is situated as a lily, so she declares that he is as superior among the sons as an apple tree to the trees of the forest. But if the beloved belongs to the heavenly realm, who are the ‘sons’? The Targumist takes the sons to be the angels on the basis of Gen. 6: 2 (‘The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair’), and Job 38: 7 (‘all the sons of God shouted for joy’).33 In an article, ‘The Targumim and Early Exegesis of “Sons of God” in Genesis 6’, Alexander writes: ‘as far back as we can go in the exegetical tradition on Gen. 6: 1–4, be˘nê e˘lo¯hîm are taken as angels’.34 But, we learn, in time this interpretation became unacceptable, the first note of dissent being sounded in the middle of the second century CE by R. Simeon b. Yohai, who cursed all who called the be˘nê e˘lo¯hîm ‘sons of God’. The article reveals the richness of the subject, but when Alexander comes to the ‘sons’ in the Targum to the Song he does not explain how the Targumist was able to remain with or restore an exegesis which had been authoritatively forbidden. The word for ‘apple’, tappûah, occurs four times in the Song and not much other- ˙ wise. A verse in Joel at 1: 12 is set in the midst of total desolation: ‘The vine withers, the fig tree languishes. Pomegranate, palm, and apple, all the trees of the field are withered, and gladness is dried up from the people.’ On the face of it this looks like a

33 Alexander 97 n. 8. 34 Alexander 1972: 61. 238 Commentary list of staple foods essential for life and health. But, as John Barton points out in his commentary on Joel, ‘the association of vines with fig trees is proverbial in the Old Testament, the juxtaposition usually signifying peace and prosperity’,35 while the presence of the pomegranate alerts us to the possibility that the list is symbolic (§5.3) as does also, I believe, the apple. Another occurrence, Prov. 25: 11––‘Like apples of gold in settings of silver is a word fitly spoken’––can only be figurative. There is a paucity of reference to this fruit in the Old Testament outside the Song,36 which contrasts with the rest of the ancient Mediterranean world where ‘apples’ (mela, a word which covers not only apples but quinces, peaches, and pomegranates) are often found in mythology, and in Greek love spells.37 In regard to the Song, Pope tells us that the apple tree has a special significance in the Sumerian sacred marriage mythology, and he provides a remarkable parallel:

He has brought me into it, he has brought me into it. My brother has brought me into the garden. Dumuzi has brought me into the garden; I strolled [?] with him among the standing trees, I stood with him by its lying trees, By an apple tree I kneeled as is proper.

Pope goes on to say (371–2) that the bride also refers to the groom as ‘My apple tree that bears fruit up to its crown.’ This background must have been known to the poet in some form or another but, without losing sight of it, there seems to me to be a further way of understanding what the poet intends by his use of tappûah, ‘apple ˙ tree’, and tappûhîm, ‘apples’, which emerges from looking at the related Hebrew ˙ forms combined with the contexts in which ‘apple’, whether the tree or the fruit, is placed. BDB (656) puts tappûah, under the verb na¯pah, ‘to breathe, blow’, and gives: ‘(from ˙ ˙ aromatic scent (breath) . . . )’. Another verb, pûah, with the same meaning, is like the ˙ word for apple, and is used in the Song at 2: 17 in a diﬃcult verse: ‘Until the day breathes, and the shadows ﬂee away . . . ’. Yet another word, similar in both pronunciation and meaning, is rûah, ‘breath, wind, spirit’, while a close relation of this word is ˙ re˘ah, ‘fragrance’, for which BDB (926) gives: ‘scent, odour (prop. breath)’. ˙ An interpretation, therefore, of the apple tree which links it with ‘spirit’ or

35 John Barton 2001: 1. 36 Some commentators claim that the apple was unknown in Palestine in biblical times, but see Zohary 1982: 70. 37 See Christopher A. Faraone 1999, especially 69–78. But his discussion slides from the symbolic to the literal and thus claims that apples contain aphrodisiacal properties, a claim commonly made in modern discussions of the fruit in the Song, in deﬁance of the daily experience of eating them. I am more inclined to the view that if brides were required to eat apples on their wedding night it was not in order to arouse their libido but for the purpose of making them wholesome to their husbands. But neither is this an adequate explanation for a number of the rituals involving ‘apples’. Commentary 239

‘fragrance’ will, I believe, bring us nearer to what is intended than focusing on the fruit itself. The apple evidently does symbolize love, but in the Song it is the love which brings a person to prayer, and to the experience of dwelling in the shade of the spirit, and of tasting the sweetness of the spirit’s fruit.

4 He has brought me into the house of wine, and his banner over me is love. 5 Sustain me with raisin cakes, support me with apples, for I am faint from love. 6 His left hand is under my head, and his right hand embraces me. 7 I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles or by the hinds of the field, that you stir not up nor awaken love ‘til it please. At the end of 2: 3 the bride likens the beloved to an apple tree and says that in his shade she delights and will abide. The word for ‘abide’ also means ‘to sit, remain,’ and thus, seated in the shade of the apple tree or, metaphorically, of the spirit, the female describes being brought into a state of prayer: ‘He has brought me into the house of wine, and his banner over me is love.’ The allusions in this verse are complex, especially in the second half. ‘His banner over me is love’ is a much-contested translation. In a short paper, ‘The Root DGL in the Song of Songs’, Robert Gordis writes: ‘The traditional rendering “his banner over me is love” is highly resonant, but unfortunately it is virtually meaningless’, and by recourse to the Assyrian root he arrives at ‘His look upon me was in love, i.e. loving.’38 Gordis’s reasoning was approved by Pope (375–6) and improved upon to provide ‘his intention toward me was love’, a reading now adopted by NRSV, thus depriving us of one of the most significant markers to meaning, and possibly to provenance, in the Song. The noun degel, meaning ‘banner’ or ‘standard’ occurs thirteen times in Numbers, while the identical form to that in the Song at 2: 4, ‘his banner’, occurs twice at Num. 1: 52 and 2: 2. In addition, verbal forms occur in the Song at 5: 10; 6: 4 and 10, neither noun nor verbal forms occurring otherwise in the Bible.39 The meaning of ‘his banner’ in the Song is, therefore, to be sought in Numbers and, having been alerted to the understanding that the organization of the tribes in the desert reflects some divine order, that is where we are prepared to find it (§5.7). The theme in the opening chapters of Numbers of the organization of the tribes around the Tabernacle in preparation for the journey from Sinai to the Promised

38 Robert Gordis 1969: 204. 39 There is a verbal form at Ps. 20: 6 but HALOT replaces it, incontestably, with LYGN,‘we will rejoice’. 240 Commentary

Land is found in the early Rabbinic literature,40 and, no less significantly for the present purpose, forms of degel occur in the Hekhalot literature.41 We have already encountered (§4.3) in 3 Enoch, ‘the four great and honoured princes who are in charge of the four camps of the Shekhinah’, the heavenly counterparts to the four leading camps and their standards described at Num. 10: 14–28. The line in the Song, ‘His banner over me is love’, clearly in my view, links to all this, and informs us, it seems, that the intention of the poet is to align his work with the great theme of cosmic order described in the first ten chapters of Numbers, and taken up in much of the early Jewish mystical literature. On the parallel character of the word ‘love’ with the letters of the Tetragrammaton see §7.5. The ‘raisin cakes’ are found at 2 Sam. 6: 19 and in the corresponding passage at 1 Chron. 16: 3. The context of these passages is the bringing of the ark into ‘the city of David’, when David whirls in an ecstasy of praise before the ark of the Lord, like a whirling dervish, after which he distributes to all the people three items of nourishment, the third being a raisin cake. It seems the poet uses the word a˘sˇîsˇôt, ‘raisin cakes’, to remind the reader of the entry of the ark into Jerusalem and, if this is so, Tournay’s belief, that one of the poet’s concerns is to call ‘to mind the outstanding event which marked the beginning of David’s reign’ (§4.4) is given added weight. Again Pope (384) provides a remarkable parallel to the next two lines from a Sumerian sacred marriage song: Your right hand you have placed on my vulva, Your left hand stroked my head. It seems that the earlier the material the more likely sexual terms will be used. Erich Neumann refers to this in a paragraph following the one quoted in the Egyptian section (§2.5): ‘What was to be expressed had from the very outset no sexual connotations; it was meant symbolically.’ And again: ‘All visceral centres, which also function as affective centres controlling sexuality, are already centres of a higher order.’42 It appears that some concept of the spiritual senses, namely that the five senses of the physical world have an exact counterpart in the spiritual world (a concept we know from Origen, who took it up and brought it into prominence in the third century), could well have been a commonplace of understanding in earlier civilizations such as the Egyptian and the Sumerian.43 In India we find a similar tradition continuing well

40 See the references under LGD in Jastrow. I first heard this interpretation in a class in Oxford some years ago when Professor Jonathan Webber expounded the cosmic order of the tribes around the Tabernacle in what was to me an astonishing illumination of the opening chapters of Numbers. 41 Forms of degel occur in the Hekhalot literature about twenty times. See Schäfer 1981. 42 Erich Neumann 1954: 20 and 26. 43 An observation in the Introduction of Faraone’s book (cited earlier) is striking in this connection: ‘I shall focus mainly on the interpersonal use of love magic, that is, spells used by persons to force others to lust [because] such spells are by far the most frequently attested in our extant sources and because the Greeks themselves so frequently call attention to them in their myths and stories, a noteworthy fact when one searches in vain for any mention of the practice in ancient Mesopotamian or Egyptian myth literature’ (23–4, my emphasis). Commentary 241 into the Middle Ages, exemplified in the Gita Govinda, a long, apparently erotic poem describing the love between Krishna and Rhada, which is often referred to as the Indian Song of Songs, although the similarity between them seems to be confined to the love between the protagonists and appears not to be multi-layered in the same way as the Song. ‘I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem/by the gazelles or by the hinds of the field’. This is the first of four adjurations in the Song, the other three occurring at 3: 5; 5: 8 and 8: 4, the last two without calling on the animals as witnesses to the charge. The plural form of ‘gazelle’ only occurs in the Song with this meaning. Otherwise it means ‘hosts’: the Lord of hosts, heavenly hosts, or hosts in the sense of an army. In addition to the discussion on these creatures (§1.5), which saw them as representing Wisdom, there seems to be another link here between the four adjurations and the four standards or banners of Numbers 10, and a play on the singular form of sa¯ba¯ , ‘army, host’, ˙ in the first chapter of Numbers in which the organization of the tribes for their march from Sinai to the Promised Land is described, as noted above in connection with ‘His banner over me is love.’ For it is about love, that is, in my understanding of the Song, prayer, that the daughters of Jerusalem are being adjured: ‘Stir not up nor waken love ’til it please.’ At the beginning of this unit the female declares that ‘he’ has brought her into the house of wine, that is, into a state of prayer. And this state has caused the sleep of the faculties (§7.6), which must not be disturbed by those outside it, that is, the daughters of Jerusalem. The poet envisages Jerusalem––which stands for the whole people of Israel––brought into perfect communion with her God which the nations––as the ‘daughters’ possibly here represent––are charged not to disturb.

8 The voice of my beloved! Behold, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills. 9 My beloved is like a gazelle or a young hart; behold, he stands behind our wall, gazing through the windows, peering through the lattice. 10 My beloved answered and said to me: Arise, my companion, and go forth my fair one. 11 For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. 12 The blossoms appear in the land; the time of singing has arrived, and the voice of the turtle-dove is heard in our land. 242 Commentary

13 The fig tree has formed its green figs, and the vines are in bud and give a fragrance. Arise my companion, and go forth, my fair one. And into this state of prayer comes the voice of the beloved. The word for ‘voice’ can equally be translated ‘sound’, but if there is an allusion here to the fourth of four passages in Jeremiah, 7: 34; 16: 9; 25: 10 and 33: 11, ‘voice’ is to be preferred. The first three of these depict scenes of desolation, God having caused to cease from the ‘cities of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem’, or from ‘this place’, or from ‘them’, the ‘voice of joy, and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride’. In the fourth passage, Jer. 33: 11, all is reversed: ‘Again there shall be heard in this place . . . the voice of joy, and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride.’ The theme of the ‘voice of the bridegroom’ is taken up in the Gospel of John: ‘He who has the bride is the bridegroom; the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice; therefore this joy of mine is now full’ (3: 29). In the language of wisdom the bride then presents a picture of the beloved as like a gazelle (singular form of the word used in the adjuration) or a young hart, standing behind ‘our wall’, gazing through the windows, peering through the lattice,44 ––similar to the scene at Sir. 14: 20–7––and she reports what the beloved has come ‘leaping over the mountains, bounding over the hills’ to say to her: ‘Arise, my companion / and go forth my fair one.’ According to André Chouraqui, the poet is here presenting the call of God to Abraham at Gen 12: 1, and he complains that the translators who interpret le˘khi la¯kh as ‘come away’ (AV, RSV, NRSV) betray, he believes, ‘le mouvement le plus profond et le plus significatif du Cantique’.45 Tournay took up this idea and expanded it, as we have seen (§4.10). We will return to the motif of Abraham in the Song at the end of this chapter. The next eight lines depict what may be seen as the raison d’être of the Song: ‘For lo, the winter is past; the rain is over and gone. The blossoms appear in the land, the time of singing has arrived.’ This, we are being shown, is heaven, if not yet heaven above, certainly heaven on earth. Here is the bliss of forgiveness, of communion, of nourishment by and harmony with God. In contrast, and as hell to heaven, the book of Lamentations depicts the torment of sins unforgiven, of rejection, starvation by and disharmony with God. The further difference is that the bliss described in the Song cannot be recognized as historical reality, whereas the horrors of Lamentations, whether historical in its time or not, can. The poet, I believe, is depicting the messianic age when the ideal originally intended will be restored.

44 The LXX gives δια´ , ‘through’, for both occurrences of IM, usually ‘from’ in Hebrew, but ‘through’ seems to be required here. Cf. Cant. 5: 4 and BDB, p. 579, 2. (b). 45 André Chouraqui 1984: 50. But the LXX also understood ‘come’, and so did Jerome, if the veni in the Vulgate goes back to his translation from the Hebrew. Nevertheless, Chouraqui, followed by Tournay, makes an important link with VL-VL. Commentary 243

The vocabulary in this unit includes several unusual words. The one about which there is most disagreement, za¯mîr, can equally mean ‘song’, or ‘pruning’.46 The LXX takes it to mean ‘pruning’, and so also does the Targum. Pope has an excellent discussion (395–6), which presents both sides of the argument but comes down on the side of ‘pruning-knives’ in the light of what he calls ‘the most instructive passage’, that at Isa. 18: 5. But a much more instructive passage is that at Isa. 51: 3, which describes exactly what is being conveyed in ours, and concludes with a form of the same word for ‘song’:

For the Lord will comfort Zion, he will comfort all her waste places, and will make her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of song (zimrâ).

A further point in favour of links with this passage is the next verse where the Lord says that a law, tôrâ, will go forth from him, and in the next line in the Song we have ‘the voice of the turtle-dove’, qôl hattôr, ‘is heard in our land’, which looks like a reference to the Torah. And if the Torah is heard, which is to say ‘obeyed’, then the paradisal state portrayed is the certain consequence. The Targumist takes the voice of the turtle-dove to be ‘the voice of the holy spirit’, a symbolism which, Alexander notes, while standard in Christian iconography, is harder to parallel in Rabbinic literature.47 The last two lines, ‘The fig tree has formed its green figs, and the vines are in bud, giving a fragrance’, complete the paradisal picture, the juxtaposition of figs and vines, as we have seen in the discussion on apples, being symbolic of peace and prosperity (see Mic. 4: 4. for an oft-cited example). And so, having delineated a state of supernal perfection, the beloved repeats his invitation: ‘Arise my companion, and go forth my fair one.’ A Hebrew paragraph division occurs at the end of verses 8–13, and again after the next single verse––which suggests we should take it on its own.

14 O my dove, hidden in the clefts of the rock, in the secrecy of the steep places, let me see your appearance, let me hear your voice,

46 Wilfred Watson notes that the poet is archaizing here, and showing his erudition. He goes on to say that a measure of the poet’s skill is that the central word of the stanza [2: 10–13], RYMZ, is an ancient Hebrew word, used in the Gezer calendar, which both epitomizes the theme of the stanza and the entire poem itself, since the word means both ‘song’ and ‘pruning’ (1986: 371). 47 Alexander 108–9 nn. 73, 77. 244 Commentary

for sweet is your voice, and comely your appearance. The vocabulary of ‘hidden in the clefts of the rock, in the secrecy of the steep places’ leads in several different directions. First, the phrase ‘in the clefts of the rock’ occurs three times: here at Cant. 2: 14, Jer. 49: 16, and Obad. v. 3, these last in relation to Edom. Both Jeremiah and Obadiah foretell the total destruction of Edom, and that its rocky, mountainous country will afford no protection against God. The prophecy against Edom in Jeremiah, 49: 7–22, begins: ‘Thus speaks the Lord of hosts, Is wisdom no more in Teman, has counsel perished from the prudent?’ And the passage continues at v. 10: ‘I will strip Esau bare, I will uncover his hiding places, so that he shall not be able to hide himself.’ And at v. 16: ‘You who dwell in the clefts of the rock, who cling to the height of the hill; though you make your nest as high as the eagle’s, from there I will bring you down, says the Lord.’ And the ‘vision of Obadiah’ paints the same picture. Likewise, the word which follows, madre¯gâ, meaning ‘steep’ or ‘high place’, occurs otherwise only at Ezek. 38: 20 in a passage of similar fury and destruction: ‘On that day . . . all human beings that are on the face of the earth, shall quake at my presence, and the mountains shall be thrown down, and the steep places shall fall, and every wall shall tumble to the ground.’ The verse in the Song, on the contrary, depicts the dove, that is, Israel, dwelling securely in the clefts of the rock, safely hidden in her high place, so that the Lord is constrained to beseech her to let him have a sight of her and to hear her voice. For whereas the vocabulary suggests that it lies in his power to cast her down from her ‘clefts of the rock’ and her ‘steep place’ as in times past, now she is no longer in danger from his anger. The word for ‘appearance’, usually glossed ‘countenance’ or ‘face’, is a noun meaning ‘sight, appearance, vision’, from the root ‘to see’. It is used widely, from the appearance of cows (Gen. 41: 2) to the appearance of the glory of the Lord (e.g. Exod. 24: 17). Combined with ‘beauty’ it is used of Sarah, Rachel, Tamar, and David. But it most often occurs in visionary sequences, notably in Daniel and Ezekiel, and frequently elsewhere. The translation ‘your face is lovely’ (NRSV) fails to convey that the dove is here addressed as wholly fitted (‘comely your appearance’) for her role as God’s chosen one. Modern critical studies of early Syriac writings have revealed a line of tradition which takes us back to Jewish literature of the intertestamental period, 1 Enoch for instance, and to the many ideas then current about Paradise. One such study, ‘Les hymnes sur le Paradis de saint Éphrem et les traditions juives’ by Nicholas Séd,48 shows Ephrem’s understanding of Paradise as a mountain, a subject closely related to that of the Temple, and sees the symbolism of the Song of Songs as being among the sources for this understanding. Séd discusses the two words, se¯ter and madre¯gâ, in our present verse, and what follows is based on his study of them.

48 Séd 1968. I am indebted to Robert Murray for pointing me to this study. Commentary 245

First, the word se¯ter, ‘covering, hiding place, secrecy’, occurs in three psalms which reveal it to represent a place where the righteous are hidden and protected by God: 27: 5: ‘For in the evil day he will hide me in his shelter; he will conceal me in the secret place of his tabernacle/tent; he will set me high on a rock’; 91: 1: ‘The one dwelling in the secret place of the most High, shall abide in the shadow of the Almighty’; 119: 114: ‘You are my hiding place and my shield.’ Séd follows these with three characteristic uses of the word in Isaiah, at 4: 6, 16: 4, and 32: 2. He then goes on to tell us that se¯ter is a technical term in Syriac (setoro), used by Ephrem in his description of the mountain of Paradise as the place where the souls of the righteous may wait in security for the resurrection. But it is, perhaps, on the next word, madre¯gâ, that the argument hangs. This word translated, he says, faute de mieux by parois escarpées, steep walls (of rock), comes from the root drg, admitting of the idea of a gradual elevation.49 He goes on to say that ‘this image of the Canticle immediately recalls the “degrees” (deroge in Syriac) of glory of the mountain of Paradise. One can, therefore, think that it concerns the protected shelter, hidden by the mountain, that is to say, the Shekhinah.50 Again, the importance of the Canticle of Canticles for the symbolism of Ephrem’s Paradise is evident’ (470–1). The discussion on this verse has focused largely on the unusual vocabulary. But there is another resonance, the similarity of this scene with that at Exod. 33: 18–23. There Moses implores the Lord to allow him to see his glory and the Lord replies that he will put Moses in the cleft of the rock, and will cover him with his hand while his glory passes by, allowing him to see his back parts ‘but my face shall not be seen’. The vocabulary is not that of the Song––the poet needed to use those words which pointed to scenes of God’s anger in order to portray the reversal. But he also wishes, it seems, to suggest another reversal, one more difficult to understand but a feature of the Song, which is that the male figure, God, or the Messiah, in the interpretation given here, uses language of love and of supplication which we normally expect to be confined to the human side of the relationship. Thus, in the scene in Exodus it is Moses who begs God to reveal something of himself. But here, in the Song, it is the Lord who desires to see the appearance of the one he created to be his companion, that is, his equal. As already noted, the Masoretes marked this verse off with paragraph divisions, which confirms its importance, and suggests that they saw the connections suggested here––and doubtless many more.

49 See BDB under GRD, 201. See also S. Talmon on ‘har’ (1978: 433): ‘While in some cases the slopes [of mountains in Palestine] are smooth, in other cases terracing gives the impression of a stairway (madhreghah, Ez. 38: 20; Cant. 2: 14).’ 50 Namely, God himself, and not as in the later development of the term. 246 Commentary

15 Seize for us the foxes, the little foxes, the ones ruining the vineyards, when our vineyards are in blossom. We see in this verse that the ideal life, to which the bride is exhorted to rise and go, is not beyond being attacked. Although the poet is painting an idyllic picture, this verse suggests that vigilance is necessary; that there are always foxes of one kind or another who, unless seized, either by the community or by the individual, will corrupt the good fruit that is coming into bud (§3.9).

16 My beloved is mine and I am his; he who feeds among the lilies. This verse occurs again at 6: 3, and the first half of it a third time at 7: 11 (7.§7). The verb ‘to pasture, tend, graze’, occurs six times, and here could mean either ‘he pastures his flock among the lilies’, as RSV/NRSV give, ‘his flock’ being supplied, or ‘he who feeds among the lilies’ (3.§13), this latter being more likely and subtly contributing to the sense of eros in the first line. My understanding of this verse is that it represents a person at prayer, the individual in turn representing the people symbolized by the lilies (3.§2) among whom the beloved ‘feeds’ when they are thus united to him.

17 Until the day breathes and the shadows depart, turn, my beloved, be like a gazelle or a young hart upon the mountains of separation. The discussion of Cant. 2: 17 (§4.10) does not include a similar verse at 4: 6 or the ﬁnal verse of the Song, which links with both the earlier verses, and, as already mentioned, further comment on all three will be found below at the last verse of the poem. The Hebrew paragraph division given here agrees with the chapter division.

CHAPTER 3

‘Have you seen him whom my soul loves?’ 4 Hardly had I passed from them when I found him whom my soul loves. I held him and would not let him go until I had brought him into my mother’s house, and into the chamber of her who conceived me. 5 I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles or by the hinds of the field, that you stir not up nor awaken love ‘til it please. These five verses are enclosed on either side by a paragraph division, and are discussed at §7.8. Here we will only note the dramatic change of scene in the first four verses of this chapter. The city has been fleetingly evoked by address to the ‘daughters of Jerusalem’ (1: 5 and 2: 7), but now we are in the city itself in contrast to the classic biblical themes of vineyards, flocks, mountains, land, fig trees, and vines of the first two chapters, and the beloved is nowhere and must be sought. The last verse of this unit, v. 5, reveals that what the bride had failed to obtain in v. 1, that is, the sleep of the faculties in prayer, has now been granted, and there follows an exact repetition of the adjuration at 2: 7, not to awaken love ‘til it please.

6 Who is this coming up from the wilderness like columns of smoke, being censed with myrrh and frankincense, and with every kind of powder of the merchant? 7 Behold his bed which is Solomon’s. Sixty mighty men surround it from the mighty men of Israel. All hold a sword, being instructed in war; 8 each has a sword upon his thigh, from fear in the night The question, ‘Who is this (fem.)?’ has received many answers but I have found none better than the one suggested by Gerald Sheppard in his Wisdom as a Hermeneutical Construct. in which he sees a parallel between this passage in the Song and Sirach 24, where Wisdom makes her way through the cosmos to the beloved city, Jerusalem, and is given both rest and power (§1.5). I should like here to reflect further, with the help of another scholar, on the implications of the incense in this passage. But first, the phrase ‘columns of smoke’ occurs otherwise only at Joel 3: 3 (ET 2: 30) in an apocalyptic oracle describing the ‘great and terrible day of the Lord’, the columns of smoke being one of the portents in heaven and earth. The passage in Joel is moving in the direction of Jerusalem as are the passages in the Song and in Sirach. If 248 Commentary the poet is recalling Joel he is giving a double meaning to the columns of smoke for in the Song they refer to incense, as the next word, a pual participle meaning ‘being censed’, related to ‘censer’, makes clear––or would make clear if the meaning of the form was understood. But translators and commentators are usually unfamiliar with censers, and with the practice of censing things and people, and of being censed, with the consequence that some odd translations are provided, BDB’s ‘fumigated’, for instance (883).51 The most frequent translation is ‘perfumed’, which, if not entirely incorrect, deprives us of the significance of incense in this context. And here I turn to the article, ‘Sirach and Wisdom’s Dwelling Place’, by C. T. R. Hayward. Section 3 of this article is entitled ‘The alleged defects of the Second Temple’. These are things missing or lacking their former sanctity, and we have seen one of them–– oils––at Cant. 1: 3. Here it is the incense, which would also have been missing. About this Hayward writes: Sirach 24: 15 compares Wisdom with incense which, according to 2 Maccabees 2: 5, could not have been burned in the Second Temple . . . Elsewhere, Sirach compares incense with wisdom and its students (39: 13–14); and a similar tradition linking wisdom with Torah study is found in the Qumran literature at 4Qflor 1: 6–7, and in Rabbinic texts like b. Men 110a; Ber. 43b, and PJ of Exod 40: 5. In all these sources, including Sirach, biblical information about the incense is assumed: of the highest degree of holiness, it is offered next to the divine Presence (Exod 30: 36). Like the anointing oil, it is confined to the sanctuary: imitations for use outside the holy place are forbidden under the strictest penalties (Exod 30: 32–33, 37–38).52 Hayward then goes on to say that the references to Wisdom’s tabernacling in the holy tabernacle (24: 8, 10) now take on an added meaning: ‘It seems that Sirach is joining hands with defenders of the sanctity of the Second Temple.’ The description of the figure being censed with myrrh and frankincense on the way to Jerusalem at Cant. 3: 6 is, I believe, making the same point. That the author of the Song makes it in one verse while Ben Sira takes twelve is typical of their very different styles although, if Sirach pre-dates the Song, it could be attributed to the poet needing to do no more than allude to his predecessor. If the first three lines of 3: 6 exercise the minds of commentators, the ‘merchant’ in the fourth tends to render them quiescent, modern commentators passing lightly and sometimes altogether over the subject. But an examination of rôke¯l in Ezekiel, emporos in Revelation, and taggara in Syriac tradition, reveals that there is quite a lot to be gained from the role of the ‘merchant’. In Ezekiel and the Apocalypse he is portrayed negatively as an enabling element in the kind of commerce which is corrupting Tyre and Babylon. Approaching this question from the perspective of the Song we find that there is a significant overlap of vocabulary between Ezekiel 27 and the Song, but even more so in the description of the cargo at Rev. 18: 12–13. The list consists of twenty-eight nouns, five of which have no counterpart in Hebrew. Of the remaining twenty-three, sixteen are explicitly in the

51 HALOT overlooks the form altogether. The LXX gives a perfect passive participle, τεθυµιαµ(νη, which is similarly overlooked in the concordance of Hatch and Redpath. 52 1999: 39. Commentary 249

Song as follows: gold, silver, precious stone, marble, purple, scarlet, wood, ivory, cinnamon, spice, incense, frankincense, wine, oil, sheep, and horses. Another item with which the merchants trade in both Ezekiel (27: 13) and Revelation (18: 13) is ‘souls’, often understood to mean traffic in slaves. We will shortly see, when looking at the positive role of the merchant, that ‘souls’ fits. The correspondence between the list in Revelation and the vocabulary of the Song is suggestive. The list is generally taken as consisting of the items of those days in which a merchant would trade. And doubtless that is what it is. But the connection of so many of the items with the cult is striking. Tyre and Babylon are extreme examples of one of the chief concerns of the biblical literature: the misuse of religion to create power and wealth, thus corrupting the cult, and turning all its original goodness to arrogance, to usurpation of the purposes of God for its own purposes. And so it is God who decrees their ruin. Consequently the merchants are themselves brought to ruin through the ruin of that which they serve. But in Syriac tradition the merchant is presented as serving the interests of God. In a chapter called ‘Titles shared by Christ and Apostles, Bishops’, Murray writes: ‘Another figure expressing apostolic functions is that of a merchant (taggara), either seeking the pearl which is Christ, or trading with talents.’ He goes on to say that although the immediate source of both allusions is the Gospels, the image has a long prehistory in Mesopotamian religious language, and he provides a substantial footnote indicating ancient sources, which includes: ‘The divine merchant (the saviour or his agent) deals in merchandise, i.e. souls and their merits, which will be subjected to scrutiny by the heavenly customs officers’ (174–5). In the Song, however, it is the negative role of the merchant in Ezekiel which is reversed, the poet showing that this merchant is properly providing for the worship of the Temple, the implicit subject from ‘Who is this?’ to the end of the chapter. ‘Behold his bed which is Solomon’s’ is interpreted by the Targum as a metaphor for the Temple as also by Numbers Rabbah 11: 3: ‘“Behold the litter” alludes to the Temple.’ The ‘sixty mighty men’ are taken by both the Midrash and the Targum to be the sixty letters of the Priestly Blessing at Num. 6: 24–6 which protects Israel like an encircling wall, and was regarded, Alexander tells us, as one of the most potent spells in Jewish magic.53 Alexander cites a further meaning for the ‘mighty men of Israel’ from parallels in Numbers Rabbah where they are taken to be ‘the Priests, the Levites and all the tribes of Israel’ (123 n. 35). But this would be more easily understood if they represent the Levites only. For what follows, ‘each with his sword upon his thigh’, recalls Exod. 32: 26–7 where, after the episode of the Golden Calf, the Levites gather themselves to Moses, who says to them: ‘Put every man his sword upon his thigh . . .’. The wording of Exod. 32: 27 is identical with the wording at Cant. 3: 8, and I think the poet has preserved this one detail from the story of the Golden Calf because he understands the command to the Levites, ‘Put every man his sword upon his thigh, go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man

53 Alexander 123 n. 34, 123 n. 35, 124 n. 38. 250 Commentary his companion, and every man his neighbour’, to mean something like: cut down those earthly ‘attachments’ which lie at the root of apostasy. The command from Moses is diﬃcult, even read metaphorically, but read literally it would mean that the Levites––since all of them were gathered to Moses––slaughtered each other. A further clue is found at Deut. 33: 8–11 where Moses blesses the children of Israel before his death: for they [the Levites] have kept your word and guarded your covenant. They shall teach Jacob your judgements and Israel your law; they shall put incense before you, and whole burnt oﬀerings upon your altar. (9b–10) The last verse of the passage asks God to bless Levi’s virtue and the work of his hands and concludes––and this may be the point––with the request to God to crush the loins of his adversaries, of those that hate him, that they rise not again. Thus, there may be an implicit polemic on behalf of the Levites at Cant. 3: 7–8. To return to the Targum, Alexander notes that at Cant. 3: 8, ‘from fear in the night’ the Targumist heard an echo of Ps. 91: 5–6: ‘You shall not be afraid of the terror by night’, and he goes on to say that Psalm 91 was regarded in Rabbinic magic as an incantation against demons, which agrees with the sense of Cant. 3: 8.54 The Masoretic text provides a paragraph break between 3: 8 and 9, and there is certainly an alteration of tone though not, I think, of subject.

9 King Solomon made for himself a palanquin from the wood of Lebanon. 10 He made its pillars of silver, its support of gold, its seat of purple, its interior paved with stones. 11 Daughters of Jerusalem go forth, and behold, O daughters of Zion, King Solomon in the crown, with which his mother crowned him on the day of his nuptials, and on the day of the gladness of his heart. In b. Soferim, we read: ‘All occurrences of the name of Solomon in the Song of Songs are sacred except one which is secular. Which one is it? “Behold, it is the litter of Solomon” (3: 7). Others say: “Thou, O Solomon, shalt have the thousand”’ (8: 12).

54 Alexander 124 n. 40. Commentary 251

But I would like to suggest––if there must be one occurrence when God is not given the title ‘King of Peace’ in the Song––that it is here, and that we read ‘King Solomon made for him [namely for God] a palanquin’, the ‘palanquin’ and all that follows representing the Temple which Solomon did indeed make for God. This kind of cryptic allusion is so typical of the poet that I find it difficult to take the line in any other sense. On the other hand, if Solomon stands for God here, which is not disputed in rabbinical exegesis, then God must be understood as the real builder of the Temple. ‘Palanquin’ translates a word of obscure origin, ’appiryôn, not otherwise in the Hebrew Bible (see Pope, 441). ‘From the wood of Lebanon’ recalls Solomon’s speech to Hiram, King of Tyre (§4.11). In this account of the building of the Temple (1 Kgs. 5: 5, 6) there is no mention of silver until its completion when Solomon ‘brought in the holy things of his father David, the silver, the gold and the vessels . . . ’ (1 Kgs. 7: 51). But at 1 Chron. 22: 14 David tells Solomon: ‘With great pains I have provided for the house of the Lord one hundred thousand talents of gold, one million talents of silver’. For a possible explanation of ‘its seat of purple’, with its suggestion of a link to ‘chariot mysticism’, see §4.4. The attempts to amend the Hebrew in the line ‘its interior paved with love, from the daughters of Jerusalem’ are numerous. The word generally translated ‘paved’ is a passive participle of a verb meaning ‘to fit out, fit together’ and does not occur otherwise in the Bible. Michael Fox translates ‘its interior laid with stones’ because, as he rightly observes, the noun derived from the verb, rispâ, means ‘pavement’, and ˙ ‘always applies to floors’.55 The floors are those of the Temple, cf. 2 Chron. 7: 3; Ezek. 40: 17–18, and the stones are found at 1 Kgs. 5: 17: ‘And the king commanded, and they brought great stones, costly stones, to lay the foundation of the house.’ Again at 1 Chron. 22: 2 [‘David] set masons to hew wrought stones to build the house of God.’ Fox’s amendment becomes the more compelling the more references to stones for the building of the Temple are studied, while a comparison of the word for ‘stones’ and a plural form for ‘love’ supports the suspicion of some corruption having taken place.56 The next verse, then, has the daughters of Jerusalem in parallel with the daughters of Zion and, thus amended, these verses give the sense of meaning restored. The last verse of chapter 3 brings it to a glorious conclusion. Reflecting on the name Solomon earlier in the passage, Theodoret links it to 1 Chron. 22: 9–10: ‘His name shall be Solomon, and I will give peace and quiet to Israel in his days. He shall build a house for my name. He shall be my son, and I will be his father, and I will establish his royal throne in Israel for ever.’57 On the reason why it is Solomon’s mother who crowns him, Gregory of Nyssa connects the mother in this verse with God who crowns the king in Ps. 21: 4, saying that the terms ‘mother’ and ‘father’ mean the same where God is concerned since there is neither male nor female in God. This seems to me a point of great importance, but I think the ‘mother’ in the Song points to

55 M. V. Fox 1985: 126. 56 OYNBA = ‘stones’, and OYBHA = a plural form of ‘love’, the meaning of which is far from certain. It occurs, for instance, at Prov. 5: 19, usually translated ‘loving’ (’loving hind’), and at Prov. 7: 18 no less incomprehensibly. 57 Richard A. Norris Jr. 2003: 147. 252 Commentary

Wisdom, especially here since it was with wisdom that Solomon was crowned in consequence of his request for it. Perhaps Gregory was not entirely satisﬁed with his explanation for he concludes: ‘But it would be more eﬀective to set out the divine words themselves, which go exactly like this: ‘Daughters of Jerusalem go forth, and behold, O daughters of Zion, King Solomon in the crown, with which his mother crowned him on the day of his nuptials, and on the day of the gladness of his heart.’58

CHAPTER 4 (UP TO 5: 1)

1 Behold, you are fair, my companion, behold, you are fair; your eyes are doves from behind your veil. Your hair is like a flock of goats which have come forth from Mount Gilead. 2 Your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes, which have come up from the washing; all of them bear twins; not one among them has miscarried. 3 Like a thread of scarlet are your lips, and your mouth is comely. Your temple is like a slice of pomegranate behind your veil. 4 Your neck is like the tower of David built in terraces, on which hang the thousand shields, all bucklers of mighty men. 5 Your two breasts are like two young harts; twins of a gazelle that feed among the lilies. 6 Until the day breathes and the shadows disappear, I will get me to the mountain of myrrh and to the hill of frankincense. 7 You are all fair, my companion; there is no blemish in you. These verses are enclosed on either side by a Masoretic paragraph division. But the subject of the whole of chapter 4, and the first verse of chapter 5––seventeen verses–– is solidly, I believe, the Temple, the central section of the book being given to this theme.

58 McCambley 1987: 152–3, except that I have used my translation for the verse from the Song. Commentary 253

First, we note that it is the male voice which speaks throughout except––when we come to them––for two lines at 4: 16. He praises the different parts and the different functions of the Temple in the language of address to the ‘bride’: ‘Behold, you are fair, my companion, behold you are fair; your eyes are doves behind your veil.’ This is a repetition of 1: 15, where the context is also the Temple, but here with the addition of ‘behind your veil’, which occurs also at 4: 3 and again at 6: 7, three times in the Song and otherwise only at Isa. 47: 2. This word, sammâ, against which BDB (855) has ˙ ‘woman’s veil’ (similarly HALOT), is difficult and has, as Pope rightly says in a good discussion (458), been troublesome to early translators and interpreters.59 ‘Your hair is like a flock of goats, which have come forth60 from Mount Gilead’ also occurs at 6: 4 except that ‘Mount’ is there lacking. As we have seen, the curtains of the Tabernacle are made of goats’ hair, the word ‘hair’ being implicit in Exodus and Numbers in the references to ‘goats’. In the Song ‘hair’ is supplied in the praise of the female, and is an indication that she represents the Temple in these passages. The significance of Mount Gilead is difficult, as the silence of commentators on the subject testify, though Ellen Davis is an exception with: ‘Gilead . . . evokes a series of associations with the foundational period of Israel’s history. Here the tribes of Reuben, Gad and Manasseh settled at the end of the wilderness wandering [and] God first brought deliverance to Israel through Saul (1 Sam. 13)’ (264). Without losing that interpretation, another is suggested in the covenant made between Jacob and Laban at Genesis 31 where the words gal, ‘heap, wave, billow’, and ¯de , ‘witness’, are put together (v. 48) to form a play on the name Gilead. Thus, if the poet is praising the curtains of the Temple he is also, it seems, alluding––in ‘which have come forth from Mount Gilead’––to the flight of Jacob from Laban, Laban’s pursuit, and their meeting on Mount Gilead, the combination ‘mount’, or ‘mountain’, and ‘Gilead’ occurring three times in the story of Laban’s pursuit, Gen. 31: 21, 23, 25, a fourth time here at Cant 4: 1, and not otherwise. What can be said in support of this suggestion? The story at Genesis 31 concerns Jacob’s response to God’s instruction to him––in language which echoes God’s call to Abraham at Gen. 12: 1––to return to the land of his fathers. That the poet intends to evoke the story of Jacob’s flight from Laban is further suggested by the similarity of vocabulary with Jacob’s protest when Laban overtakes him: ‘These twenty years I have been with you; your ewes and your female goats have not miscarried ’. The word translated ‘miscarry’, sˇa¯kal, meaning primarily ‘to be bereaved of children’, also occurs at Exod. 23: 26: ‘There shall not be any who miscarry or are barren in your land.’ And whereas the Exodus verse is preceded by God’s warning to the people that he will send an angel before them, the episode at Mount Gilead is followed by Jacob being met by the angels of God, as we have seen when considering the meaning of Mahanaim at Cant. 7: 1 (§4.3). These ‘hidden’ allusions to Jacob give the sense that Jacob is like a watermark in the paper of the biblical scroll. Behind the letters his face may, here and there, be dimly

59 More recently, an essay by Jane Barr (1994) informs us that according to Luis de Leon the word sammâ means both ‘locks of hair’ and the female pudenda––an interpretation fortunately unknown˙ to Pope who would have given us at least ten pages on it. 60 See Jastrow under $oL G , 251, where Cant. Rabbah on this verse is cited. 254 Commentary discerned. He is, after all, Israel, and it is with Israel as land and as community in loving relationship with God that the poet is concerned. This loving relationship between God and Jacob/Israel is shown in a unique passage which depicts the eros of God in ‘bridal’ mode, the only passage in the early Jewish mystical literature, as far as I am aware, to do so. It occurs in the context of the yorde merkava, the adept who descends to the chariot, the emissary of Israel whose task is to secure communion with God, and who is the one addressed in the opening line. Here is the translation of the passage in Morray-Jones: And bear witness to them of what you see of me; what I do to the countenance of Jacob, your father, which is engraved by me on the throne of my Glory. For at the time when you recite before me: Holy! Holy! Holy! . . . I bend down towards him and caress him, embrace him and kiss him, with my hands upon his arms, three times, corresponding to the three times at which you recite the qedushah before me, as it is written: Holy! Holy! Holy is the Lord of Hosts! 61 On the text set out above, Morray-Jones writes: it is clear that Jacob’s image functions as the heavenly representative of the community of Israel, which is frequently portrayed in biblical tradition as God’s beloved bride. This is a theme which continues to be developed in rabbinic literature––above all in the context of midrashic exegesis of the Song of Songs. In this passage, then, the community––as bride––is figuratively identified with the celestial throne on which God appears in his visible Glory. Moreover, the liturgical action which brings about this visible enthronement––recitation of the qedushah [‘Holy, holy, holy’]––is here presented as an intimate and tender act of ‘marital’ union. In this loving interchange, Jacob’s image, being the personification of the ‘bride’, necessarily occupies the ‘feminine’ role.62 ‘Your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes’. The Targumist understands the teeth as representing the two matching orders of Priests and Levites who eat the priestly gifts, and he compares these gifts to a flock in the line ‘Your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes’. Alexander explains: ‘The “flock” to which the priestly gifts are compared is not just any flock, but Jacob’s flock, at a significant moment in the sacred history, namely when he is about to wrestle with the angel.’63 The Targumist is alerted to Jacob by the word ‘ewes’ because, except for the two references in the Song, 4: 2 and 6: 6, the word occurs only once with the meaning ‘ewe’ (at Isa. 53: 7: ‘as a ewe before her shearers is dumb’) apart from Jacob, who not only possessed ewes (Gen. 31: 38 and 32: 15) but loved Rachel, whose name means ‘ewe’. Thus we see another example, in the two references to ewes, of hidden allusions to Jacob. There might be yet another in ‘All of them bear twins’, Jacob and Esau being twins. The author of the Song is the only biblical writer to use the verb ‘be double’ (here at 4: 2 and again at 6: 6, two identical passages about bearing twins) apart from Exod. 26: 24 and 36: 29, where, in both places, the instruction is to make two boards for the corners of the Tabernacle which shall be coupled together above and beneath. And he is likewise unique in his use of the noun ‘twins’, at Cant. 4: 5 and 7: 4 (both in relation to ‘breasts’), which otherwise only occurs in the narratives of Gen. 25: 24 (birth of Jacob

61 2009: 504. 62 Ibid. 505. 63 Alexander 131 n. 9. Commentary 255 and Esau) and 38: 27 (birth of twins to Tamar). Here, in this passage, there is a concentration in vv. 1–5 of doubles or things in pairs: the word ‘fair’ occurs twice in v. 1 followed by eyes of which there are two; teeth are in two sets, an upper and a lower; the flock of shorn ewes all bear twins; lips, like teeth, have an upper and a lower part. Moreover, passing over v. 3a for the moment, 3b, ‘Your temple is like a slice of pomegranate’, contains a rare word for ‘slice’ about which Pope writes: ‘The word may designate either of two parts of a divided object as seen from its application to millstones, both upper and lower . . . Whether the reference is to temples or cheeks, the aspects both of unity and duality are implicit’ (464). And at v. 5, ‘Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle.’ In addition, the poet repeats many verses twice, these, for instance, occurring again in chapter 6. It seems that the poet is alluding to a tradition made explicit in Sirach, as we saw in the Introduction (§5): ‘All things are twofold, one opposite the other ’ (42: 24) or, from the same source: ‘Look at all the works of the Most High; they come in pairs, one opposite the other’ (33: 15). But he is also, I believe, making a connection with the two tablets of stone––which thus appropriately ascribes a double motive to his double images and doubling of verses. Returning to 3a, the line ‘Your lips are like a thread of scarlet’ is generally seen by commentators to be an allusion to the story of Rahab and the two Israelite spies at Joshua 2, the words ‘scarlet thread’ being identical in both places, and the combination not otherwise occurring. This is confirmed, I believe, by the beginning of the sentence (Josh. 2: 18) in which the scarlet thread occurs: ‘Behold, when we come into the land’, the land being one of the principal heroines of the Song, as we have seen, especially at Cant. 7: 1–5. AV’s ‘Your mouth is comely’, in the next line, agrees with BDB: ‘mouth, as organ of speech’ (184). ‘Your neck is like the tower of David built in terraces, on which hang the thousand shields, all bucklers of mighty men.’ We saw (§4.8) that a ‘tower of David’ is not attested in the biblical literature, but there was a tradition of calling the Temple a ‘tower’; and although it was Solomon who built the Temple, the idea and the pattern for it came from David (see especially the account of the Chronicler, 1 Chronicles 28). From Pope’s discussion of v. 4, I have taken Delitzsch’s ‘built in terraces’: ‘[Delitzsch] opted for the sense “built in terraces”, with the explanation that the damsel’s neck was surrounded by ornaments so that it did not appear as a uniform whole, but as composed of terraces [which] he supposed were built one above the other like the Babylonian ziggurat’ (466–7). The language of the Song frequently leads to ziggurats, which encourages me to adopt a related word here. There are two references, the first at Ezek. 27: 10–11, and the second at 1 Macc. 4: 57, which indicate the use of shields to decorate walls, the walls of the Temple in Maccabees. Indeed, the line in the Song sounds like an allusion to 1 Macc. 4: 57, and further encourages a late dating for the Song. ‘Your two breasts are like two young harts, twins of a gazelle.’ This line seems a particularly good example of Ben Sira’s ‘Look at the works of the Most High; they come in pairs . . . ’ coupled with the interpretation of the two breasts being a metaphor for the two tablets of the law. ‘Until the day breathes and the shadows flee’ is an exact repetition of 2: 17a, there 256 Commentary followed by ‘turn, my beloved, be like a gazelle or a young hart upon the mountains of cutting’, here followed by ‘I will get me to the mountain of myrrh and to the hill of frankincense.’ Thus the passage closes with a reference to myrrh, a constituent of the holy anointing oil, and to frankincense, the word meaning both incense and the mountain range, Lebanon, which provided the trees for building the Temple. And so the beloved declares again: ‘You are all fair, my companion, and in you there is no blemish.’ The word ‘blemish’ is translated by µµο in the LXX and consequently links, as has often been noticed, with the passage in Ephesians where the writer, in the context of marriage, instructs his readers: Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that he might present the Church to himself in splendour, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish (α µµο ). (5: 25–7) Whether the author of Ephesians was consciously making a link with the Song we do not know. But, conscious link or not, both writers are talking about the same thing, namely, the Temple or Church––the subject, I believe, of what follows.

8 Come from Lebanon, O bride, come, journey from Lebanon; travel from the top of Armana, from the top of Senir and Hermon; from the dens of lions, from the mountains of leopards. 9 You have struck at my heart, my sister, my bride, you have struck at my heart with one of your eyes, with one bead from your necklace. 10 How fair are your breasts, my sister, my bride, how much better your breasts than wine, and the fragrance of your oils more than all spices. 11 Your lips, O bride, drop flowing honey; honey and milk are under your tongue, and the fragrance of your garments is like the fragrance of Lebanon. The MT marks the beginning and end of this passage with a paragraph break which agrees with the inclusio provided by the word ‘Lebanon’ in the first and the last line: ‘Come from Lebanon, O bride . . . the fragrance of your garments is like the fragrance of Lebanon.’ For a discussion of v. 8 see §4.11. The verses which follow, 9 and 10, convey kinship with the Egyptian material (§2.5): in the use of ‘sister’ glossed with ‘bride’; in the bead necklaces of the musician-priestesses who impersonate the goddess Hathor; and in Commentary 257 the use of the word for ‘breasts’, dd, usually translated ‘love’. This word is also used in the Egyptian material, we learn from Fox (88), and it is worth noting that in its five occurrences in the Song (1: 2; 1: 4; 4: 10 (twice); and 7: 13) one senses the Egyptian influence. The second half of v. 10 is almost an exact repetition of the opening verses, 1: 2 and 4, except that while at Cant. 1: 2–3 the female declares: ‘your breasts are better than wine. For fragrance your oils are good’, at Cant. 4: 10 it is the male voice which declares: ‘how much better your breasts than wine, and the fragrance of your oils more than all spices.’ At v. 11 there is a line redolent of wisdom vocabulary: ‘Your lips, O bride, drop flowing honey; honey and milk are under your tongue.’ The application by the Tal- mud to chariot mysticism of this verse in the Song suggests a long tradition, while the image of lips dripping flowing honey takes us back to Proverbs, where it is applied to the ‘strange woman’, namely, the woman who represents the seductive power of false religion (§1.9).64 ‘And the fragrance of your garments is like the fragrance of Lebanon.’ We have seen (§3.4) that the phrase ‘like the fragrance of Lebanon’ only occurs otherwise at Hos. 14: 6 (7 Hebrew) where it refers to Israel, and is one of the blessings which will come upon him when he returns to the Lord his God. There the one addressed by God is male, here female; there Israel, here the Temple. We are also reminded of Jacob obtaining the blessing from Isaac, who ‘smelled the smell of his raiment’ (Gen. 27: 27), the word ‘smell’ or ‘fragrance’ being used twice there as here.

12 A garden barred is my sister, my bride; a spring barred, a fountain sealed. 13 Your shoots are a paradise of pomegranates, with excellent fruit; cypresses with nards. 14 Nard with saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices. 15 A spring of gardens, a well of living water, and flowing streams from Lebanon. 16 Awake north wind, and come O south! Blow upon my garden that its spices may flow forth! Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat its choice fruits.

64 The word ‘strange’, HRZ, used of the ‘strange woman’ in Proverbs, is identical with the word at Exod. 30: 9 forbidding the oﬀering of ‘strange’ incense on the altar of incense. 258 Commentary CHAPTER 5

1 I have come into my garden, my sister, my bride, I have gathered my myrrh with my spice. I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey, I have drunk my wine with my milk. Eat, friends! Drink and be drunk, beloved ones! A paragraph break at 4: 11 and again at 5: 1 suggests that these six verses should be taken together (see §5.2 to §5.6). But taking all seventeen verses of chapter 4, including 5: 1, together, we see that they are all spoken by the male except for the second half of v. 16, ‘Let my beloved come into his garden’, which can only be spoken by the female since only she uses the term ‘beloved’. The unit ends with: ‘Eat, friends! Drink and be drunk, beloved ones!’, which I understand as giving permission to the proﬁcients of mystical prayer to enjoy freely the fruits of their long and diﬃcult apprenticeship in the practice of divine loving (§5.6).

CHAPTER 5 (CONTINUED FROM 5: 2)

2 I sleep, but my heart is awake. A sound! My beloved is knocking! Open to me, my sister, my companion, my dove, my perfect one, for my head is full of dew, my locks with the drops of the night. 3 I have put off my tunic, how shall I put it on? I have washed my feet, how shall I defile them? 4 My beloved put his hand through the opening and my inward parts were moved for him. 5 I rose up to open to my beloved, and my hands dripped with myrrh, my fingers with flowing myrrh, upon the handles of the bolt. 6 I opened to my beloved, but my beloved had turned and gone. My soul went forth at his departing.65 I sought him, but I found him not;

65 Following a suggestion from Dr Hughes based on a cognate in Arabic, dabara. Commentary 259

I called him, but he did not answer me. 7 The watchmen who go about the city found me, they smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took my veil from me. A paragraph break marks 5: 2 but there is not another one until 6: 3. Here we will look at the six verses of 5: 2–7. There is, it seems to me, a theology of God and the Temple implicit in the Song which is exactly analogous to the theology of Christ and the Church. Thus the bride in the Song is much more than the Temple building just as the bride of Christ, the Church, is much more than the structures in which God is worshipped, for she is both structure and worshipper. The teaching of Paul illumines the relationship between God and the Temple, as understood by our author, quite as much as it guided the nascent Church. ‘Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?’ Paul writes in his first letter to the Corinthians (3: 16). And in his second, ‘I betrothed you to Christ, to present you as a pure bride to her one husband’ (11: 2). Again, in the letter to the Ephesians, as we have seen, the writer compares the relationship between a husband and his wife to Christ and his Church, an analogy he calls a ‘great mystery’. Here at 5: 2, the change of speaker appears to mark a change of subject, but there is only, I believe, a change of aspect. Throughout chapter 4 the bridegroom has been praising the bride as ‘Temple’. Now we encounter her as the ‘Assembly’ or the people of God. And in this aspect she is still on the way, still capable of failing––which indeed she does. Here, in a passage spoken by the bride about the bridegroom, approximately equal in length to his, the response of the female falters. We will look first at the six verses set out above. ‘I sleep, but my heart is awake.’66 This highly compressed half-line reveals the poet as one experienced in mystical prayer, which explains the Song’s resonance with those who pray similarly. Teresa of Avila’s analysis of states of prayer, as we saw (§7.6), identifies a state which she calls the ‘sleep of the faculties’, and this, I believe, is what the poet is describing at 5: 2. An early commentator, Gregory of Nyssa, provides a remarkable commentary on this verse (§7.6), and I should like to adduce other early commentators, but several of particular interest, Origen, Gregory the Great, Bernard of Clairvaux, did not get as far as 5: 2. Others seem not to have seen a reference to prayer in this verse. Among Jewish commentators I have not been able to discover any who tie this experience of prayer to 5: 2 of the Song. Maimonides quotes the verse in The Guide of the Perplexed, but in connection with having one’s mind always on God, even whilst speaking with others, or attending to bodily wants, which does not at all suggest the ‘sleep of the faculties’, though in all probability he knew this state.67 That Abulafia

66 The Greek and Latin versions translate the Hebrew waw as ‘and’, which is what it normally means, and perhaps is what should be given here. 67 Translation by M. Friedländer. 1956 edition, 387. 260 Commentary knew such a level of prayer is beyond doubt, but he did not, it seems, attach it to the experience described at Cant. 5: 2. Moshe Idel, Abulafia’s modern exponent, questions Abulafia’s use of Maimonides’ teachings and his Guide as a point of departure for his non-Maimonidean view of unio mystica and asks: ‘Why did he stick to the Guide, interpreting its secrets which hint at the possibility of mystic union, instead of commenting upon the Song of Songs?’68 There are several descriptions in the chapter ‘Death and Desire in Jewish Spirituality’ in Fishbane’s The Kiss of God which indicate that the state is known and has been practised down the centuries, while Fishbane himself glosses the reference to Cant. 5: 2 in Maimonides in a way which suggests knowledge: ‘a numbing of the exterior senses so that the presence of God may be acquired in pure inwardness’ (30). Then, while the bride is deep in prayer, ‘gripped by inaction’, as Gregory puts it, there is the sound of the beloved knocking: ‘Open to me, my sister, my companion, my dove, my perfect one.’ ‘My perfect one’ (tamma¯ti) occurs here and again at 6: 9, where it is also juxtaposed with ‘my dove’ (yôna¯ti). There is a passage in Fishbane’s Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking which cites Rabbinic perceptions of the par- ity between God and Israel precisely, I believe, as the author of the Song wishes it to be understood: We begin with the myth of complementarity. It repeatedly comes to expression around the phrase ‘My dove, My pure one (tamati)’ (Songs 5: 2), which in numerous homilies is part of God’s response to the people’s expression of love and expectation in the first part of the verse. According to R. Yannai, when God calls the people tamati he intends tomyati,‘My twin’, by which is meant equivalence: ‘I am not greater (or older) than she, and she is not greater (or older) than I’. By this assertion the sage seems to have God acknowledge the covenantal complementarity of Israel and her Lord. But R. Yehoshua of Sikhnin went further, reporting in the name of R. Levi (early third century, Palestine): ‘The matter may be compared to twins (te’omin). Just as one of them will feel the head pain experienced by the other, so the Holy One, blessed be He, said, “I shall be with him in affliction” (Ps. 91: 15).’ Thus the word tamati is taken to encode God’s confirmation that He is ‘paired’ with Israel in suffering.69 We have seen above (Commentary at Cant. 4: 2) that the author of the Song is unique in his use of the word te¯’ômîm, ‘twins’. But he shows us that the primary ‘pairing’ with God is in love, not in suffering, except when there is a failure of love on the human side. Thus the importance of the Song for the Scriptures is that it supplies what would otherwise be lacking: a book devoted to this primary ‘pairing’––though what follows in the Song is a failure in the created ‘twin’ which does indeed lead to suffering. The beloved goes on: ‘for my head is full of dew, my locks with the drops of the night’. It seems that, even though the bride is ‘asleep’ in prayer, and has consequently drawn the beloved to her door, he is complaining of being kept out. And her reply confirms this impression: ‘I have put off my tunic, how shall I put it on? I have washed

68 Moshe Idel 1988b: 16. 69 Michael Fishbane 2003: 164–5. Commentary 261 my feet, how shall I defile them?’ If ‘I sleep, but my heart is awake’ is a line of exceptional significance, this one is even more so. The first reveals the author as depicting a state of prayer, and the second suggests that he lived in a milieu of intense asceticism, that is, in a milieu which, by ascetical practices, believed it possible to remove the consequences of disobedience, the ‘garments of skin’, with which God clothed the first transgressors (§7.9). That they can to some extent be removed by the subjugation of the corporeal, is implicit in this verse, but there is always more which––as the poet makes clear in v. 7––can only be removed by God or by his appointed agents. The claim made next by the female, to have washed her feet so that she cannot therefore be expected to defile them, seems also to belong to the poet’s view that rising up in response to love’s demands and not settling down with ideas about perfection is what is being asked of her. And so she discovers. The beloved puts his hand through the opening, a movement which stirs her ‘inward parts’ (§7.9–10), silences her reasons for staying put, and causes her to rise up and open to him. ‘My hands dripped with myrrh, my fingers with flowing myrrh upon the handles of the bolt.’ The scene is more redolent of eros than any other in the Song, moving the reader at one level or another by language and imagery which touches the ‘inward parts’ with a sense of extraordinary intimacy.70 ‘Myrrh’ is seen to be closely related to a number of nouns denoting bitterness, while in this context its use apparently foresees the bitterness of losing the beloved, and the encounter with the watchmen. It seems that if ‘myrrh’ in its eight occurrences in the Song is accompanied by ‘frankincense’ then it relates to the holy anointing oil, but if it occurs alone, as here, it relates to words meaning ‘bitter’ and, consequently, to suffering. After opening to the beloved and finding him gone, seeking and calling him and receiving no answer, the bride is found by the watchmen who are, I believe, to be identified with those appointed by God to guard the walls of Jerusalem at Isa. 62: 6. They smite and wound her and remove from her that final covering she thought she had removed but which, she now discovers, could only be removed by a power greater than any she possessed (§7.9). Then she addresses the ‘nations’:

8 I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if you ﬁnd my beloved, what will you tell him? [Tell him] that I am faint from love. 9 What is your beloved more than another beloved, O fairest among women? What is your beloved more than another beloved, that you so charge us? The word translated ‘faint’ here, could mean ‘sick’ (§7.8). The same phrase, ‘I am sick

70 Whether it touches the inward parts at the level of human eros or at the level of divine eros (the spiritual senses), or neither, depends, of course, on the nature of the reader. 262 Commentary

[or faint] from love’ occurs at 2: 5, and for the idea of feeling ‘faint’ or ‘weak’ from love see the passage quoted by Fishbane (§7.1). The question, ‘What is your beloved more than another beloved?’, is understood by Cant. Rabbah to mean, ‘What is your God more than other gods?’ (§6.1), to which the female gives the following reply:

10 My beloved is radiant and ruddy, exalted above ten thousand. 11 His head is fine gold; his locks are bushy and black as a raven. 12 His eyes are like doves by streams of waters; bathed in milk, fitly set. 13 His cheeks are like terraces of spices, yielding perfumes. His lips are lilies, dripping with flowing myrrh. 14 His hands are cylinders of gold set with tarshish; his loins are panels of ivory overlaid with sapphires; 15 his legs are pillars of marble, set upon bases of gold. His appearance is like Lebanon, chosen like cedars. 16 His speech is exceedingly sweet, and all of him is most precious. This is my beloved, and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem. The influence of this passage on early Jewish mysticism tells us how it was understood by the writers and practitioners of that literature. But the passage also suggests, more clearly, perhaps, than any other in the Song, some of the influences which went to form it. In Chapter 6 we examined the first three lines (§6.1) and noted a number of links to theophanic and apocalyptic texts which suggest that this description of the beloved represents the messianic, ‘son of man’ / ‘son of God’ figure found in several works of the late Second Temple period. The study ‘The Body of the Glory: Approach- ing the New Testament from the Perspective of Shiur Koma Traditions’, by C. R. A. Morray-Jones, led to our looking at the significance of the use of Cant. 5: 10–16 in the Shiur Koma literature and the evidence such use implies for the original understanding of the Song (§6.3). But from the standpoint of translating the passage, the influence upon it of the description of the statue in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream (§6.2) is also, I believe, important. Even so, the passage is particularly impenetrable, and I can do no more than attempt to convey some of the ideas the vocabulary suggests to my understanding. To pick up, then, the passage at the second half of v. 11, ‘his locks are bushy and black as a raven’ (see §6.1 and §6.2 for vv. 10–11a), this description is in strong Commentary 263 contrast to the white wool hair of the related passages, and is evidently intended to convey a picture of powerful youth. However, there is no simple equation, black hair = youth and white hair = age, since white wool hair is ascribed to the child born to Lamech at 1 Enoch 106, while even more difficult from the standpoint of the speculation that the beloved represents the ‘son of man’ figure, is the passage at Rev. 1:12–16 which points explicitly to ‘one like a son of man’ and goes on to ascribe to him ‘hair white as white wool, white as snow’. But another passage of similar type, in Joseph and Asenath, describes Jacob in exalted terms as being ‘exceedingly beautiful to look at’, and shows him as having a head ‘all white as snow’, while at the same time ‘the hairs of his head were all exceedingly close and thick like those of an Ethiopian’.71 ‘Ethio- pian’ suggests a parallel cliché for blackness as ‘raven’ in the Song verse. and the passage is evidently drawing on a tradition which ascribes both the white hair of wisdom and the black hair of youth to a theophanic figure, a tradition found also in the Talmud, in b. Hagiga 14a: ˙ One verse says: ‘His raiment was as white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool’ (Daniel 7: 9), and it is written: ‘His locks are curled and black as a raven’ (Cant. 5: 11). There is no contradiction: one verse [refers to God] in session [in the heavenly court] and the other [refers] to God in war. For a master said: In session none is more fitting than an old man, and in war none is more fitting than a young man. The first half of the next verse, 5: 12, ‘His eyes are like doves’, reflects the similar comparison made by the male at 1: 15 and 4: 1 (see §3.12), except that here the female describes the beloved’s eyes in terms of a simile––‘like’––while he has described hers in terms of a metaphor: ‘your eyes are doves’. This point suggests both the symmetry and the difference between the two. She is Israel. He is like Israel. And yet, as the poem progresses, the poet seems to convey an increasing identity between the two, as we will see in the next chapter. The second half of the verse gives a phrase, aphikê-mayîm, ‘streams/channels of waters’, which occurs at Joel 1: 20 and Ps. 18: 16 and 42: 2, this last in particular suggesting a link with the male figure in the Song: As the hart longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for you, O God. The male is called a hart (stag or deer) at 2: 9, 17 and at 8: 14. This last verse charges the beloved to be like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of spices, while the next verse here says that his ‘cheeks are like terraces of spices’. The word ‘terraces’, arûgâ, usually translated ‘bed’ (e.g. of roses), is a noun identical in its radicals with the verb ‘to long for’ (BDB, 788) or ‘groan, pant’ (Jastrow) in Ps. 42: 2 above. The noun also occurs at Cant. 6: 2: ‘My beloved has gone down to his garden, to the beds/terraces of spices’, and otherwise only at Ezek. 17: 7 and 10. The word, then, either as verb or noun, is not much used in Hebrew, but it has a cognate in

71 22: 7, C. Burchard 1985: 258. 264 Commentary

Arabic where one of its meanings is ‘he ascended’ and, in a passive form, ‘he was taken up to a high place, e.g. to the clouds of heaven’, while the noun, mira¯j, means a ladder or series of steps on which ‘the souls ascend when they are taken from their bodies’.72 The link between the noun in Arabic and its related noun here in the Song, ‘His cheeks are like terraces of spices’, is strong when taken with ‘upon the mountains of spices’ at Cant. 8: 14. But between ‘by streams of waters’ and ‘His cheeks are like terraces of spices’ there is a particularly difficult line, translated by RSV and NRSV, following AV, ‘bathed in milk, fitly set’, a rendering in respect of these last two words which has more in its favour than a first look at the Hebrew leads one to expect. Forms of the root ‘be full, fill’ occur three times in this chapter. First in the primary sense of the verb: ‘My head is filled with dew’ (5: 2); thirdly in the secondary sense of ‘set’ or ‘be filled’ with jewels (5: 14); and here (5: 12) in a form, mille¯ t, not otherwise found, which can be translated either way, many important witnesses to the text, such as the LXX and Vulgate, taking the word in its primary sense to mean ‘fullness’, as do also the Rabbis73 and, in more modern times, Luther.74 But exegesis based on ‘fullness’ leads away from the idea of a statue in which jewels are ‘set’ or ‘filled’, a sense of the word most often used in connection with the instructions for setting the four rows of jewels in the breastpiece of the priestly garments, notably at Exod. 28: 17, where the radicals are identical. Thus the difficult line suggests eyes of jewel inlay. But how the eyes like doves, by streams of water, bathing in milk, are to be understood pictorially is impossible to depict. A very different text which presents a similar problem is the depiction of the four living creatures in Ezekiel’s vision––for, I suspect, much the same reason. Both are vividly visual and yet defy representation, because they concern those mysteries not intended for the ordinary eye. The next verse (5: 13), ‘His cheeks are like terraces of spices, yielding75 perfumes. His lips are lilies, dripping with flowing myrrh,’ again reflects vocabulary used in descriptions of the female. But here we must go to Psalm 45, not yet cited although it contains considerable overlap of vocabulary, and is the only other substantial evidence in the Scriptures of a mystical tradition similar to that claimed in earlier times for the Song. The title itself contains links: ‘lilies’, but especially ‘Song of the Beloved’, sˇîr ye˘dîdo¯t, this latter word being a form of ya¯dîd meaning ‘beloved’. BDB translates ‘a song of love’, while HALOT gives ‘love song’, as also RSV and NRSV. But it is worth emphasizing that ya¯dîd means ‘beloved’, as in Jedidiah, the name the prophet Nathan

72 At a later period this word came to be particularly associated with Muhammad in The Night of the Ladder where the story of his ascension from Jerusalem to heaven is related. See E. W. Lane 1995–7. I am indebted to Dr Sara Sviri for introducing me to the importance in Arabic mystical literature of the cognates of GRE and HGWRE. The cognates in Ethiopian are similarly used, she tells me. 73 See Alexander’s long note to this verse: 157 n. 42. 74 Luther appears to be influenced by the LXX (καθµεναι )π* πληρµατα +δα´των––‘sitting by the fullness of waters’) with ‘und sitzen an reichen Wassern’. 75 The Masoretic pointing gives ‘towers’, but a widely adopted amendment gives the piel participle of LDG, translated ‘yielding’ by RSV and NRSV. Commentary 265 gave to Solomon at his birth, meaning ‘beloved of the Lord’ (2 Sam. 12: 25), as also at Isa. 5: 1, and wherever the word occurs.76 Thus Psalm 45 and Cant. 5: 10–16 are both about the ‘beloved’, the divine anthropos, the second verse of the psalm declaring: ‘You are fairer by far than the sons of men;77 grace is poured into your lips, therefore God has blessed you for ever.’ In the psalm, grace is poured into the lips of the ‘beloved’ while in the Song passage his lips drip with flowing myrrh. Again, in the psalm it is his garments which are of myrrh, aloes, and cassia, a trio found otherwise only in the Song at 4: 14 and in the Proverbs passage we examined in relation to Cant. 4: 14 (§1.6), except that ‘cassia’ becomes ‘cinnamon’ in these two latter, cassia and cinnamon being closely related. The description in the Song continues at vv. 14 and 15 with: ‘His hands are cylinders of gold set with tarsˇîsˇ; his loins are a plate of ivory overlaid with sapphires; his legs are pillars of marble, set upon bases of gold. His appearance is like Lebanon, chosen like the cedars.’ The word tarsˇîsˇ is applied both to a place78 and to some kind of precious stone, this latter being translated variously. But since it is not known what stone it represents, I have left it untranslated, and will give it in an English form in the following occurrences. In the order of biblical chronology, tarshish as a stone first occurs at Exod. 28: 20 and again at 39: 13, in both cases in the instructions concerning the four rows of jewels to be set on the breastpiece of the priests, tarshish being the first stone of the fourth row. It occurs three times in Ezekiel, first in the vision at 1: 16 in the description of the four living creatures: ‘The appearance of the wheels and of their work was like the sparkle of tarshish’; again, in the vision at 10: 9: ‘the appearance of the wheels was like the sparkle of a stone of tarshish’. And at 28: 13 in the description of the king of Tyre, the symbol of all perfection, as was Tyre itself until its fall: ‘You were in Eden, in the garden of God; every precious stone was your covering’. And nine precious stones are cited, tarshish being the fourth. Finally, apart from Cant. 5: 14, the word occurs in the vision of Daniel in chapter 10: And I lifted up my eyes and looked, and behold, a certain man clothed in linen, whose loins were girded with fine gold of Uphaz; and his body was like tarshish ... In the Song his loins are panels of ivory79 overlaid with sapphires. About these

76 GKC has a paragraph (124e) under the heading ‘The various uses of the plural form’, which gives examples of the ‘plural of amplification’ with the ot ending, as in ye˘dido¯t, but falters when it comes to the example under discussion, giving ‘Probably also TDYDY (heartfelt) love, ψ 45:1.’ But in the case of another word, TWDWMX (Dan. 9: 23), GKC has no problem in giving ‘(greatly) beloved’. 77 For the form TmYPiYmPm Y at Ps. 45: 3 see Joüon and Muraoka 1996: ‘you are more beautiful (than anybody)’, vol. 1, 59d, under ‘Rare conjugations’. 78 See especially HALOT for the possibilities concerning place, none of which, however, have been established. 79 The word T$oE as a noun does not otherwise occur. HALOT gives ‘panels of ivory’, which I have adopted. 266 Commentary stones a consensus has formed in recent times which tells us without hesitation: ‘For sapphires in the Bible read lapis lazuli.’ This may be correct in some instances, Lam. 4: 7 for instance (see a footnote in §6.1), though it is unlikely to be correct in every case.80 But, from the standpoint of this study, whether sappîrîm sometimes or never means sapphires, it is, like tarshish, the contexts of these words which are significant.81 Next, ‘his legs are pillars of marble, set upon bases of gold’, a line which particularly suggests the contrast with Nebuchadnezzar’s statue at Dan. 2: 31–45 (§6.2), but also links to 1 Chron. 29: 2 where, in the list of materials gathered by David for the building of the Temple, marble is mentioned last––as here. A perception that the sum total of the figure is intended to evoke the Temple is inevitably strengthened by the next line: ‘His appearance is like Lebanon, chosen like cedars’. Again we are confronted by a certain symmetrical quality in the principal protagonists. He is now shown, at the conclusion of chapter 5, to be what we found her to be in chapter 4. Perhaps this twofoldedness of the male and the female is another example of Ben Sira’s ‘All things are twofold, one opposite the other . . . one confirms the good things of the other . . .’? Certainly the next verse, 16, sums up the beloved in vocabulary found predomin- antly in wisdom literature: ‘His palate is most sweet, and all of him is precious’. ‘Palate’ (§1.10) occurs in conjunction with the abstract noun ‘sweet’ three times: at Cant. 2: 3: ‘his fruit is sweet to my taste/palate’, once in Proverbs at 24: 13: [‘the honeycomb is] sweet to your taste’; and here. But here ‘sweet’ is in an intensified plural form, as also is the word translated ‘precious’.82 The final declaration: ‘This is my beloved, and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem’, is also an example of the view, ‘All things are twofold’, applied here to the divine anthropos, since to him is now attributed the capacity to be both the beloved, that is, as representing ‘eros’, and the ‘friend’. That the bride refers to the beloved by a term meaning ‘friend’ is a departure from the rest of the book for other than on this occasion only the beloved uses a form meaning ‘friend’ in address to the bride. This extraordinary passage remains far beyond my capacity to understand and expound, but I hope the inadequacy of my attempts to catch something of its meaning will arouse a commentator equal to the task.

80 I am grateful to an exchange of emails with Dr Alison Salvesen on the question of sapphires v. lapis lazuli. She has saved me from being too dismissive of the consensus on this point by providing a great deal of information on precious stones and their sources in ancient times. But, pending further research on the point, she inclines to the view that some of the biblical references may refer to sapphires not to lapis lazuli. 81 Especially Exod. 24: 10; 28: 18; 29: 11; Ezek. 1: 26; 10: 1; 28: 13. 82 See Joüon 1923: vol. 2, 136g, for both these forms. And see footnote 7 in §6.2 for the reasoning in translating OYDMXM ‘precious’. Commentary 267

CHAPTER 6

1 Where has your beloved gone, O fairest among women? Where has your beloved turned aside that we may seek him with you? 2 My beloved has gone down to his garden, to the terraces of spices, to feed in the gardens, and to gather lilies. 3 I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine, he who feeds among the lilies. Anyone familiar with the opening of the Second Part of the Matthew Passion is hardly able to think of the first two verses of this chapter apart from Bach’s hauntingly beautiful music which accompanies them, and which prepares the listener for the Passion of the beloved of the Gospels. But what does the poet intend by the question, ‘Where has your beloved gone . . . where has your beloved turned aside . . . ? First, we note in regard to structure that between the bride’s declaration at 5: 16, ‘This is my beloved, and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem’, and their question at 6: 1, there is no paragraph division, the dialogue between the daughters and the bride being seen by the Masoretes to continue without the break supplied by the chapters. And, second, this is the last time they are in dialogue (though there is one further reference to the daughters at 8: 4), and it contrasts strongly with the first time when it is the bride who addresses them, begging them not to look at her because she has been blackened by the sun’s gaze upon her (Cant. 1: 5–6). Here, on the contrary, they address her as ‘the fairest among women’ and desire to know where her beloved is so that they may seek him with her. There is, then, a progress to be understood. If the ‘daughters of Jerusalem’ represent the nations, the Song begins with an apology to them by the one who represents the chosen of God and who should, therefore, be showing the fairest of faces to them if they are to join her in becoming similarly chosen. A few verses on (1: 8) the male figure instructs her in the path she should be following, and he calls her the ‘fairest of women’ because he knows the truth behind the appearance. Now her appearance agrees with the truth for all to see, and the nations address her accordingly, ‘O fairest among women’. She replies in effect that the beloved is to be found in his Temple to which he has gone down ‘to feed’ and to gather ‘lilies’. And the unit concludes with a repetition of the bride’s confidence that she belongs to the beloved, and that he, no less, belongs to her. 268 Commentary

4 You are fair, my companion, as beauty itself, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as the bannered hosts. 5 Turn your eyes from me, for they frighten me away. Your hair is like a flock of goats which have come forth from Gilead. 6 Your teeth are like a flock of ewes, which have come up from the washing; all of them bear twins, not one among them miscarries. 7 Your temple is like a slice of pomegranate behind your veil. The usual translation for 6: 4 is something like: ‘You are beautiful as Tirzah, my love, comely as Jerusalem’ (NRSV). The word tirsâ, for which BDB (953) gives ‘pleasure, ˙ beauty’, is the name of what is thought to have been the ancient capital of the northern kingdom and is, consequently, favoured by many modern translators on the grounds of parallelism with Jerusalem, the capital of the southern kingdom. There are a dozen biblical references to Tirzah, site unknown, one at Josh. 12: 24 and eleven distributed between 1 and 2 Kings, from which it is deduced that, before Samaria, it was the capital of Israel. But not a single adjective or epithet occurs with any mention of it––not even that it was a city. All that is said about it is that a string of kings operated from it ‘who did evil in the sight of the Lord’. But it is not Tirzah’s dubious history which renders it an impossible parallel to Jerusalem. It is that in the eyes of the poet a parallel to Jerusalem is unthinkable. Jerusalem stands alone, and if it has a parallel it can only be the heavenly Jerusalem. Two further points add to the unlikelihood of a proper noun. First, the LXX, the Vulgate and the Peshitta did not take tirsâ to refer to a place here, the first to do so as ˙ far as I am aware being Luther, followed by the AV. And second, the verse is in form a tricolon, not in a form which lends itself to parallelism.83 Nevertheless, it has to be asked: why did the poet use this unusual word? Apart from references to the place, it is only used four times (Num. 26: 33; 27: 1; 36: 11; Josh. 17: 3) in the story of the five daughters of Zelophehad, the youngest of them being called Tirzah. Since no sons were born to Zelophehad, his daughters presented themselves to Moses, Eleazar the priest, the princes, and all the congregation at the door of the Tabernacle, and protested their right to a share of the inheritance of their father. Moses took the matter to the Lord (Num. 27: 1–11), who came down squarely on the side of the daughters, thus providing a ruling which, in societies originally based on biblical laws, like our own, continues in force to this day. It was not only a question of justice in this world but, as

83 See the section, ‘The tricolon’ in Wilfred G. E. Watson 1986, especially 177. My sudden resort to questions of poetic structure at such a late stage of this work is a good example of Watson’s observation that ‘the main interest of commentators is exegesis, so that remarks on poetic technique are more or less of a random nature’ (1). Commentary 269 one commentator puts it: ‘If the children of Zelophehad received no share of the Promised Land, they would not be included in the inheritance of the People of the Lord; the name of their father would vanish as though it had never existed.’84 But it is possible that the poet saw yet more in the episode in view of the evident concern he shows for the welfare of the female principle. The commentator just quoted moves in a similar direction: ‘This priestly story, with its accompanying law, is one more step toward that Church in which there is neither male nor female as respects privilege before Christ. The request of these courageous women is vindicated by God; daughters as well as sons are to have a place in the inheritance of the People of the Lord.’85 Thus the poet’s choice of a word meaning ‘beauty’, never otherwise used except as a proper name, must, I think, reflect something of the story of Zelophehad’s daughters. The third element of the verse, ‘terrible as the bannered hosts’, confirms, in my view, that it is indeed the heavenly Jerusalem which is being addressed here. The root of ‘bannered hosts’, dgl, takes us back to Cant. 2: 4 and the discussion above, ad loc., where we saw that the use of ‘banner’ derives from the opening chapters of Num. to the theme of cosmic order, to the four leading camps and their standards described at Numbers 10: 14–28, and to their heavenly counterparts as described particularly in 3 Enoch (§4.3). Here, the heavenly aspect of the figure being praised emerges clearly at v. 10 as we shall see. For ‘Turn your eyes from me for they frighten me away’ see §6.6; and for ‘your hair is like a flock of goats which have come forth from Gilead’ see above, Cant. 4: 1c–3, of which these verses are a repetition.

8 There are sixty queens and eighty concubines, and maidens without number. 9 She is one, my dove, my perfect one, one is she to her mother, pure is she to her who bore her. The daughters saw her and they blessed her, the queens and the concubines, and they praised her. 10 Who is she who looks down like the morning star, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as the bannered hosts? In Chapter 2 we saw that in the Egyptian cult there were great numbers of sacerdotal princesses and that concubines were assigned to the gods, and even to certain goddesses, which raises questions about the meaning of 1 Kgs. 11: 3: ‘And he had seven hundred wives [na¯sˇîm = women], princesses, and three hundred concubines’. And we also saw that the word a˘la¯môt, ‘maidens’, possibly included the meaning ‘female

84 J. L. Mays 1965: 131. 85 Ibid. 270 Commentary cultic servants’ from the sixth century onwards, which suggests how they are to be understood at Ps. 68: 26: Your solemn processions are seen, O God, the processions of my God, my King, into the samctuary; the singers in front, the musicians last, between them maidens (a˘la¯môt) playing tambourines . . . ‘One is she, my dove, my perfect one, one is she to her mother, pure is she to her who bore her.’ We have looked at this verse both at §1.13 and §3.19. That the language is wisdom language is shown also in the next two lines of the same verse: ‘The daughters saw her and they blessed her, the queens and the concubines, and they praised her’. At §1.13 we saw that these lines parallel Prov. 31: 28: ‘Her sons rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her.’ Both the verse in the Song and the verse in Proverbs are formed with waw conversives, about which Fox notes that in the Song waw conversives do not otherwise occur.86 This suggests that the poet read the Proverbs passage as a paean of praise to Lady Wisdom, and is adopting the same formula here as a clue to his meaning. Verse 10 partly repeats v. 4 but adds a cosmic dimension: ‘Who is she who looks down like the morning star, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as the bannered hosts?’ Three verses in the Song begin ‘Who is this (female)?’ as we saw earlier (§1.4). The first, at 3: 11, ‘Who is this coming up from the wilderness like columns of smoke, being censed with myrrh and frankincense’, is seen by Gerald Sheppard to be Solomon identified as Wisdom, a view he supports with Wisdom’s account in Sirach 24 of her journey from ‘the mouth of the Most High’ to her resting- place in Zion. The second ‘Who is this?’ occurs here at 6: 10 and can, I believe, be equally supported by the description of Wisdom in Sirach 24: Wisdom praises herself, and tells of her glory in the midst of her people. In the assembly of the Most High she opens her mouth, and in the presence of his hosts she tells of her glory. There is a difference in tone between the two passages, the Song verses containing the idea that there is a ‘terrible’ or ‘dreadful’––in the sense of ‘full of dread’––aspect to the figure being described which is hardly present in the Sirach account, although ‘Alone I compassed the vault of heaven and traversed the depths of the abyss’ suggests a similarly formidable figure.

11 I went down to the garden of nuts, to look at the green shoots of the valley; to see whether the vine had sprouted, the pomegranates had blossomed.

86 M. V. Fox 1985: 153. Commentary 271

12 Before I knew it my soul had set me in the chariots of my noble people. We might suspect what Wilfred Watson calls ‘stanzaic mobility’ here87 except that it is possible to detect three links, one each in verses 10, 11 and 12. In v. 10 the word from which ‘bannered’ is derived, degel, is the word used in the first two chapters of Numbers and not otherwise in the biblical literature except in the Song, but much used in the Hekhalot literature. In the discussion on v. 11 (§5.7) we saw that in the mystical literature a connection is seen between the structure of the nut and the organization of the tribes in Numbers 2 which ‘reflects some divine order, so that we find no conflict between the two metaphors describing the earthly tribes and the celestial chariot as reflected in the structure of the nut’ (quoting Joseph Dan). And thirdly, in v. 12, there is a veiled reference to the merkava, the veiling being achieved by the plural form, marke˘vôt, ‘chariots’. Thus degel, e˘gôz (nut), and merka¯vâ, plus the verb ‘to go down’, ya¯rad, within three verses is unlikely to be accidental and should alert the scholars of Jewish mysticism to further investigation. The verse at 6: 12 is widely agreed to be the most difficult in the Song: ‘Before I knew it [or ‘was aware’], my soul had set me in the chariots of my noble people.’ One difficulty centres on the translation of ammi-na¯dîb which, in the light of 1 Chron. 29:14, I take to be drawn from that verse, in which all the people (‘my people’–– ammi––as David calls them) are willingly (derived from na¯dîb) offering from their resources for the building of the Temple (§4.4). In the Song the verse is spoken by the female (only the female uses the word nepesˇ––soul), and that she now represents the ‘willing’ people is suggested by her being called bat-na¯dîb within two verses, at 7: 2––though there is a problem with this phrase, as we shall see.

CHAPTER 7

1 Return, return, O Shulamite, return, return, that we may see you. What will you see in the Shulamite? [You will see something] like the dance of Mahanaim. 2 How fair are your feet in sandals, O noble daughter!88 The curved lines of your thighs are like ornaments, the work of the hands of a master craftsman. 3 Your navel is the rounded bowl, may it not lack the mixed wine; your belly is a heap of wheat fenced round with lilies.

87 1986: 165–6. 88 Lit. ‘daughter of a noble’. See the discussion which follows. 272 Commentary

4 Your two breasts are like two young harts, twins of a gazelle. 5 Your neck is like the tower of ivory; your eyes are pools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bat-rabbim; your nose is like the tower of Lebanon which looks towards Damascus. 6 Your head upon you is like Carmel, and the hair of your head like purple cloth; your fringe is bound with bands. In the section ‘Visionary seeing, and “two camps”’ (§4.3), we saw the significance of the word ha¯zâ, meaning ‘to see’ in a visionary sense. It is also, I think, worth noting ˙ that Cant. Rabbah is popularly known by a form of this verb, Ha¯zita¯, because it is the ˙ first word of the quotation cited at the beginning of the midrash: ‘Have you seen a man diligent in service?’ (Prov. 22: 29). On the face of it this verse appears to be an arbitrary choice for the launch of a long work on the Song of Songs. But the rabbinical writers always have their reasons, and this one emerges from a careful reading of the five explanations given for this verse, especially the last: ‘This applies to Solo- mon, son of David, who was diligent in the building of the Temple, as it is written, He was seven years building it.’ The visionary verb used for the title of this midrash warns the reader that what follows requires a ‘seeing’ into the work beyond that of ordinary seeing. And what is to be ‘seen’ is that the work is largely about the Temple. In the first verse of this chapter there are the four repetitions of the word ‘return’, which we saw earlier (§4.3) link to Isa. 11:12, to the time when God ‘will assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth’. What is to be seen in the Shulamite is a vision of angels, that is to say, she is ‘God’s camp’ (Gen. 52: 3––see §4.3). The next verse, ‘how fair are your feet in sandals’, again links to the messianic passage in Isaiah where, at 11: 15, the only other occurrence of ‘sandals’ in masculine plural with beth prefix is found. The term, bat-na¯dîb, ‘noble daughter’, usually translated ‘prince’s daughter’ (AV, JB, REB, NIV) but also ‘queenly maiden’ (RSV, NRSV), is translated by the LXX θγατερ Ναδαβ, ‘daughter of Nadab’, which is not very probable.89 The Vulgate is correct with its filia principis, followed by Luther’s Fürsten-tochter, but the AV’s ‘prince’ is too specific for na¯dîb. The word na¯dîb in its twenty-six occurrences means primarily ‘generous’, ‘willing’, ‘noble in character’. There are several occurrences, especially in the Psalms, where na¯dîb is used negatively and is consequently taken to refer to status: ‘he pours contempt on princes and makes them wander in trackless wastes’ (Ps. 107: 40–1); ‘Put not your trust in princes, nor in any child of man’ (Ps. 146: 3); or, most negative of all: ‘Make their nobles like Oreb and Zeeb, their princes like Zebah and Zalmunna . . . make them like whirling dust, like chaff before the

89 There are four men called Nadab: the eldest son of Aaron (Exod. 6: 23, and Lev. 10: 1); the son of Jeroboam (1 Kgs. 14: 20, and 15: 25–7); a Jerahmeelite of whom nothing is known (1 Chron. 2: 28); and a Gibeonite, similarly anonymous (1 Chron. 8: 30). Commentary 273 wind’ (Ps. 83: 12–13). In the Song the word is clearly used positively and, at 6: 12, can be translated either ‘my noble people’ or ‘my generous/willing people’. The greater problem is how to translate bat nadîb since bat is feminine and nadîb is masculine, whether as adjective or noun, and the phrase should therefore be translated ‘daughter of a noble/generous/willing man’. Nevertheless, I have chosen to translate the phrase ‘noble daughter’ because I suspect the poet has a reason for keeping both occurrences of the word na¯dîb in the same form.90 He wants the reader to recall those passages we saw earlier (§4.4), of which the following passage provides a further example: Moses said to all the congregation of the Israelites: This is the thing that the Lord has commanded: take from among you an offering to the Lord; let whoever is of a generous [na¯dîb] heart bring the Lord’s offering: gold, silver and bronze; blue, purple, and crimson yarns, and fine linen; goats’ hair, tanned rams’ skins, and fine leather; acacia wood, oil for the light, spices for the anointing oil and for the fragrant incense, and gems to be set in the ephod and the breastpiece. (Exod. 35: 4–9) Much of the language of that passage, as will be familiar to the reader by now, is the language of the Song, except that the poet has used a different term for crimson since he evidently wanted his word to read both Carmel and carmîl (§4.9). To summarize: the passage is a minefield of metaphors and similes which point to the Temple, to its worship, and to its setting in the land of Israel. The emendation of the last verse, 7: 6, removes an unlikely king and restores, I believe, a fringe bound with bands on the veil of the Temple (4.§9).

The next passage in chapter 7 is, it seems to me, direct address to ‘love’, if to a particular form of love:

90 Dr Hughes supports this translation: ‘On a syntactic level it is a construct noun+noun phrase rather than a noun + adjective phrase and is equivalent to “daughter of a noble”. But’, he goes on, ‘I suspect that the meaning is closer to “noblewoman”. There are a number of similar Hebrew expressions such as “sons of the gods” = gods; “sons of the prophets” = prophets; “daughters of men” = women.’ 274 Commentary

moving the lips of sleepers. 11 I am my beloved’s and upon me is his desire. In the earlier discussion on these verses (2.§3) I saw two ways of looking at this passage, the first based on the verse, ‘She is a tree of life to them that lay hold on her’ (Prov. 3: 18), and the second based on the belief that the Masoretes pointed these lines with feminine suffixes whereas there are strong grounds for thinking it is the female who is addressing the male, which, if correct, would require masculine suffixes. The difficulty of it being spoken by the beloved is that he is referred to at v. 10. Moreover, from ‘This your stature is like that of a palm tree’ to ‘the fragrance of your nose like apples’ speaks of the beloved. And if, in Dan’s phrase, the Song is the parent text of the mystical literature, the word komah, ‘stature’, points to the passage being about the beloved. Verse 11, ‘I am my beloved’s, and upon me is his desire’, is similar to verses at 2: 16 and 6: 3, but includes the significant word te˘sˇûqâ, ‘desire’, which occurs in the speech to Eve after she has succumbed to the suggestions of the serpent, when God says to her: ‘your desire shall be for your husband’. Thus its use by the poet, put into the mouth of the woman, is a striking reversal of Gen. 3: 16, and suggests to this reader the intention of the work to portray the restoration of the feminine principle, that is, the intuitive, contemplative, and mystical life of the soul which yearns to be drawn by the eros of God into union with him (§7.7).

The next three verses are the last in chapter 7 according to the chapter divisions, but begin a new section according to the Masoretic divisions.

12 Come, my beloved, let us go forth to the field, let us abide among the cypresses. 13 Let us rise early [and go] to the vineyards; let us see if the vine has blossomed, if the tender buds have opened, if the pomegranates have come forth; there I will give you my breasts. 14 The mandrakes give their fragrance, and at our doorways is all excellence, things both old and new, which I have treasured up for you, my beloved. The first line provides the original inspiration for the verse in the synagogue service for the Inauguration of the Sabbath: ‘Come, my beloved, to meet the bride’, which is repeated ten times. But the inclusion of this line dates from the practice of the eighteenth-century Kabbalists of Safed and Jerusalem who, on a Friday afternoon, some time before the onset of the Sabbath, went out of the city into an open field ‘to Commentary 275 meet the Bride’. There, before the traditional Sabbath prayers were spoken, the Song of Songs, ‘traditionally identified with the indissoluble bond between the Holy One, blessed be He, and the Ecclesia of Israel’, was intoned, as Scholem tells us in his On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. A page earlier Scholem relates that a ‘mystical notion’ which played a part in the Kabbalistic Sabbath ritual was the ‘field of the holy apple trees, as the Shekhinah is frequently called in the Zohar’. Scholem goes on: In this metaphor the ‘field’ is the feminine principle of the cosmos, while the apple trees define the Shekhinah as the expression of all the other sefiroth or holy orchards, which flow into her and exert their influence through her. During the night before the Sabbath the King is joined with the Sabbath-Bride; the holy field is fertilized, and from their sacred union the souls of the righteous are produced.91 Kabbalism, as we see in that passage, was able to sustain a mystical interpretation of the Song long after Christian mystical interpretations had collapsed. But Kabbalism, too, was soon to collapse under the pressure of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlighten- ment, bringing us to modern times and to the demise of a mystical understanding of the Song. The next word in the passage which raises a query, ke˘pa¯rîm, is widely translated as ‘villages’. Both the LXX and the Vulgate give ‘villages’, but Luther gives ‘Zyperblumen’ = ‘cypress flowers’, which seems more likely since the same word, kôper, also occurs at 1: 14 and in plural at 4: 13, translated ‘cypresses’, this latter form being identical to the word translated ‘villages’. ‘Cypresses’ at 4: 13 comes in the middle of the principal Temple passage, which links with Blackman’s suggestion that ‘to rise early’, ‘to do something in the morning’, may be connected with worship and mean ‘to adore in the morning’ (§2.5). One senses the Egyptian influence in these verses, not least in ‘there I will give you my breasts’, where the word for ‘breasts’ is that used in the Egyptian material and noted by Fox (88) to be a semiticism. The next verse also suggests Egyptian influence with its reference to ‘mandrakes’ (§2.5), and if the poet is consciously using sacred Egyptian texts, the rest of the verse may be a reference to those texts, that is, Israel in the person of the female in the Song declaring: ‘at our doorways [namely, the surrounding countries, especially Egypt] is all excellence, things both new and old, which I have treasured up for you, my beloved’.92

CHAPTER 8

1 O that you were as a brother to me, sucking the breasts of my mother;

91 Gershom Scholem 1965b: 141, 142, 140. 92 If this is correct, it would suggest another reversal: the archetypal enemy of Israel transformed into a source of spiritual excellence. 276 Commentary

I would find you in the street, I would kiss you; neither would they despise me. 2 I would lead you, I would bring you into the house of my mother, she who taught me; I would give you spiced wine to drink, the juice of my pomegranate. 3 His left hand is under my head, and his right hand embraces me. 4 I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that you stir not up, nor awaken love ’til it please. Joüon, in his commentary on the Song, heads this chapter ‘Le Désir Messianique’. Among biblical scholars generally, messianism in the Old Testament has been a marginal subject throughout the modern period until works such as J. C. O’Neill’s Who Did Jesus Think He Was? (1995) and Horbury’s Jewish Messianism and the Cult of Christ (1998) signalled a change. In the Introduction to the latter work Horbury writes: Much recent work seems to the present writer to underrate the significance of messianic hope within the scripture and tradition of Jews in [the Second Temple] period. It is urged below that a rich but largely consistent messianism grew up in pre-exilic and later Israel. In the Old Testa- ment it forms an important theme, which was given clarity and impetus through the editing and collection of the Old Testament books. (2) Messianism is also found in the Qumran Community,93 and centuries later the Targum would reflect the messianic character of the Song, if in a different spirit from that of the earlier period. No less striking in this final chapter is the prevalence of wisdom language. Almost every line is imbued with it from the second onwards in which the bride wishes that the beloved was as a brother to her, ‘sucking the breasts of my mother’. This line recalls ‘the wife of your youth’ and the admonition to ‘let her breasts fill you at all times’ at Prov. 5: 18–19, ‘wife’ and ‘mother’ being interchangeable terms for Wisdom in the wisdom literature (cf. Sir. 15: 2, and see §1.6). ‘I would find you in the street’, and what follows, is a variation on 3: 1–4 which, as we have seen (§1.7), is a reversal of Prov. 7: 12–18. In the Proverbs passage Folly is outside and, seizing the man, kisses him. Here, at Cant. 8: 1, the bride, after finding the beloved outside, or in the street, declares she would kiss him, ‘neither would they despise me’, namely, the fools of Proverbs (§1.7). In the next verse the bride would conduct the beloved and bring him into the house of her mother. The combination of ‘house’ and ‘mother’, that is, Wisdom in a wisdom context, points to the Temple. The noun, translated ‘spiced wine’, occurs only here in

93 For messianism in the Dead Sea Scrolls, with a full bibliography, see, for instance, George J. Brooke 1998. Commentary 277 the Hebrew Bible, but the verb takes us to Exod. 30: 25, which gives the instructions for the compounding of the holy anointing oil––from ingredients with which we are familiar: myrrh, cassia, and oil. In the next line, ‘the juice of my pomegranate’, the noun meaning ‘pressed out juice’, but usually translated ‘sweet wine’, occurs in four other places, two of them in eschatological contexts (Joel 4: 18; Amos 9: 13), which is how I understand the present passage. For ‘pomegranate’ see §5.3. Cant. 8: 3 is a repetition of 2: 6, ‘His left hand is under my head, and his right hand embraces me’ (§7.5), while 8: 4 is a repetition of 2: 7 and 3: 5, except that 8: 4 omits ‘by the gazelles or by the hinds of the ﬁeld’. The next line, ‘that you stir not up nor awaken love ‘til it please’, is interpreted in relation to prayer in the light of 5: 2, ‘I sleep, but my heart is awake’. What follows here is the identical line to that which follows 3: 5:

5 Who is this coming up from the wilderness leaning upon her beloved? Under the apple tree I awakened you, there your mother travailed with you, there she travailed who bore you. At 3: 5, ‘Who is coming up from the wilderness’ is followed by ‘like columns of smoke’; here it is followed by ‘leaning upon her beloved’. In the example at 3: 5 we quoted Gerald Sheppard (§1.4) who sees a parallel between the Song passage and Wisdom’s account in Sirach 24 of her journey from ‘the mouth of the Most High’ to her resting-place in Zion. It is, then, Wisdom who is leaning upon her beloved. But is it Wisdom who, speaking to her beloved, says: ‘Under the apple tree I awakened you’? Only if the Masoretes were right in their provision of masculine suffixes to the person addressed here, which, Pope (663) tells us, virtually all interpreters think they were not. And he goes on: ‘According to Delitzsch, we must change the punctuation of the text altogether, and throughout restore the feminine suffixes as those originally used, following the example of the Syriac.’ Joüon (310) takes the same view and thinks not only that the Masoretes were mistaken in providing address to the male but that Jerome’s use of a different verb, ‘Sub arbore malo suscitavi te: ibi corrupta est mater tua, ibi violata est genitrix tua’ (‘Under an apple tree I raised you: there was your mother corrupted: there was your mother violated ’) exactly reflects the original reading. His point is that the verb can be repointed as the passive (Pual) of the same verb at 2: 15 (BDB, ha¯bal II, 287) where the little foxes are ruining the vines, and not the intensive ˙ (Piel) of an identical verb meaning ‘to writhe, twist, hence travail’ (BDB, 286). Joüon takes the three occurrences in the Aramaic of Daniel of the verb ha¯bal, used in ˙ relation to the kingdom of God which shall not be destroyed, as a parallel, and goes on to say that the bride of the Canticle, Israel, is precisely a kingdom, and that the mother of the bride, namely, the ancient kingdom, has been ruined, lost, reduced to nothing. And he points to Isa. 51: 17: ‘Awake, awake, stand up, Jerusalem, you who have drunk at the hand of the Lord the cup of his fury’, where the verb is the same as in ‘I awakened you under the apple tree.’ The interest of this reading, in my view, is that it 278 Commentary could well have been the reading in the time of Jerome, that is, that the kingdom had been ruined, reduced to nothing. In regard to the apple tree (which must in some sense be related to the apple tree at 2: 3), Joüon (310–12) notes that several Christian exegetes have thought it here to be the tree of Eden of which the fruit proved fatal to Eve, and that it is possibly thanks to this application of our passage that the tree of Eden has become an apple tree. We are thus returned to the other verb meaning ‘to travail’, and to Gen. 3: 16 in which God declares to Eve after she has eaten of the forbidden tree: ‘I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing’, thus providing a double meaning, which would be typical of the poet.

6 Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm, for love is strong as death, ardour fierce as Sheol; its arrows are arrows of fire, a most vehement flame. 7 Many waters cannot quench love, and neither can floods drown it; if a man gave all the substance of his house for love, they would utterly despise him. The beauty of this passage puts it beyond interpretation. It is about love, and what does it matter whether it is human or divine love since, at this level of intensity, can a difference be maintained? Nevertheless, there is a lot to be gained from looking into it. First, Joüon again thinks the Masoretes are mistaken, as we have seen (§4.12), in attributing masculine suffixes to the verse beginning, ‘Set me as a seal upon your heart’. It is Israel, as the bride of God, who has been unfaithful and to whom, therefore, the exhortation to be faithful is addressed. Following the prophets, the author of the Song, Joüon says, conceives the restoration of Israel as a new covenant between God and his people, and he refers the reader to such texts as Hos. 2: 21–2 and Jer. 31: 31–3. But, related to the meaning of the Song as these texts undoubtedly are, they do not contain the word ‘seal’, hôta¯m, a word used at the end of the prophet Haggai: ‘In ˙ that day, says the Lord of hosts, I will take you, O Zerubbabel, son of Shealtiel, my servant, says the Lord, and I will set you as a seal; for I have chosen you, says the Lord of hosts’ (Hag. 2: 23). If, as I believe, there is a link here with Haggai, a beam of light is thrown on the next few verses and confirms that the Temple is central for the poet, for Haggai is concerned with one topic: the rebuilding of the Temple. As one commentator puts it: ‘To speak of Haggai is to speak of the temple and its manifold significance.’94 The love

94 D. L. Petersen 2001: 608. Commentary 279 which is strong as death, the ardour ﬁerce as Sheol, and its arrows which are arrows of ﬁre, is related in some way, then, to the love which was required to rebuild the Temple. There is much more to be said about these verses (see §4.12 for an attempt to say some of it). Here I will add that, in the light of the rebuilding of the Temple, the line, ‘if a man gave all the substance of his house for love’ could be taken literally, while ‘they’––those who would utterly despise such a one (§1.15) has a meaning which remains whether the previous line is taken literally or metaphorically. It can, of course, be taken at both levels, the word ‘substance’, hôn, yielding many levels of meaning.

8 We have a little sister, and she has no breasts; what shall we do for our sister on the day she is spoken against? 9 If she is a wall, we will build upon her a course of silver; and if she is a door we will enclose her with boards of cedar. 10 I am a wall, and my breasts are like towers; then was I in his eyes as one who finds peace. ‘We have a little sister’ follows on well from a link with Haggai if this ‘sister’ is the Second Temple (§2.3). The poet would, then, be upholding its validity and its capacity to provide nourishment, represented by the breasts she claims, against her detractors, to possess. The Targum reads the next part of the verse, commonly translated, ‘What shall we do for our sister on the day that she is spoken for?’ as ‘On the day when she shall be spoken against’, and Alexander notes that the expression ledabber be- has different meanings according to context and may denote disapproval and hostility, as at Num. 12: 1: ‘Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses’, and 21: 5: ‘the people spoke against God’, etc.95 The Targum applies this reading to Israel, and Cant. Rabbah does similarly: ‘“We have a little sister”: these are the returning exiles. “Little” because their numbers were small.’ But then this midrash immediately goes on, after quoting ‘And she has no breasts’: ‘This refers to the five things in which the second Temple fell short of the first, namely, the fire from heaven, the oil of anointing, the ark, the holy spirit, and the Urim and Thummin.’ And then comes the quotation from Hag. 1: 8 where the Lord instructs the people to go up to the mountain, to bring wood and to build the Temple, ‘and I will take pleasure in it and I will be glorified, says the Lord’. At this point the midrash notes that ‘I will be glorified [or honoured]’ is written without the letter he, a point which is clarified by a footnote: ‘As if to signify that it will lack five things, five being the numerical value of he.’96

95 Alexander 199 n. 39. 96 Cant. Rabbah VIII. 9, §3. Hebraists may want to consult the text here and to note with what evident intention the H has been omitted from DBKA at Hag. 1: 8. 280 Commentary

The text of the Song certainly gives grounds in my view for interpreting ‘the little sister’ as the Temple by its use of vocabulary used in the description of the building of the Temple at 1 Kings 6: ‘wall’, ‘build’, ‘course’, ‘silver’, ‘door’, ‘boards of cedar’, and the word ‘tower’ used as a metaphor for the Temple. But one word is missing: ‘gold’. Could it be that the poet, while supporting the second Temple, agrees that in comparison with the first it is as silver to gold? Robert Hayward, in the article referred to above, makes this point: ‘even those loyal to the Second Temple accepted that it was somewhat deficient compared with the First’.97 Nevertheless, if ‘then was I in his eyes as one who finds peace’ a play on the name Solomon, is she not declaring that, in spite of her defects, she finds favour in the eyes of the original builder of the Temple, that is to say, in the eyes of God, the heavenly builder, Solomon representing him as the builder of the earthly?

11 Solomon had a vineyard at Baal-hamon; he entrusted the vineyard to keepers; each one will bring for its fruit a thousand pieces of silver. 12 My vineyard which is mine is before me; the thousand for you, O Solomon, and two hundred for those who keep its fruit. If the implied Solomon in the previous verse represents God, the explicit Solomon here similarly represents the God who brought a vine out of Egypt (Ps. 80: 9), and to whom belongs a vineyard, notably at Isa. 5: 1–7. The diﬃculty in this verse is the phrase usually translated as a place name, Baal-Hamon. There are eleven place names beginning with Baal listed in BDB, apart from this one, giving Baal-Hamon plausibil- ity as a name even though not otherwise attested. In context the phrase is untranslat- able, and only the Vulgate attempts a translation: Vinea fuit paciﬁco in ea, quae habet populos (lit. ‘The peacemaker [namely, Solomon] had a vine among that which has a multitude’). In chapter 15 of Genesis God makes a covenant with Abram to which, as we have seen, the poet refers in his use of the term beter. Here, it seems to me, the poet is making a link with Genesis 17 where Abraham is told by God that he will be the father of a multitude of nations. The phrase baal-hamon, literally ‘master/owner/lord of a multitude’ in the Song, is very close to av-hamon, ‘father of a multitude’, which occurs twice in Genesis 17, the pivotal chapter in the history of Israel. It is in this chapter that God makes the covenant of circumcision with Abraham after he has said to him: ‘Neither shall your name any more be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for a father of a multitude of nations I have made you’ (17: 5). Thus God puts into Abram’s name the very letter left out at Hag. 1: 8. Later in the chapter he will also change Sarai’s name to Sarah so that the names of both the father and the mother of the people with whom God makes a covenant contain the sacred letter he––doubly sacred in the Lord’s name, the Hebrew of which contains two, YHWH.

97 1999: 38. Commentary 281

What follows in the Song brings the history to that point of perfection intended from its beginning. God’s vineyard, that is, the people he brought out of Egypt, is now in the hands of faithful keepers who will provide the maximum return for its fruit and to whom in return a portion both in this world and in the world to come is assured (§3.9), while the bride, who confessed her failure in regard to the vineyard in the ﬁrst chapter, is now able to claim it as her own and to contemplate it with unalloyed approval. Thus the covenant made with Abraham is here seen to be brought to its proper conclusion, with this world restored to its original state of perfect harmony with the world to come.

13 O you who dwell in the gardens, the companions hearken to your voice; enable me to hear it. 14 Flee, my beloved, and be like a gazelle or a young hart upon the mountains of spices. André Robert seems to me to express the poet’s intention when he identifies the bride here with Wisdom and sees her, after her long journey (Sir. 24), as finally established in Sion––‘the gardens’ of this verse. Then the ‘companions’, a ‘groupe des fervents’, as Robert puts it (326), hearken to her voice. Another comparison can be found at Prov. 8: 32–5 when Wisdom addresses her devotees: Now, O children, hearken to me: blessed are those who keep my ways. Hear instruction and be wise, and do not neglect it. Blessed is the one who listens to me, waking daily at my doors, watching my openings of the doorposts. For whoever finds me finds life and shall obtain favour from the Lord. And it is to Wisdom, I believe, that the last verse of the Song is given, a verse with links to three earlier ones looked at in the context of mountains (§4.10). Here we must probe further into the meaning of the animals. The gazelle and the hart are paired seven times in the Song––hardly an accidental number.98 The occurrences are in feminine plural forms at 2: 7 and 3: 5, where they are used in adjuration; in masculine forms at 2: 9, 17 and 8: 14, where the beloved is

98 See the chapter, ‘The Merkavah and the Sevenfold Pattern’, and the long n. 76, in Rachel Elior 2004: 77–78. 282 Commentary once declared by the female to be like a gazelle or a young hart, and twice exhorted by her with imperatives to be like these creatures; and in mixed forms at 4: 5 and 7: 4 where the two breasts of the female are likened to two young harts (masculine), twins of a gazelle (feminine). A search for the source of these creatures reveals two––or rather, one if Deuter- onomy and 1 Kings are to be put under the label of the Deuteronomist. In chapters 12, 14, and 15 of Deuteronomy the gazelle and the hart occur in four verses. First: ‘With all the desire of your soul, you may sacrifice and eat flesh in all your gates according to the blessing of the Lord your God which he has given to you; the unclean and the clean may eat of it, as of the gazelle and as of the hart’ (12: 15). Second: ‘As the gazelle and the hart is eaten, so you may eat of it; the unclean and the clean together may eat of it’ (12: 22). Third: ‘These are the animals you may eat: the ox, the sheep, the goat; the hart and the gazelle, the roebuck, the wild goat, the ibex, the antelope, and the mountain-sheep’ (14: 4–5). Fourth: ‘You shall eat it within your gates, the unclean and the clean together, like the gazelle and like the hart’ (15: 22). The context of the verse at 1 Kgs. 5: 3 (ET 4: 23) is a description of the provision of food made each day for Solomon––the putative author of the Song. Among the animals listed are the hart and the gazelle. Before we venture to draw out a meaning for these animals, there is a passage from a chapter called ‘Wisdom Substrata in Deuteronomy’ in Moshe Weinfeld which seems to me suggestive in relation to the Song. Weinfeld’s approach to wisdom literature is typical of the contemporary outlook which, as a representative source puts it, sees ‘the combination of practical advice on sensible living with speculation about divine wisdom [as] characteristic of the genre’.99 So Weinfeld: ‘Until the seventh century Law and Wisdom existed as two separate and autonomous disciplines. Law belonged to the sacral sphere, whereas Wisdom dealt with the secular and the mundane.’ Nevertheless, what he goes on to say links with our interests: These two disciplines were amalgamated in the book of Deuteronomy, and the laws of the Torah were identified with wisdom: ‘ . . . for this is your wisdom and your understanding’ (Deut. 4: 6). This identification of Torah with wisdom is indeed somewhat paradoxical, for laws and statutes which were given by God are here regarded as being indicative of the wisdom and understanding of Israel. The verse undoubtedly reflects the difficulties which resulted from the sapiential desire to identify Torah with wisdom. The inherent contradiction was ultimately resolved only by identifying wisdom with Torah, as a result of which both were conceived together as a heavenly element which descended from heaven to take up its abode among the children of Israel (Ben-Sira 24).100 The sapiential desire to identify Torah with wisdom is suggested in the Song by the references to two breasts, thus representing the feeding aspect, that is, the wisdom aspect of the two tablets of stone. At Prov. 5: 18–19 (‘A lovely hind and a graceful doe, let her breasts fill you at all times’), there is not the same sense of the Torah being identified with wisdom. There the two animals which symbolize the ‘wife’ are the

99 ODCC, 1755. 100 Moshe Weinfeld 1972: 256. Commentary 283 hind, ayya¯lâ, the female form of the hart, ayya¯l, which is paired with a similarly spelt and sounding female animal, ya a˘lâ, literally, a ‘mountain-goat’. The change to gazelle in Deuteronomy of this latter may be explained by the view that Proverbs influenced Deuteronomy (the view taken by Weinfeld, see especially 256), but that the Deuteronomist changed the feminine mountain-goat to a masculine gazelle to pair with a masculine hart instead of the feminine hind of Proverbs. The word for gazelle, se˘bî, is homonymous with words for ‘beauty’ and, in plural, ‘hosts’, as in ‘the Lord of ˙ Hosts’, and thus provides significant resonances, ones which were later to chime well with the purposes of the poet. The animals in Proverbs need to be female because they symbolize the ‘wife of your youth’, a phrase which in its various occurrences points to religious commitment (§1.6), but the author of the Song wants his animals to be male and so takes them from Deuteronomy. How, then, might we understand our last verse when the female exhorts the beloved to go101 and to be like a gazelle or a young hart? The ineluctable conclusion to be drawn in my view is that the beloved is being exhorted to go and to be food. But where and for whom? The Targumist interprets as follows: Then the Elders of the Assembly of Israel will say: ‘Flee away, my Beloved, Lord of the World, from this polluted land, and cause your Shekhinah to dwell in the highest heavens, but at the time of our distress, when we pray before You, be like a gazelle which, when it sleeps, [has] one eye shut and one eye open, or like the young of the hart which, when it flees, looks behind it. So watch over us and observe our trouble and affliction from the highest heavens, till such time as You are pleased with us and redeem us and bring us up to the mountains of Jerusalem, where the priests will offer up before you incense of spices.102 The Targumist, circa the seventh or eighth century CE, dispatches the Messiah back to heaven. The poet, circa the second or first century BCE, dispatches the Messiah from heaven. For if we see the bride as perfected Israel, and identified with Wisdom, then her exhortation to the beloved, that is, to the Messiah, is made from the perspective of heaven, or perhaps from both earthly and heavenly perspectives at the same time. Go, she says, and be food for the world. And so a messiah is born in Bethle- hem––‘the house of bread’––and is laid in a manger, that is, in a trough in a stable

101 The imperative of the verb ‘to flee’ or ‘to go/pass through’ provides a difficulty for the commentator, irrespective of standpoint. ‘Flee’ is undoubtedly correct, but it has the wrong connotations in English, implying flight from an enemy. I have retained it in the translation, but it seems to me that ‘Go’ or ‘pass through’ (the heavens?) is what is intended, and that the poet used XRB as being––by exception to his usual style––the least ambiguous form of ‘go’, the word AWB, for instance, meaning ‘come’ as well as ‘go’. Nevertheless, BDB (137) provides ‘Come quickly’ for this verse, followed, inevitably, by many commentators. 102 Alexander, 205 n. 65, writes that there must surely be an allusion here to a bestiary tradition. Cant. Rabbah gives: ‘Just as a gazelle sleeps with one eye open and one eye closed . . . ’ (VIII. 14, §1). Considerably earlier Origen writes: ‘The roe, that is, the dorcas, has very keen sight; the deer is a slayer of serpents.’ (Lawson 1957: 300. Origen notes that these animals are frequently put together, and are allowed for food, but he does not develop the point.) Gregory of Nyssa writes similarly. For instance: ‘Look as a gazelle or a young stag which sees the thoughts of men and reads their hearts. Blot out the offspring of vice as a young stag destroys a serpent’ (McCambley 1987: 124). 284 Commentary from which cattle eat.103 And he declares: ‘I am the living bread which came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever’ (John 6: 51). And at the Last Supper, in another Gospel, this same man ‘took bread, and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to the disciples and said, “Take, eat; this is my body”’ (Matt. 26: 26), which is done at every Eucharist when the priest holds up the consecrated wafer and, quoting John 1: 29 and 36, says: ‘Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world’, after which he distributes it to the congregation to be eaten. These texts are not, of course, adduced because I believe the poet foresaw them but because they manifest the realization of his understanding of Wisdom as food, an understanding clearly articulated by Ben Sira: ‘Those who eat of me will hunger for more, and those who drink of me will thirst for more’ (24: 21). The poet, with a similar understanding, sends the Messiah he eagerly awaits into the world to be Wisdom for the world and therefore to be its food. The gazelle and the hart are to be eaten, ‘by the unclean and the clean together’, as would, indeed, happen from the earliest days of Christianity. But this brings us to the problem of who it is who represents Wisdom in the biblical books. In the first nine chapters of Proverbs, and in the Deuterocanonical books, Wisdom and Sirach, Wisdom is hypostasized as female. In the New Testament it is the male figure, Jesus, who is seen in a number of key texts to be ‘the wisdom of God’,104 and these texts have formed our understanding from that time to the present. Never- theless, in the Latin tradition of the West, Mary has shared this role, Sirach 24 being applied to her in the liturgical texts for her feasts, while the Eastern Orthodox tradition, especially the Greek, has seen Jesus as the figure of Wisdom, though there have been periods in Russian Orthodox history when the figure of Jesus as Wisdom has yielded to that of Mary. In our day, the great theologian of Wisdom, Sergei Bulgakov, writes that ‘The Mother of God . . . is the fulness of Sophia in creation and in this sense she is created Sophia.’105 Elsewhere he writes: ‘The Divine Sophia and the crea- turely Sophia are not two but one, although in two modes of being.’106 It seems to me that the author of the Song intends the female to be so understood:

Who is she who looks down like the morning star, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as the bannered hosts? (6: 10)

The Kabbalists certainly understood this when they transformed the previously understood identiﬁcation of the Song of Songs with the Jewish Ecclesia into an identiﬁcation of the Ecclesia with the Shekhinah. Scholem writes: [‘I]t is precisely this

103 The references to a manger are found only in Luke, 2: 7, 12, 16 and 13: 15. Luke is also the only evangelist who is specific about the capacity of the resurrected Christ to eat food–– although this is connected to the restoration of the original body, lost after the Fall, and not directly to the role of the resurrected body to function as food. 104 See the article on Wisdom in the ODCC already referred to for a useful survey. 105 Quoted by Andrew Louth 2005: 160. 106 2002: 61. Commentary 285 identification that introduces the symbolism of the feminine into the sphere of the divine’,107 that is, introduces the idea of a feminine element in God, while also seeing the Shekhinah as the soul––the earthly, created Sophia––which matches, it seems to me, the heavenly and earthly nature of the female roles in the Song. But I believe that the final verse reveals the beloved to be the uncreated figure of Wisdom. In Chapter 5, in particular, we saw him linked to several theophanies, both biblical and pseudepigraphic, and thus we were prepared to understand him to be the Messiah who was to come. But to see him also as the figure of Wisdom, dispatched by Wisdom to be Wisdom incarnate, brings the vision which inspired the Song even closer to the Christian understanding of the figure depicted in the New Testament, and fully justifies early Christian interpretations which saw the bridegroom in the Song as the anticipation of the bridegroom of the Gospels. Bulgakov seems to have taken a similar view of the Song of Songs, writing that: ‘the essential meaning of this mysterious hymn of love becomes comprehensible because of the teaching of the New Testament about the Church, since in truth this song from the Old Testament forms the most New Testament part of the canon . . . everything is accomplished in the Song of Songs’.108 Yes, indeed. In the portrayal of life as it was intended originally to be; in the reversal of how it had become as castigated by the prophets, all is wonderfully accomplished. And yet, the very last line of the Song suggests that the realization of the perfection portrayed depends on the beloved ‘going through’ the heavens to become ‘food’ for this world. That there is a further cosmic event necessary for this suffering planet is the Christian expectation of the Parousia. But if we go back to the impact of that First Coming, as expressed in the Odes of Solomon, we can, it seems to me, glimpse something of what the poet of the Song was longing for. The later Odes, especially, provide numerous examples, for instance, Ode 31: . . . I bore their bitterness because of humility; In order that I might deliver my people and take possession of them, And that I might not render void the promises to the patriarchs, For the deliverance of whose seed I was promised.109 Hallelujah. But, of the many lines which might be chosen to show the impact of the Messiah on the Odist, as well as links with the eros of God in the Song of Songs, here in conclusion are a few lines from the last ode, Ode 42: . . . I have laid upon them the yoke of my love. As the arm of the bridegroom upon the bride, So is my yoke upon those who know me; And as the bed that is spread in the bridal chamber. So is my love upon those who believe in me.110

107 See Scholem 1965b: 106. 108 See note 104 above. 109 Translation by J. A. Emerton 1984: 721. This last line is his alternative in a footnote to the line he provides in the text: ‘Whose seed I promised to deliver.’ 110 Ibid. 730–1. Primary Sources

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OLD TESTAMENT 34: 24–32 136 Genesis 71 38: 27 255 1: 26–27 220 41: 2 244 1: 27 17 47: 29 136 1: 28 37 n., 173 49: 11 110, 139 n. 2: 6–7 220 49: 25 75 2: 8 155 2: 9 51 Exodus 2: 15 155 3: 7–4:13 17 2: 18–25 2 4: 15 225 n. 3: 7 216 4: 22 18 3: 14–19 216 6: 23 272 n. 3: 16 41, 210–11, 274, 278 15: 8 11 3: 21 98, 215–6 19: 21 204 3: 22 106 23: 26 253 3: 24 159 24: 6 138 4: 7 210 24: 6–8 139 6: 1–4 237 24: 9 205 6: 1–5 175 24: 10 180 n., 266 n. 6: 2 237 24: 17 244 12: 1 242, 253 25: 2 134 n. 13: 10 155 25: 18–22 156 15 280 25: 31 136 15: 9 15, 148–9 26: 22 138 n. 15: 10 148 26: 24 254 17 280 26: 27 138 n. 17: 5 280 26: 31 146, 156 22 149 n. 26: 33 146 22: 1–14 235 28: 11 70 24: 2 136 28: 17 264 24: 9 136 28: 18 266 n. 25: 13 228 28: 20 265 25: 24 254 28: 33–5 159 27: 27 257 28: 35 160 28: 14 131 29: 11 266 n. 29: 11 58 30: 3–24 160 30: 14–16 93 30: 4–36 161 31: 21 253 30: 9 257 n. 31: 23 253 30: 23 51, 58, 161 31: 25 253 30: 23–4 51 31: 38 254 30: 25 277 31: 48 253 30: 32–33 248 32: 3 132 30: 34 51, 161 32: 4 181 30: 37–38 248 32: 15 254 32: 26–7 249 32: 30 205 32: 27 249 306 Index of Biblical References

33: 11 205 28: 3 55 33: 18–23 245 28: 6 55 35: 4–9 273 36: 11 268 35: 21 29, 134 n. 36: 27 138 n. Deuteronomy 36: 29 254 3: 9 150 36: 32 138 n. 3: 25 103 36: 35 146 4: 6 282 37: 17 136 4: 29 212 39: 13 265 6: 4 121 39: 24–6 159 6: 5 121, 212 40: 5 248 7: 6 43 40: 22 138 n. 8: 7–8 159 40: 22–27 164 12: 5 113 40: 24 138 n. 12: 15 282 12: 22 282 Leviticus 14: 4–5 282 1: 11 138 n. 14: 6 56n. 10: 1 272 n. 15: 22 282 17–26 79 18: 18 225 n. 22: 24 79 32: 14 139 n. 26: 12 209 33: 2 181–2 33: 8–11 250 Numbers 33: 13–16 165 1 and 2 271 33: 13–17 108 1: 52 239 1–10 240 Joshua 2: 2 239 2: 18 255 2: 17 167 n. 9: 27 113 3: 29 138 n. 12: 24 268 3: 35 138 n. 17: 3 268 5 146 5: 11–31 136 Judges 5: 9–22 136 5: 4 181 5: 21 137 9: 37 125–6 6: 24–6 249 14: 5–18 63 7 228 n. 8: 4 136 1 Samuel 10 241 6: 7 135 10: 14–28 240, 269 7: 1 135 11: 15 79 13 253 12: 1 279 14: 24–45 63 12: 8 225 n. 16: 12 68, 181 13: 23 159 26: 7 79 19: 17 163 20: 5 159 2 Samuel 21: 5 279 5: 7 116 21: 25 142 6: 3 135 22: 38 225 n. 6: 19 240 23: 5 12, 225 n. 7: 10 114 24: 6 58 12: 25 40, 207, 265 26: 33 268 23: 1 67, 67 n., 27: 1–11 268 236 n. Index of Biblical References 307

1 Kings 2: 13 144 2: 11 40 3: 1 149 2: 13–25 71 3: 14 144 3: 10–15 207 3: 16 159 4: 23 282 4: 6 101 5: 5, 6 251 4: 13 159 5: 17 251 7: 3 251 5: 20 103 20: 2 235 5: 8–9 151 31: 6–9 140 6 280 6: 15 107, 236 Nehemiah 6: 23–28 156 2: 8 170 6: 29 156 8: 10 68 n. 7: 8; 9: 16 and 24 16 n. 7: 18–20 159 Job 7: 19 101 3: 12 76 7: 22 101 6: 30 64 7: 26 101 10: 11 216 7: 42 159 15: 30 153 7: 48–49 164 23: 10 66 7: 51 251 24: 9 76 9: 16 and 24 16 n. 27: 10 81 11: 3 91, 92, 269 28 69 14: 20 272 n. 30: 18 216 15: 25–7 272 n. 30: 30 228 19: 18 225 31: 27 225 33: 15 212 2 Kings 71 38: 7 237 2: 3 37 40: 16 125 5: 12 150 25: 13 17, 159 Psalms 4: 5 212 1 Chronicles 9: 11 116 5: 23 150 11: 7 205 8: 30 272 n. 12: 7 232 15: 20 92, 226 18: 16 263 16: 3 240 18: 34 56 17: 9 114 19: 10 63 22: 2 251 19: 10 68, 232 22: 9–10 251 20: 6 239 n. 22: 14 251 21: 4 251 28 255 22: 9 76 28: 11 92 27: 4 67 28: 11–12 174 27: 5 245 28: 18 133, 135 33: 1 229 29 134, 135, 136, 140 33: 12 39 29: 2 266 36: 8–10 163 29: 5, 6, 9 134 n. 37: 4 and 11 81, 229 29: 14 271 40: 3 225 n. 29: 27 40 42: 2 263 43: 3 231 2 Chronicles 45 41 n., 101, 264 2: 6 144 45: 3 265 n. 308 Index of Biblical References

45: 8 58 3: 8 124, 124 n., 126, 128 n. 46: 1 92 3: 9–10 73 46: 5 231 3: 13–14 65 51: 8 137 3: 16 206 55: 12–15 19 3: 18 82, 274 55: 15 68 4: 6–8 55 55: 22 19 5: 3 62, 64 60 101 5: 3 65, 257 65: 1 116 5: 18 50, 55, 82 68: 25 226 5: 18–19 54, 76, 276, 282 68: 25–6 91 5: 19 55, 57, 62, 251 n. 68: 26 270 6: 31 72 68: 34 134 7: 4 96 69 101 7: 6–23 57 71 46 n. 7: 12–18 57, 276 72 207 7: 16 106, 108 74: 19 66, 117 7: 18 75, 79, 86, 251 n. 75: 9 139 n. 8: 7 65 80 101 8: 17 58 80: 8–11 105 8: 18–19 73 80: 9 280 8: 22 71 80: 14–15 105 8: 22–36 69 81: 16 64 8: 30 70, 137 83: 12–13 272 8: 32–5 281 84: 2 231 8: 34 69 87: 3 84 9: 15 227 n. 87: 7 163 11:1 272 90: 17 67 11: 30 108 91: 1 245 13: 7 73 91: 5–6 250 13: 11 73 91: 15 213, 260 13: 13 72 92: 13–14 103 16: 21 68 93: 8 229 16: 24 64, 68 95 210 17: 3 66 103: 19 134 19: 10 81 104: 4 182 19: 13 54 n. 107: 40–1 272 21: 9 19 54 n. 116: 15 172 22: 29 272 118: 24 93 23: 9 72 119: 103 64, 65 23: 31 65 119: 114 245 24: 13 64, 214 n., 266 120: 5 228 24: 13–14 68 121: 6 228 25: 11 238 126 (127) 46 n. 25: 12 137 127 207, 214 25: 16 21, 64, 172 144: 12 174 25: 23 164 146: 3 272 27: 7 21, 64 149: 5 212 27: 15–16 54 n. 27: 21 66 Proverbs 27: 27 62 chs 1–9 33, 48 n., 56, 57, 284 27: 30 62 1: 7 72 30: 17 72 1: 28 213 30: 23 54 n. Index of Biblical References 309

Proverbs 43: 5–6 131 31: 28 219, 270 47: 1 229 31: 10 56 47: 2 253 31: 10–31 69 n. 49: 2 207 31: 22 57 n., 58 49: 10 228 31: 28 68 49: 18 146 31: 31 69 50: 2 213 51: 3 155, 242 Ecclesiastes 51: 17 277 2: 5 170 52: 2 66, 146 2: 6 142 52: 7 229 7: 25 142 53: 7 254 7: 27 142 55: 1, 2b 52 9: 10 142 55: 2 81 58: 14 81 Song of Songs passim 60: 4 146 Isaiah 71 60: 13 103 2: 2 147 60: 16 76 3: 16 116 60: 21 113 3: 17 116 61: 3 113 3: 23 214 61: 9 101 3: 16–26 214 62: 6 214, 261 4: 4 116 63: 1 139 n. 4: 6 245 65: 8–9 235 5: 1 265 65: 10 237 5: 1 179 n. 65: 12 213 5: 1–7 105, 111, 280 65: 13 165 n. 5: 1 40, 43, 97, 179 66: 4 213 5: 2 143 66: 10–1 1 76 6: 1 205 66: 11 81, 229 7: 15 61 11: 12 131, 272 Jeremiah 5 11: 15 272 1: 9 225 n. 12: 3 162 2: 2 230 13: 6 76 n. 2: 21 230 16: 4 245 3 2 16: 11 217 3: 1 230 17: 11 140 3: 4 230 18: 5 243 3: 6 22 21: 16–17 228 3: 13 230 22: 24 138, 139 n. 3: 14 230 25: 9 93 3: 15 118 n. 26: 7 65 3: 19 230 27: 1 153 3: 20 230 27: 21 228 5: 1, 3 213 28: 9 75 5: 3 214 n. 30: 2 104, 245 5: 7 56 32: 12 76 6: 2 81, 229 35: 1 101 7: 12 113 35: 2 237 7: 13 213 38: 12 144 7: 23 209 41: 8 149 n. 7: 34 242 43: 1–2, 4a 153 12: 10 111 310 Index of Biblical References

12: 16 56 23 75, 78, 233 13: 27 18 23: 2–4 77, 79 16: 9 242 23: 3 79 25: 10 242 23: 8 77, 79 29: 12–14a 213 23:17 86 31: 3 226 23: 21 77, 79 31: 31–3 278 23: 25 144 31: 20 217 23: 33–4 77 33: 11 242 27: 5 150 34: 18–19 148 27: 10–11 141, 255 49: 3 143 27: 13 249 49: 7–22 244 28: 13 265, 266 n. 49: 10 244 34: 14–15 210 49: 16 244 34: 30–1 210 52: 17–23 159 38: 12 125 38: 20 244, 244 n. Lamentations 39: 19 139 n. 1: 9 22 40: 17–18 251 3: 13 207 47: 1 163 4: 1a–2 66 47: 1–12 159 4: 3 76 4: 7 180, 266 Daniel 244 4: 8 228 2 183 n. 2: 31–45 182, 266 Ezekiel 244 7: 9 181, 184, 263 1: 1 205 7: 9–14 183, 191 1: 16 184, 265 9: 23 265 n. 1: 24 132 10 265 1: 26 134, 185, 266 n. 10: 5–6 183 1: 26–7 184 10: 6 190 3: 3 68 48 102 3: 12 113 5: 5 125 Hosea 5 10: 1 266 n. 1–3 2 10: 9 265 1:2+ 56 10: 18–19 80 2: 2 76, 81, 234 13: 4 111 2: 14–20 99 15, 15: 6 111 2: 15 137 16 75, 78 2: 21–2 278 16: 1–14 2 4: 12, 13 18 16: 2–3 77 4: 13 104, 107 16: 4 124, 126, 128 n. 5: 6 213 16: 7 77 6: 4 100 16: 8 86 7: 11 117 16: 12 144 9: 10 59 16: 17 95 10: 1 105 16: 23 2 11: 4 226 17: 3–10 105 11: 11 117 17: 7 263 13: 3 100 17: 10 263 13: 7 150 20: 5–9 78 14: 6 257 20: 8 79 14: 5–8 99 20: 47 153 14: 5 101 Index of Biblical References 311

Hosea 5 8: 2 54 55 14: 6 115, 120 8: 9 74 14: 7 100 8: 16 74 14: 8 106 14: 8a 99 Sirach 14: 9 106, 236 2: 4–5 66 14: 20–27 48, 242 Joel 14: 23a 49 1: 12 237 15: 2 50, 54, 55, 276 1: 8–12 160 15: 3b 55 1: 15 76n. 15: 6 50 1: 20 263 24 53, 69, 247, 270, 277, 281, 282, 2: 3 155 284 2: 16 76 24: 3b-4 53 2: 30 247 24: 8 248 4: 18 159, 277 24: 8–12 52 24: 10 248 Amos 24: 10–11 53 9: 13 277 24: 13–21 50 24: 14 236 Obadiah 24: 15 53, 248 3 244 24: 16–17 51 24: 19 165 Micah 24: 19–21 51, 63 1: 16 81 24: 20 64 2: 9 81 24: 21 284 4: 4 243 24: 30 63 24: 30–1 51 Habakkuk 27: 5 142 n. 2: 17 103 33: 15 255 3: 3 164, 181 39: 1–11 48 3: 18 110 39: 13–14 248 Haggai 39: 26 62, 139 n. 1: 8 279, 279 n., 280 42: 3 142 n. 1: 9 160 42: 24 205, 255 1: 18–19 160 42: 24–5 17, 266 2: 23 278 46: 8 62 50: 14–15 139 Zechariah 50: 15 139 n. 4: 10 71 51: 13–30 217 6: 1–6 133 9: 15 139 n. 2 Baruch 14: 8 159, 163 4: 2–6 128 n. Susannah 101 APOCRYPHAL BOOKS 4 Ezra Tobit 5: 23–8 108 13: 16–17 128 n. 5: 23 110 5: 24 113, 114 Wisdom of Solomon 5: 25 115, 116 7: 27 121 5: 26 117, 118 7: 28 74 7: 26 128 n. 7: 29 74 9: 21–2 111 312 Index of Biblical References

10: 54–9 128 n. Acts 13: 36 128 n. 10: 41 216

1 Maccabees 1 Corinthians 4: 57 142, 255 3: 16 259 11: 25 139 n.

NEW TESTAMENT 2 Corinthians Matthew 11: 2 259 13: 24–30 33 23: 25 22 Ephesians 19: 16–30 72 5: 25–7 256, 259 21: 33–46 105 21: 33ﬀ 113 1 Peter 62 23: 13 198 5: 2–4 118 26: 7–13 233 26: 26 284 1 John 26: 28 139 n. 4: 8 34 27: 51 146 Revelation Mark 1: 12–16 184, 263 10: 17–31 72 3: 10 215 n. 12: 1–12 105, 113 1: 14 181 13: 28 110 7: 17 163 14: 3 233 18: 12–13 248 14: 24 139 n. 21 156 15: 38 146

Luke RABBINIC TEXTS 2: 7 284 n. Mishnah 2: 12 284 n. Ta’anit 1:4 177 2: 16 284 n. Hagigah 2:1 177 13: 15 284 n. Avodah Zara 2:5 85 n. 18: 9–14 205 ‘Eduyot 5:7 171 n. 18: 18–30 72 Avot 5:1 121 20: 9–19 105, 113 Yadayim 3:5 8–9, 13 22: 20 139 n. 23: 44 146 Tasefta 24: 39–44 216 Hagigah 2.3 170 Sanhedrin 12.10 10 John 1: 29 284 Jerusalem Talmud 1: 36 284 Hagigah 77b 170 3: 29 19, 242 4: 10, 11 163 Babylonian Talmud 4: 20 126 Berakhot 57b 13 6: 44 226 n. Hagigah 13a 63 6: 35 52 Hagigah 14b 170 6: 51 284 Hagigah 15b and 77b 7: 38 163 175 n. 12: 3 233 Hagigah 14a 263 12: 32 226 n. Yebamot 63b 173 13: 10 217 Sanhedrin 101a 10 15: 1–11 105 Avodah Zara 35b 85 n. Index of Biblical References 313

Minor Tractates Midrash Soferim 5.17 112 Numbers Rabbah 11:3 249 Soferim 3.7, 8.12 250 Canticles Rabbah passim This page intentionally left blank Index

See Contents for subjects not listed here

Abegg, Martin Jr., Flint, Peter, Ulrich, Eugene Brenner, Athalya 39 n, 143 8 n, 12–13 Brooke, George 276 n Abulaﬁa, Abraham 259–260 Brock, Sebastian 5 n, 88 n, 169 n Akiva 8–11, 12, 14, 15, 155, 168, 169–178 Bruegemann, Walter 229, 230 passim, 185 n, 192–3 Bulgakov, Sergei 70 n, 284, 285 Alexander, P. S. References to Targum of Canticles passim Calvin 23, 26 n Alexander, P.S. References to other works 36 Carruthers, Mary 68 n, 39, 212 n, 44, 127–8, 132, 135, 139–140, 175, 193, Cassian 177 n, 208 n, 234 227 n, 237 Chaldean Oracles 204–5, see also Oracles, Allchin, A. M. 25 n Chaldean allegory 42, 43 Charlesworth, James H. 97, 98 Altmann, Alexander 7, 167 Chesnutt, Randall D. 139 Anderson, Gary 216 Childs, Brevard 46–7, 49 n, 124, 128 Anthony of Egypt 208 Chouraqui, André 242 Apocalypse of Abraham 149–590, 184 Clements, R. E. 160 n 11 Aristeas, Letter of 162 Cloud of Unknowing 204 Asienso, Victor Morla 33, 34 Cohen, Martin S. 7, 187–8, 189 Athanassiadi, Polymnia 194 Cooper, Jerrold S. 83 Augustine 217, 234 Auwers, Jean-Marie 32 Dan, Joseph 10, 167–8, 187, 191, 271, 274 Baildam, John D. 27 Day, John 99 n, 152, 153, 164 n Barbiero, Gianni 33, 34 Davies, G. I. 100 n, 106, 107 n Bach, Johann Sebastian 25, 267 Davis, Ellen F. 5, 10, 141, 145, 212, 224, Barker, Margaret 156, 157–8, 205 253 Barr, James 87 n Davis, Virginia Lee 89 Barr, Jane 253 n DeConick, April 178 n Barth, Karl 2–4, 23 Dell, Katharine 49 Barthélemy, Dominique 42 DiLella, A. A. 182, 183 n Barton, John 7 n, 9 n, 12–13, 16 n, 43, 44, Dobbs-Allsop, F. W. 7, 8 131 n, 238 Dodds, E. R. 189 Bataille, Georges 201, 202 Dohmen, C. 91, 92 Battacharji, Santha 21 Douglas, Mary 119, 137 Benedict XVI, Pope 86 n Driver, S. R. 28 Ben Yehuda, Eliezer 145–6 Bernard of Clairvaux 5, 21 n, 80 n, 197, Ebeling, Gerhard 24 199–200, 203, 259 Elior, Rachel 162, 281 n Black, Matthew 82 n, 36 Elliott, Mark W. 16 n Blackman, Aylward M. 89–94, 96 Emerton, J. A. 98 n, 285 nn, 109–10 Block, Ariel and Chana 83 n, 131, Ena, Jean Emmanuel de 32 153 n 1 Enoch 81, 84, 120, 143, 161, 175, 181, Bloch, René 5 184–5, 244, 263 Bowker, John 131 3 Enoch 132, 269 Boyarin, Daniel 11, 169 Ephrem 244–5 316 Index

Evagrius 208 Jubilees 124, 126–7

Falk, Marcia 129 Kabbalah 19 n, 173, 275 Faraone, Christopher A. 238, 240 n Kabbalists 16, 20, 40 n, 82 n, 274, 284 Fenton, Paul 37 Kearney, Richard 199–201, 203 Feuillet, André 31, 99 n Keel, Othmar 30, 32, 56, 71, 114 Fishbane, Michael 123 n, 163–4, 188, 197–8, Kyrke-Smith, Jean 70 n 206, 262 Flusser, David 170 Lacan, Jacques 201, 202 Fox, M. V. 70 n, 83 n, 86 n, 89, 93, 94, 95, 225 LaCoque, André 136 n, 186 n n, 251, 257, 270, 275 Landy, Francis 40 n Fox, Michael see Fox, M.V. Lawson, James 193–4 Fraade, Steven D. 36, 38 n Lieberman, Saul 168, 169 Freud, Sigmund 27 n, 41, 202 Lipin´ ski, Edward 151 Littledale, R. F. 14 n, 25, 152 Garbini, Giovanni 8, 33 Loewe, Raphael 87, 134 n Genesis Apocryphon 130 Lohse, Bernard 24 n, 25 n Gerleman, Gillis 30 Louth, Andrew 3, 4, 21 n, 46, 55 n, 219–20, Ginzberg, Louis 10, 192 n, 193 284 Gordis, Robert 239 Luther, Martin 3, 22–5, 142, 228, 264 (Refs to Gordon, Robert P. 136 his translation of the Song not noted) Goulder, Michael 41, 129 n Luzzarraga, Jésus 34 Graetz H 7 Gregory of Nyssa 5, 16, 35 n, 42, 197, 208, Macdonald, Nathan 121 214 n, 216 n, 251, 259, 283 n MacKenna, Stephen 204 n Maimonides, Moses 259–260 Halperin, David 78 n, 133, 149, 176, 178 Maimonides, Abraham 37 Harl, Marguerite 142 Majercik, Ruth 194, 195 Haskalah 275 Marcion, Marcionism 41 Haupt, Paul 27, 28, 143 Masoretes 75, 78, 80, 83, 85, 86 n, 87, Hayward, C. T. R. 131, 134 n, 143, 226 n, 248, 145, 150, 152, 225, 245, 267, 274, 280 277, 278 Heim, Kurt 228 n Matter, Ann 25 n Hekhalot Literature 7, 168, 172, 174, 178, Mays J. L. 269 181 n, 185, 186, 195, 226, 240, 271 Merkava mysticism 8, 38, 65, 132, 133, 135, Hekhalot Rabbati 191 166, 167, 169, 174, 176–7, 178, 187, 188, Hekhalot Zutarti 170, 171, 172, 203 205, 254, 271, 281 n hesychast, hesychasm 169 Merkava Rabbati 170, 171 Horbury, William 39, 74 n, 53, 276 Messiah 13, 40, 98, 187 n, 188 n, 190, 191, Hughes, Jeremy 182 n, 258 n, 273 n 193, 233, 235, 245, 283, 284, 285 Humanae Vitae 31 messianism 193 n, 276 Moberly, Walter 120 Idel, Moshe 189, 260 Morray-Jones, C. R. A. 146 n, 155 n, 170 n, 171, 172 n, 178, 185 n, 187 n, 188, Jerome 14, 15 n, 82, 83, 87, 88, 242 n, 277, 189–192, 203 n, 249, 254, 262 278 Müller, Hans-Peter 30 John of the Cross 5, 21, 32, 197, 199, 200–1, Muraoka, T. 218–9 203, 223, 224 Murray, Robert 36, 97, 110, 111, 118, 123, Joseph and Asenath 36 n, 263 147, 177 n, 244 n, 249 Josephus 7, 158 Joüon, Paul 27 n, 84, 152, 231, 265 n, 266 n, Navarra, University of 33 276, 277, 278 Neumann, Erich 95–6, 240 Joyce, Paul 78 nn Nygren, Anders 3, 22, 41 n, 101 Index 317

O’Neill, J. C. 26, 36, 37 n, 177, 276 Sheppard, Gerald 52–3, 247, 270, 277 Oracles, Chaldean see Chaldean Oracles Siddur Rabbah 190 Origen 14–16, 32, 60, 169, 175, 176, 186, 189, Shiur Koma 15, 83, 87, 166, 168, 174, 179, 197, 202, 206, 216 n, 219–21, 237, 240, 185–195 passim 262 259, 283 n Sinnot, Alice Mary 70 n Soloway, Mark 40 n 96 Pardes, Ilana 17–18 Southern, Richard 19–20 Pelletier, Anne-Marie 32 Stone, M. E. 99, 109, 113–117 passim, 120 n Petersen, D. L. 278 Sufis, Jewish 37–8 Philo of Alexandria 158 Sviri, Sara 18 n, 37 n, 264 n Pope, Marvin 28–9, and see passim Talmon, Shemaryahu 125–6, 128, 245 n Qumran 7, 8, 35 n, 39, 42, 86, 104, 127, 130, tendenz 42, 44 132, 140, 163, 164, 170, 217, 218, 219, Teresa of Avila 5, 197, 199, 201–2, 203, 208–9, 248, 276 234, 259 Testament of Levi 139–140, 151 Rad, Gerhard von 47, 48–9, 69–70 Theodoret 251 Ravasi, Gianfranco 32–3 Tourney, Raymond 31, 40, 41 n, 84, 134–5, Renan, Ernest 27 240, 242 Ricoeur, Paul 1, 5, 32 n Tov, Emmanuel 42, 86 n Robert, André 31, 32, 228, 238 n, 281 Tromp, N. J. 152, 153 n Rodd, C. S. 207 Turner, Denys 21, 198–9 Rogerson, J. W. 123 Rosenthal, Franz 37–8 Vaux, Roland de 29, 35 n Rowland, Christopher 173 n, 174 n, 175 n, Vermes, Geza 103 185 n, 188 Rufinus 14 Waltke, Bruce K. 54 Ward, Benedicta 197 Sacra Bibbia 38 Watson, Wilfred 243 n, 271 Salveson, Alison 7 n, 266 n Webber, Jonathan 240 n Sanders, J. A. 218 Weinfeld, Moshe 114 n, 282, 283 Sanmartin-Ascaso 179 n Wenham, Gordon 156, 159 Saward, John 209 n White, John B. 88, 89, 95, 96 Schäfer, Peter 133 n, 169 n, 170, 171 n, 172 n, Whybray, R. N. 59–60, 80 n 240 n William of Saint-Thierry 21, 32 Scholem, Gershom 10, 15, 19 n, 21 n, 82 n, 87, Winston, David 74 166–173 passim, 178 n, 185–7, 188, 275, Wolff, H. W. 99, 100 n, 107 n 284, 285 Séd, Nicholas 244–5 Yannaras, Christos 34–5 Segal, Alan 192 semantics 43 Zakovitch, Yair 31 Shekhinah 20, 21, 132, 240, 245, 275, 283, 284, Zohar 16, 206, 275 285 Zohary, Michael 160 n, 238 n