Re: Song of Solomon

[Peter Byrne Manchester <PMANCHESTER@ccmail.sunysb.edu>]

In a post to gaffa/love-hounds
>From: martin@kawa.ssl.fujitsu.co.jp (S.C.T. Martin)
>Newsgroups: rec.music.gaffa
>Subject: The Song of Solomon
>Date: 13 Aug 93 01:39:08 GMT
S.C.T. Martin writes,

>For your edification and delight!
>
>What follows is an introduction to the the Song of Solomon by 
>Jon Noring (permission given) and the book itself (no prior
>permission given). 

       The Kate Bush connection here, of course, is our knowledge that one of 
the songs on "The Red Shoes" is entitled "Song of Solomon."  It remains to be 
seen how directly or indirectly the song itself will refer to the text or 
themes of this Biblical writing, but since lots of us are busy checking out 
the old movie "The Red Shoes" and reviewing the folk tale behind it, it can't 
hurt to bone up on the actual Song of Solomon as well.

       Trouble is, Martin's post--Jon Noring's comments and the book itself 
included--is 35Kbytes, larger than the whole love-hounds digest itself most 
of the time, and large enough the choke the newsreaders of many gaffans.  
Casting no aspersions on S.C.T. Martin's enthusiasm to share his interest in 
this text with us, it is probably worth pointing out that posting to the 
newsgroup directly is *not* the most appropriate way to share large texts 
like this.  Alternatives include uploading to a public ftp site, or 
describing the material and offering to distribute by direct private e-mail.

       That being said, there are a couple of observations made by Jon Noring 
in the introductory material Martin provided that are not supported by 
current scholarship and need brief correction:

>          I'm sure that most will agree that the Song is a highly
>romantic and erotic poem, and certainly sheds some light on the roles
>of romantic love and sexuality during the time of King Solomon in
>ancient Israel.

       The text we know, full title "The Song of Songs (which is Solomon's)," 
or (from the Latin tradition) "Canticle of Canticles," is clearly not a 
single composition originally.  The material *is* romantic/erotic love poetry 
of a kind familiar in the ancient Near East, especially Canaan, but whether 
any of it is pre-Exilic (older than 596BCE) is hard to discern, and it is 
very doubtful whether any of it dates to the time of Solomon.  While the text 
we know has been edited in the direction of a coherent whole, dramatic 
incoherencies of many kinds remain and make clear it is a compilation, almost 
certainly post-Exilic.

>I believe the Song of Solomon was written *primarily* with the
>spiritual intent of letting people know of the beauty and grandeur of
>one of God's greatest gifts to mankind - sexuality.  In fact, I would
>say that God's primary purpose for inspiring Solomon (the probable
>author) to write the Song of Solomon is for this book to serve as an
>ever-present buffer against those misinformed Jewish and Christian
>teachers who would arise throughout history and teach, using a
>distortion of Scripture, that sexuality is somehow dirty or a
>necessary evil for only procreation purposes. 

It is quite certain that Solomon is not the author or the compiler of the 
text we have.  To the contrary, the ascription to Solomon was part of the 
still-inscrutible process by which the text was made palatable as part of the 
inspired 'writings' regarded as worthy of consideration alongside the Law 
(Torah) and the Prophets in the Judaism of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. 
Noring is quite correct in pointing out:
>It is curious to note that there is a complete lack of any type of
>religious content or teaching in the Song.
One surmise that has been popular among scholars is that the material was 
drawn from or is related to early Israelite marriage rituals, but this has 
not been established.  What *is* known is that ancient Jewish attitudes 
toward sexuality and procreation were very positive, not at all overshadowed 
by the uniquely Christian (Pauline and Augustinian and often coverly Gnostic) 
association of sexuality with 'original sin'.  But that still does not 
explain how this text arrived into the first century of the Common Era as a 
candidate for *inspired Scripture*.  Noring's comments on that history are 
rather indirect and one-sidedly Christian:

>                               I would furthermore assert that
>theologians who profess the view that God's ultimate purpose for the
>Song of Solomon is to illustrate Christ's love for the Church are
>teaching false and, in my opinion, dangerous doctrine, since this can
>open the door to the abuses that history shows have occurred.  The
>exegesis I've seen from these theologians leaves much to be desired -
>about the only arguments that they can make is that for some reason
>this book has always been accepted as canon by both Jews and
>Christians alike (combined with the Christian view that all Scripture
>points to Christ), and that in some places of the New Testament the
>relationship of Christ and the Church is talked of as a 'marriage'.
>These reasons are too flimsy, in my opinion, to make the quantum leap
>to the assertion that the primary purpose of the Song is to illustrate
>Christ's love for the Church, beautiful as that comparison is.

The Christian reference is to Ephesians 5:21ff, where Paul argues that the 
relationship of husband to wife is a figure for the 'mystery' of the 
relationship of Christ to the Church; there is no direct allusion to the Song 
of Songs involved.

       It is true that in every period we know about in which the Song of 
Songs was considered sacred, it was given *allegorical* interpretation.  That 
is to say, it was assumed that it was not about what it appears to be about 
(and, at early stages of its compositional and redactional history *was* 
about), but is rather a complex metaphor or symbol for the relationship 
between the divine and the human.  In Jewish tradition, the man and the woman 
were allegorized as the Lord and Israel (or, in later Cabalistic terms, the 
Lord and his 'shekinah', the infused glory of his People).  Some very early 
Christian commentary was modelled on this strategy, with the parallel taken 
to be Christ and the Church.  But by far the more prominent strategy in early 
Christian writing was to allegorize the man and the woman as God and *the 
soul*, that is to say, to give the text meaning in regard to individual and 
interior mystical experience.
 
       While this strategy may strike the contemporary reader as obtuse and 
frustrating, since it suspends the plain sense of the poetry, it is not drawn 
from the anti-sexual pathology of Western Christianity, but is an elemental 
aspect of mystical writing, familiar in the Spanish mystics like John of the 
Cross and Teresa of Avilla, and brought to the highest degree of refinement 
in the Sufi mystical poetry of the Islamic tradition (notably Rumi).

       It should indeed be very interesting to see what Kate Bush wants us to 
consider in a song entitled "Song of Solomon."  And we should certainly not 
underestimate the complexity of the reference if in fact her allusion to the 
Biblical text is a considered one.

............................................................................
                                                            Peter Manchester
"C'mon, we all sing!"                          pmanchester@ccmail.sunysb.edu
                                                     72020.366@compuserv.com