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5 Ancient Jewish Interpretation of the Song of Songs in a Comparative Context David Stern No biblical book’s ancient interpretation is more extensively documented than that of the Song of Songs. Nor is there another biblical book that has so clearly been subjected to so many different exegetical approaches. In the case of Jewish exegesis in the late antique period alone, one can count at least three distinctly different exegetical approaches to the book: (1) the explicitly rabbinic midrashic approach— or more accurately, approaches—as represented first in sporadic exegeses recorded in the various tannaitic collections of midrash as well as in other classic rabbinic works, and later in the several amoraic anthologies like Song of Songs Rabbah (Shir ha-Shirim rabbah, hereafter ShirR) devoted specifically to the exegesis of the Song of Songs;1 (2) the far more continuous if not systematic historical allegorization of the Song found in the Aramaic Targum;2 and (3) hints toward an ancient tradition of esoteric interpretation of the Song that once existed though it no longer survives in any particular literary document.3 While the literary documents containing the first two traditions of interpretation are all relatively late—from the sixth through the eighth centuries at the earliest —it is likely that specific interpretation of the Song in these collections may go back as early as the first or second centuries c.e. in Roman Palestine. Not coincidentally, an analogous Christian tradition of interpretation of the Song is explicitly attested for second- to third-century Greek-speaking Palestine.4 To one extent or another, nearly all these traditions assume that the Song is about something other than its plain or obvious meaning as an exchange between two human lovers who express their desire, longing, and praise for each other. The origins of this so-called allegorical interpretation of the poem have been the subject of inquiry virtually since the beginning of modern scholarship on the Song. The similarities and 88 Stern differences between the various ‘‘allegorical’’ approaches—both within the Jewish world (for example, between the midrashic and targumic traditions ) and between Jewish and Christian allegorical interpretations— have been extensively investigated, with special attention focused upon specific exegeses of the same or very similar verses in the two traditions with an eye to establishing their relationship to each other.5 To date, no consensus, let alone agreement, on this issue has emerged, but all these studies have assumed a basic comparability between the different interpretive approaches. More recently, however, some scholars have questioned this very assumption, arguing that the two exegetical approaches—the midrashic, on the one hand, and the allegorical, on the other—are founded upon entirely different hermeneutics. In the words of Daniel Boyarin, the most prominent exponent of this position, ‘‘reading on the highest level in midrash is intertextual reading, the connecting of texts to the ultimate Text’’—namely, Torah—while in allegoresis it is ‘‘the connecting of texts to abstract ideas.’’6 In this view, the two types of reading are quintessentially different, not even to be compared. For both groups of scholars, more has been at stake than merely the history of interpretation of the Song of Songs. In the first case, debates over the priority of Jewish and Christian exegesis—namely, which interpretation was the first, if not the original, and which one influenced the other—have clearly reflected more ancient rivalries about the originality and belatedness of the respective religious traditions out of which the interpretations emerged. In the second case, the essential difference if not opposition between the two modes of interpretation, Jewish midrash and Christian allegory, has become the fulcrum for distinguishing between the two religious traditions themselves, with hermeneutics becoming a virtual trope, as it were, for ontology—Christian allegory embodying one type of religious being, rabbinic midrash another.7 My aim in this essay is not to resolve the basic contradiction between these two conceptualizations, let alone the truth or utility of their respective methodological stances. Rather, I hope to use this occasion to explore some of the issues involved in trying to ‘‘do’’ comparative exegesis between separate exegetical and religious traditions. In exploring this larger project, I will use the term ‘‘allegory’’ in the broadest sense to include any type of interpretation that assumes the text under analysis to mean something other than what it says, but I will also allow for the possibility that there may be incompatible forms of allegory—for example , philosophical allegory on...

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