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5. The Song of Songs, or The Story of Stories?
- University of Wisconsin Press
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B G U The aesthetic quality of the Song of Songs is beyond doubt. However, the nature of the book, its unity, its presumed date of composition, and other matters involving its characteristics and its writer have been a source of scholarly doubts and debates. Even the book’s canonization evokes questions, which are not satisfied by Rabbi Akiva’s statement that the Song of Songs is the holiest of all books in the scriptures. Although the allegorical reading of the Song of Songs—which argues God’s implied presence in the book—seems a solid basis for the book’s canonization, it is still an interpretation that encounters more debates than agreements. There are three scholarly approaches to the Song of Songs: allegorical, cultic-mythological, and literary. (The dramatic approach to the Song of Songs is strongly related to the literary approach but does not cover the whole scope of the Song.) The allegorical approach reads the Song as a symbolic depiction of the reciprocal love between God and his people.1 The culticmythological approach reads the Song as a poetic document that maps pagan rituals of fertility, or perhaps even the wedding chronicle of Tammus and Astarte, the Canaanite god and goddess, a view strongly advocated by Karl Budde’s Das Hohelied. One literary approach treats the Song as a work of literature per se, narrating the vagaries of love, its fervent zeniths as well as its frustrating nadirs. Another approach may be considered of a literary nature as it views the Song as literature of the dramatic genre. Among those who advocate the dramatic approach are Franz Delitzsch, Guillaume Pouget, and J. Guitton. Further support of the literary approach to this book may be found 5 The Song of Songs, or The Story of Stories? That book in my eyes doth share the glory That in gold clasps in the golden story. —, Romeo and Juliet in Y. G. Wetzstein’s findings concerning wedding songs in Syria. Although the following study is primarily literary, it does not examine the conflicting views that emerge from the different approaches to the Song; there are already numerous studies that dedicate detailed discussions to those approaches, including works by Robert Gordis, John B. White, and Keith Schoville.2 Despite the conceptual differences among those approaches, however, they have one thing in common: none of those approaches sees a full, comprehensive , literary unity in the Song of Songs, but rather treats it as a collection of poems amalgamated on the basis of a common denominator. Thus, Hartmut Schmökel’s view of the Song’s unity, based on reciprocal relations among its dramatis personae, derives from his cultic approach.3 Morris Segal detects an internal evolvement, a sort of ascending evolution that is founded on love’s spiral development, and Cheryl Exam formulates the sense of unity in terms of “ring composition” founded on recurring elements and motifs, which function as integrative hooks.4 Michael V. Fox argues that the Song earns a considerable sense of cohesiveness and stylistic homogeneity, which is the result of four unifying factors: () a network of repetends, () associative sequences, () consistency of character portrayal, and () a (loose) narrative framework.5 Although Fox adverts to unifying aspects in the Song, he underlines that “the project did not arrive at the cohesiveness that we would expect to see in a unified work” (). Fox denies the book’s unity because he believes that it is not “structured according to a narrative or schematic design” (), and there is “no overall schema or continuous development in the poem beyond the loose narrative framework provided by :– and :–.” He expands on that argument: “Within this framework, the course of events does not move in the straight line of narrative progression, but rather twists and wanders affectionately through different parts of the one territory” (). Although I appreciate Fox’s contribution to the study of the Song’s unity, I take issue with his last observation. In fact, the aim of this study is to prove the opposite by emphasizing the unity of the Song of Songs, which is founded on evolving narrative and a meticulously designed pattern of plot progression. Thus, Fox’s statement that “the order in which the facets were shown does not much matter” () is hereby challenged: the order in which the facets were shown does in fact matter most significantly. The view that the Song lacks an inner evolving principle that would endow the piece...
