One alone is (my) sister, having no peer:
more gracious than all other women.
Behold her, like Sothis rising
at the beginning of a good year:
shining, precious, white of skin,
lovely of eyes when gazing.
Sweet her lips (when) speaking:
she has no excess of words.
Long of neck, white of breast,
her hair true lapis lazuli.
Her arms surpass gold,
her fingers are like lotuses.
Full(?) (her) derriere, narrow(?) (her) waist,
her thighs carry on her beauties.
Lovely of (walk) when she strides on the ground,
she has captured my heart in her embrace.
She makes the heads of all (the) men
turn about when seeing her.
Fortunate is whoever embraces her –
he is like the foremost of lovers.
Her coming forth appears
like (that of) her (yonder) – the (Unique) One.1
The above poem is an example of this, an excerpt from a small collection of love poetry composed somewhere around the mid-12th century B.C.E., entitled “The Stroll, the Beginning of the Sayings of the Great Entertainer”, and when it was published in the 1960s along with other such poetry, scholars of the Hebrew Bible began to realize its significance.
Fast forward 800 or 900 years, to the period during which Hellenism exerted itself upon the culture of ancient Israel; in centuries prior, a degree of cross-cultural transmission had occurred between Egypt and the Hebrew peoples. I’ll leave it at that, but if you’re curious for more, I’d be happy to send you my very boring grad school paper on how this process went down. The Hebrew people -- having heard traveling bards and songsters -- apparently copied and adapted Egyptian love songs, making them their own, crafting their own versions. Proof of this lies in the Song of Songs, a veritable anomaly in the Hebrew Bible’s literature.
The Song of Songs’ Weirdness
The bizarrity of the Song of Songs manifests on several levels, and given that it is a mere 8 chapters long, I would highly encourage you to read through it before continuing here.
First, it echoes -- in parts, almost to the point of blatant plagiarism -- Egyptian poetry, and incorporates elements of Greek poetry as well, such as the third person chorus. Taking place in Jerusalem, it jumps between speakers: an unmarried male and an unmarried female, who are apparently covert lovers, and a chorus interjects throughout their dialogue. Second, this stuff is highly sexual, nearing pornographic language. Depending on whose opinion you ask, the Song is either lovely or vulgar. For example, take the language of the young male lover (Song of Songs 4:12-16), who speaks euphemistically about his lover’s “garden” (hint: he ain’t talkin’ ‘bout a literal garden):
A garden enclosed, my sister, my bride,
a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed!
Your branches are a grove of pomegranates,
with fruits of choicest yield:
Henna with spikenard,
spikenard and saffron,
Sweet cane and cinnamon,
with all kinds of frankincense;
Myrrh and aloes,
with all the finest spices;
A garden fountain, a well of living water,
streams flowing from Lebanon.
Awake, north wind!
Come, south wind!
Blow upon my garden
that its perfumes may spread abroad.
And now the female lover speaks soon thereafter, going into great detail about her own bits of genitalia (Song of Songs 5:3-6):
I have taken off my robe,
am I then to put it on?
I have bathed my feet,
am I then to soil them?
My lover put his hand in through the opening:
my innermost being trembled because of him.
I rose to open for my lover,
my hands dripping myrrh:
My fingers, flowing myrrh
upon the handles of the lock.
I opened for my lover—
but my lover had turned and gone!
At his leaving, my soul sank.
I sought him, but I did not find him;
I called out after him, but he did not answer me.
As my freshmen and I read through this, they giggled and made faces of disgust. All this talk of her “opening” and “dripping myrrh” can shock the more mild-mannered amongst us; I mean, let’s call a spade a spade, shall we? She’s talking about masturbation here (be it physical reality, or the fantasy of such), and in the words of one of my fourteen year-olds, “he hit it and quit it”: the young woman cannot find her lover, who covertly departed from her presence after some pleasuring.
Here this stuff sits, smack in the Bible’s middle. Oh, how I wish that Will Ferrell and Rachel Dratch had done a biblical version of their Lov-ah’s sketches from SNL based on the Song of Songs.
The third, and last bit of weirdness I’ll mention is the most subtle and the most striking: the Song of Songs never explicitly mentions God. Scholarship remains inconclusive as to whether or not a particular phrase in verse 6 of chapter 8 (“its arrows are arrows of fire, flashes of the divine”) contains a veiled reference to the very name of God. Apart from this brief mention of the supernatural, the Song of Songs remains a thoroughly secular work of beautiful poetry. Indeed, it fluctuates between playfulness and gravitas, as eros tends to do, and does not belong to the Sitz im Leben2 of religious ritual or wedding celebration: the characters are clearly not about to get married, nor are there any references to annual religious festivals. No doubt, the Song’s cultural usage would have entered into these contexts over time, but nonetheless it does not originate from either of these real-world settings. All of this raises a singular question: why did this explicitly sexual song make its way into the Bible?
The Biblical Place of the Song of Songs
Rabbis debated into the early years of the first millennium C.E. whether or not this deserved to be a part of canonical Scripture, given its seemingly profane3 nature. Ultimately, biblical redactors included the Song in the third section of the Hebrew Bible, the Ketuvim, or the Writings. While the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) discusses the establishment of the Covenant, and the Prophets (which in Christian editions of the Hebrew Bible, is comprised of the historical books and the Major and Minor Prophets’ writings) focus on the breaking of this Covenant, the Writings encompass4 a diverse collection of literatures that hone in on what it means to live the Covenantal relationship in the plain and the seemingly ordinary.
The Song of Songs, simply, had attained such immense popularity at marriage celebrations and religious festivals and had become so firmly engrained in the collective imagination of the Hebrew people that it had to be included in the canon. Of all the secular songs that the covenantal people sang, this piece was the Song to End all Songs: for the Israelites, it proved the most haunting, the most unforgettable, the most essential to understanding the place of sexuality in human experience.
Early rabbinic writings assert that making love on the Sabbath day of rest is nothing short of a mitzvah, a good deed, an experience that makes concrete the love between the human and the Divine. Sadly, I cannot find the reference, but according to one of my professors, one such early rabbi declared that on the Sabbath, cries of lovemaking should be heard streaming forth from homes. Intercourse, in short, helps the human experience the Divine. Sex ought not to be understood as anything less than participation in the creative activity of God, or as mystical union with God through union with another human being.
As creatures, our hearts ache with passion. We long to experience union with people, places, times, et cetera, that are Other. Any even vaguely “spiritual” experience brings us to stand outside of ourselves, in ek-stasis,5 ecstasy. The Song’s inclusion within Scripture -- a reality that culminates from a multicultural process that spanned many centuries -- canonizes the most unexplored and most unorthodox facet of Christian spirituality: the erotic. While Christians throughout the centuries have allegorically read the Song as a metaphor for the relationship between Jesus and the Church, or between God and humanity, we cannot ignore the fact that its quintessential nature is that of erotic poetry. The fact that the Bible’s editors included it within our Scriptures teaches us a lesson of supreme import: sex and sexuality are things of utmost sacrality. Not only can we understand God as parent and friend, but we can (and should) understand God as lover as well. Ultimately, there is no real divide between the sacred and the profane, for all that we believe is profane can become portals into or revelations of the sacred, should we only be willing to enter through them.
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| Dave's actual, real-life arm. |
Set me as a seal upon your heart,
as a seal upon your arm,
For love is as as strong as death,
passion as fierce as the grave.
Its piercings are of fire,
flashings of the Divine.
Mighty waters cannot overcome it,
Nor can rivers drown it. [...]
You, who dwell in the gardens,
my companions listen for the sound of your voice --
let me hear it!
Make haste, my lover.
In my next post, I’ll get into concrete examples of erotic spirituality from the Christian mystical tradition that capitalize on the Song of Songs’ meaning and purpose within the Bible. It involves a nun having sex with God and a monk making out with Jesus. Get excited for some wild stuff.
1 Fox, Michael V. The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.
↩
2 This is a term of form critical biblical scholarship, and is in German because German scholars pioneered the field of form criticism; the phrase translates to “setting in life,” and is used to describe the real-world usage of any given biblical text. For example, the Sitz im Leben of certain psalms were used at various rituals and events surrounding the king, and are thus called “royal psalms”.↩
3 I use “profane” here in the classical and formal mode: anything not belonging to the “sacred” is inherently “profane”.↩
4 Think of the Psalms, the Proverbs, Wisdom, Job, so on and so forth. These books are not tied to any particular historical events, and are thus the most universally applicable of the Bible’s literatures.↩
5 The word literally means “standing outside of”.↩
6 In case you were wondering...yes, I researched the oldest extant manuscript of the Song, which is from the Dead Sea Scrolls, based the font off of the Essene scribe’s penmanship, and designed it myself. All this to celebrate finishing my year of Hebrew in graduate school, which remains and probably will forever remain, the single hardest course I’ve ever had. Take that, www.badhebrew.com.↩
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