The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity

3 The Key to the Code: Allegory and the Song of Songs

Chapter Three The Key to the Code: Allegory and the Song of Songs The last chapter pointed to allegory as a major factor of medieval Song of Songs commentaries, one not alwayssympatheticallyreceived by modern readers. In part this is due to modern suspicion of traditional Christian language about the body, but the problem also clearly begins with the profoundly erotic nature of the text itself. Especially as a canonical book of Christian Scripture, the Song of Songs presents a number of oddities which invite elaboration on a level "beyond" (or at least "away from") the apparent surface. In eight chapters of love lyrics, the Song of Songs suggests unification by means of repeating images and phrases; these hint at the possibility of an underlying structure, but contain no clear narrative development. The Song of Songs thus has inspired a steady stream of commentary which must always begin with the problem of sense at a basic level of the text. In this, it differs essentially from the narrative accounts of the Hebrew Bible (Pentateuch, Former Prophets, Chronicles) since even allegorical interpretations of books like Genesis or Kings assume a level of story-telling as history, which is not clearly present in the Song of Songs. Nor does the Song of Songs fit easily into other biblical categories, such as prophecy, or even "wisdom literature" (the class in which it is usually placed along with Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job) since, on the surface, it tells no sacred history, makes no theological nor moral points, and docs not mention God. The Twentieth-Century Debate For twentieth-century commentary, the most compelling question has been what the Song of Songs originally "was," that is, what meaning it carried at or before the stage of redaction in which we find it in the Hebrew Bible. Modern interpreters of the Song of Songs, working from the philological, literary, and archaeological discoveries of the nineteenth 5O / The Key to the Code and twentieth centuries, have arrived at three basic points of view:i) that the Song of Songs is a collection of love lyrics included in the biblical canon as a testimony to the goodness of human love; 2) that it is a cultic poem with themes drawn from ancient religious traditions, adapted to represent the sacred marriageof God and Israel; 3) that the love between God and Israel is the true meaning of the poem, which was written as a prophetic allegory in the manner of the Book of Hosea. The first theory, perhaps the most widely accepted, is expounded by a number of scholars from different traditions. The Jewish interpreter Robert Gordis, while acknowledging that the Song of Songs was included in the canon because of allegorical interpretation, argues nevertheless that the text originally spoke of human love.1 This position is accepted by the Christian scholarsRoland E. Murphy1 and PhyllisTrible; the latter adds a feminist interpretation by reading the Song of Songs as the redemption of mutual human love, lost in Genesis 2—3.' Interpretation of the Song of Songs as an ancient cultic text began with the early twentieth-century discoveries of parallel material in Egyptian and Canaanite religious literature.* Marvin H. Pope has stated the most sophisticated contemporary version of this theory, arguing that the Song of Songs originated in a context involving connected rites of fertility and death which were practiced in the ancient world from the Ganges to the Mediterranean.5 The cult theory lends itself to continual reformulation in the light of new understandings of ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Ugaritic texts. But as often as they are restated, cultic theories of the Song of Songs are challenged, both by scholars who see in the same ancient parallels an original context of purelysecular poetry,6 and by those, like Gordis, who assess the possibilityof a cult connection as at best "a secularreworkingof a no longer extant litany of an assumed Israelite cult which left no record of its existence behind it," and, in any case, an unlikely explanationfor a text included in a canon which stresses particularistic, national literature.7 Recognition that the Song of Songs belongs to a collection of Jewish religious literature is the starting point for the third modern approach, which might be characterized as one of historical allegory. This understanding of the text has been articulated by Christian scholars, who see the original meaning of the Song of Songs as an expression of love between God and the people of Israel, expressed in the context of...