The Song of Songs (), also called the Canticle of Canticles or the Song of Solomon, is a biblical poem, one of the five ("scrolls") in the ("writings"), the last section of the Tanakh. Unlike other books in the Hebrew Bible, it is erotic poetry; lovers express passionate desire, exchange compliments, and invite one another to enjoy. The poem narrates an intense, poetic love story between a woman and her lover through a series of sensual dialogues, dreams, metaphors, and warnings to the "daughters of Jerusalem" not to awaken love before its time.
Modern scholarship tends to hold that the lovers in the Song are unmarried, which accords with its ancient Near East context. The women of Jerusalem form a chorus to the lovers, functioning as an audience whose participation in the lovers' erotic encounters facilitates the participation of the reader.
Most scholars view the Song of Songs as erotic poetry celebrating human love, not a divine metaphor, with some seeing influences from fertility cults and wisdom literature. Its authorship, date, and origins remain uncertain, with scholars debating its unity, structure, and possible influences from Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greek love poetry. Most scholars date it to the 3rd century BCE.
Many Jews read the Song during Passover, a custom first recorded in 8th-century Jund Filastin. Jewish tradition interprets it as an allegory of the relationship between God and Israel. In Christianity, it is viewed as an allegory of Christ and his bride, the Church. The Song of Songs has inspired diverse works in art, film, theater, and literature, including pieces by Marc Chagall, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Toni Morrison, John Steinbeck, and Neil Diamond.
Structure There is widespread consensus that, although the book has no plot, it does have what can be called a framework, indicated by the links between its beginning and end. Beyond this, however, there appears to be little agreement: attempts to find a chiastic structure have not found acceptance, and analyses dividing the book into units have employed various methods, yielding diverse conclusions.
The following indicative schema is from Kugler and Hartin's An Introduction to The Bible:
Introduction Dialogue between the lovers The woman recalls a visit from her lover The woman addresses the daughters of Zion Sighting a royal wedding procession The man describes his lover's beauty The woman addresses the daughters of Jerusalem The man describes his lover, who visits him Observers describe the woman's beauty Appendix
Title The introduction calls the poem "the song of songs", a phrase that follows an idiomatic construction commonly found in Scriptural Hebrew to indicate the object's status as the greatest and most beautiful of its class (as in Holy of Holies). The work is also referred to as the "Song of Solomon", meaning the song "of", "by", "for", or "[dedicated] to" Solomon.Brenner, A., 21. The Song of Solomon, in Barton, J. and Muddiman, J. (2001), The Oxford Bible Commentary , p. 429, accessed 6 April 2024
Summary The poem proper begins with the woman's expression of desire for her lover and her self-description to the "daughters of Jerusalem": she insists on her sun-born blackness, likening it to the "tents of Kedar" (nomads) and the "curtains of Solomon". A dialogue between the lovers follows: the woman asks the man to meet; he replies with a lightly teasing tone. The two compete in offering flattering compliments ("my beloved is to me as a cluster of henna blossoms in the vineyards of En Gedi", "an apple tree among the trees of the wood", "a lily among brambles", while the bed they share is like a forest canopy). The section closes with the woman telling the daughters of Jerusalem not to stir up love such as hers until it is ready.
The woman recalls a visit from her lover in the springtime. She uses imagery from a shepherd's life, and she says of her lover that "he pastures his flock among the lilies".
The woman again addresses the daughters of Jerusalem, describing her fervent and ultimately successful search for her lover through the night-time streets of the city. When she finds him she takes him almost by force into the chamber in which she was conceived. She reveals that this is a dream, seen on her "bed at night", and ends by again warning the daughters of Jerusalem "not to stir up love until it is ready".
The next section reports a royal wedding procession. Solomon is mentioned by name, and the daughters of Jerusalem are invited to come out and see the spectacle.
The man describes his beloved: Her eyes are like doves, her hair is like a flock of goats, her teeth like shorn ewes, and so on from face to breasts. Place-names feature heavily: her neck is like the Tower of David, her smell like the scent of Lebanon. He hastens to summon his beloved, saying that he is ravished by even a single glance. The section becomes a "garden poem", in which he describes her as a "locked garden" (usually taken to mean that she is chaste). The woman invites the man to enter the garden and taste the fruits. The man accepts the invitation, and a third party tells them to eat, drink, "and be drunk with love".
The woman tells the daughters of Jerusalem of another dream. She was in her chamber when her lover knocked. She was slow to open, and when she did, he was gone. She searched through the streets again, but this time she failed to find him and the watchmen, who had helped her before, now beat her. She asks the daughters of Jerusalem to help her find him, and describes his physical good looks. Eventually, she admits her lover is in his garden, safe from harm, and committed to her as she is to him.
The man describes his beloved; the woman describes a rendezvous they have shared. (The last part is unclear and possibly corrupted.)
The people praise the beauty of the woman. The images are the same as those used elsewhere in the poem, but with an unusually dense use of place-names, e.g., pools of Hebron, gate of Bath-rabbim, tower of Damascus, etc. The man states his intention to enjoy the fruits of the woman's garden. The woman invites him to a tryst in the fields. She once more warns the daughters of Jerusalem against waking love until it is ready.
The woman compares love to death and Sheol: love is as relentless and jealous as these two, and cannot be quenched by any force. She summons her lover, using the language used before: he should come "like a gazelle or a young stag upon the mountain of spices".
Composition Song of Songs offers no explicit reference to its author or to the date, place, or circumstances of its composition. The superscription states that it is "Solomon's", but even if this is meant to identify the author, it cannot be read as strictly as a similar modern statement.
Since the 1800s, “most scholars” have dated it to the 3rd century BCE. The most reliable evidence for its date is its language: Aramaic gradually replaced Hebrew after the end of the Babylonian exile in the late 6th century BCE, and the evidence of vocabulary, morphology, idiom and syntax clearly point to a late date, centuries after King Solomon to whom it is traditionally attributed. It has parallels with Mesopotamian and Egyptian love poetry from the first half of the 1st millennium, and with the pastoral idylls of Theocritus, a Greek poet who wrote in the first half of the 3rd century BCE; as a result of these conflicting signs, speculation ranges from the 10th to the 2nd centuries BCE, with the language supporting a date around the 3rd century. Other scholars are more skeptical about the idea that the language demands a post-exilic date.
Debate continues on the unity or disunity of the book. Those who see it as an anthology or collection point to the abrupt shifts of scene, speaker, subject matter and mood, and the lack of obvious structure or narrative. Those who hold it to be a single poem point out that it has no internal signs of composite origins, and view the repetitions and similarities among its parts as evidence of unity. Some claim to find a conscious artistic design underlying it, but there is no agreement among them on what this might be. The question, therefore, remains unresolved.
The poem seems to be rooted in festive performance, and connections have been proposed with the "sacred marriage" of Ishtar and Tammuz.
Genre
The consensus among contemporary scholars of the Bible is that the Song of Songs is an erotic poem, and not an elaborate metaphor.
In his commentary for the Anchor Bible Series, Marvin H. Pope describes the Song as a fertility cult liturgy, rooted in the fertility cults of the ancient Near Eastern cultures of Mesopotamia and Canaan, as well as their sacred marriage rites and funeral feasts.
J. Cheryl Exum wrote: "The erotic desire of its protagonists, everywhere evident in the Song, leads me, in conclusion, to the Song's unique contribution to the conceptualization of love in the Bible: its romantic vision of love".
The historian and rabbi Shaye J. D. Cohen summarises:
Several scholars have also argued that, alongside its condition as love poetry, the Song of Songs also shares a number of features with Wisdom literature. For instance, Jennifer L. Andruska argues that the Song employs a number of literary conventions typical of this didactic literature and that it combines features of both ancient Near Eastern love song and wisdom genres to produce a wisdom literature about romantic love, instructing readers to pursue what she describes as a particular type of "wise love" relationship, modelled by the lovers of the poem. Likewise, Katharine J. Dell notes a number of Wisdom motifs in the Song such as parallels between the lovers and the advices and conduct of Woman Wisdom and the Loose Woman of Proverbs, among others.
Canonisation and interpretation
Judaism
The Song was accepted into the Jewish canon of scripture and was understood as "an allegory for the love between God and Israel", a view "dominant for a thousand years and more". However, according to Catholic priest Fr. Andrew Greeley, Song of Songs is "secular love poetry, a collection of love songs gathered around a single theme" and scholarship has "routed the allegorical interpretation". Although "there is a tradition that even this book was considered as one to be excluded", as stated in Aboth d'Rabbi Nathan A1, a 700–900 CE work, the Song of Songs was not only included but regarded as "especially meritorious". Reform Jewish Rabbi Solomon Freehof notes that one must think "if the book is so gross ... unlike all other books of the Bible tradition[...] why accept it at all?"
Canonicity was tied to its attribution to Solomon, and based on an allegorical reading where the subject matter was taken to be not sexual desire but God's love for Israel.Avot of Rabbi Natan 1:4, "At first they buried [Song of Songs], until the Men of the Great Assembly arrived to explain it[...] as it says, 'Come my beloved, let us go forth to the field[...]'" Cf. b. Eruvin 31b for the Rabbinic homily on this verse, "'Come my beloved' – so the congregation of Israel said to the Holy One, blessed be He[...]" For instance, the famed first and second century Rabbi Akiva forbade the use of the Song of Songs in popular celebrations. He reportedly said, "He who sings the Song of Songs in wine taverns, treating it as if it were a vulgar song, forfeits his share in the world to come". However, Rabbi Akiva famously defended the canonicity of the Song of Songs, reportedly saying when the question came up of whether it should be considered a defiling work, "God forbid![...] For all of eternity in its entirety is not as worthy as the day on which Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the Writings are holy, but Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies."