Five Festal Garments

Christian Reflections on the Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Esther

Barry G. Webb, D. A. Carson, D. A. Carson

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9780830872169
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

These five Old Testament books, traditionally known simply as "the Scrolls, " are among the most neglected parts of the Christian Bible. In Judaism, the Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Esther were eventually adopted as lectionary readings for five of the major festivals. In Christian tradition, however, no consensus has emerged about their proper use. Each book presents particular difficulties with regard to how it relates to the rest of Scripture and how it should be understood as the Word of God for us today.In this New Studies in Biblical Theology volume, Barry Webb offers a Christian interpretation of these problematic writings. He allows each book to set its own agenda, and then examines each in relation to the wider Old Testament and to the New Testament gospel with its basic structure of promise and fulfillment. In this way, Webb presents fresh and illuminating perspectives on these five "festal garments" of love, kindness, suffering, vexation and deliverance.Addressing key issues in biblical theology, the works comprising New Studies in Biblical Theology are creative attempts to help Christians better understand their Bibles. The NSBT series is edited by D. A. Carson, aiming to simultaneously instruct and to edify, to interact with current scholarship and to point the way ahead.

Chapter One

The Song of Songs

Garment of love

In my youth they used to make me read the Bible.

Trouble was, the only books I took to naturally were

the ones they weren’t over and above keen on. But I

got to know the Song of Songs pretty well

by heart.

Lord Peter Wimsey1

Two problems confront any reader of the Song of Songs. The first is the problem of meaning. Who is speaking to whom, and what do they mean when they say what they say? The second has to do with the place of the book in the canon of Scripture. How are we to read it as part of the Bible? How does it relate to the message of the Bible as a whole? Of course, these problems are not unique to the Song of Songs. We have to grapple with them when we read any biblical book. But they present themselves in an especially acute form when we come to this particular book.

I

The Song as love poetry

The starting-point must be to recognize that what lies before us on the page is love poetry. It is rich in imagery, much of it very sensuous. Take, for example, the opening lines of the poem (1:2):

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth –

for your love is better than wine. . .2

‘Let him kiss me’ is sensuous in itself, but here that particular quality of the language is intensified by the additional words, ‘with the kisses of his mouth’. And this is just the beginning. In what follows there is going to be a lot of description of the various parts of the male and female body and of the delights of seeing, touching, tasting, hearing and smelling. As for imagery, love-making is compared here to the drinking of wine, with its strong connotations of intoxication and physical pleasure, and again it is but a beginning; more extravagant imagery will follow as the Song unfolds. The Song, as the name suggests, has a strong lyrical quality. The lines are short and rhythmical, and deal more with feelings than with rationally presented objective truth, and this requires a special kind of sensitivity from us. When the woman says that the love of her man is ‘better than wine’, it would of course be absurd for us to want to know whether it really is better than wine in any way that could be empirically or rationally established. It is simply not that kind of statement. The words are a true expression of how this woman feels about his love, and that is all that matters. We will need to maintain this kind of sensitivity, even when the need for it may be less obvious. The Song is love poetry from beginning to end.

Its subject is love, but it is neither a philosophical treatise about love, nor a sex manual. It is a rhapsody of love, an outpouring of the feelings of people who are in love and are experiencing it in the flesh, with all its attendant pains and pleasures. There is an intimacy about the book which is both delightful and embarrassing. The lovers are not aware of our presence. What they say, they say to each other and not to us. What they do, they do to each other and not to us. In a sense, the book is not addressed to us at all – and yet it is, for by simply being there for us to read it opens a window for us into that intimate world and allows us to experience in some measure what the lovers themselves are experiencing. This is a book for those who want to know, or perhaps remember, what it is like to be in love and to make love.

But how are we to understand the voices that we hear in the Song? Are they the voices of a particular pair of lovers whose relationship may be traced throughout the book? Is there just one pair of lovers, or several? Or is the whole quest to identify particular lovers misguided? Should we rather take the voices simply as that – voices, male and female respectively, speaking out typical expressions of love, as in modern love lyrics?3

At least one lover, Solomon, is named in the Song, and there is a description of his wedding in 3:6–11.4. We may perhaps be forgiven for wondering which one, since Solomon seems not to have known where to draw the line when it came to weddings! But no such considerations seem to trouble the writer. Only one wedding is mentioned, and it is a splendid and happy occasion. Two other lovers appear to be more or less clearly identified, although they are not named. The first is a rather naïve country girl, called the ‘Shulammite’ in 6:13. This is probably a place name (maid of Shulam), but the location is so far unknown. The second is a male shepherd lover who is so idealized that he scarcely seems to touch the ground: ‘he pastures his flocks among the lilies’ (6:3, my translation). And beside these two there is a host of minor figures: mother, brothers, watchmen, women of Jerusalem and others.

So there appears to be a considerable cast of characters, and this has led most commentators to assume that the Song is a drama of some kind. But the variations on this basic approach have been many. It has been seen as involving two main characters: Solomon and the Shulammite; or three: Solomon and the two country lovers (Solomon is an intruder). Some have seen it as a cultic drama, the expurgated liturgy of a fertility cult. And among those who have seen it as a drama there has been disagreement about whether it should be interpreted allegorically or literally (see Falk 1982: 62–63). The basic problem with reading the book as a drama is that the plot is very difficult to follow, and this stems mainly from uncertainty about Solomon’s role. In spite of attempts to do so, he cannot simply be equated with the shepherd figure, since in the Song there is an explicit distancing of Solomon’s world from the world of the lovers (8:11). But neither can he easily be regarded as an intruder in their world, for this would cast him in the role of a villain, and he can hardly be that in a book which is either by him or for him (1:1),5, and in which he is, if anything, idealized rather than vilified (1:5; 3:11).

An anthology of love lyrics?

The apparently insoluble nature of these problems has been a major factor in the current trend, which has become almost universal in recent interpretations of the Song, to read it as a collection of love lyrics rather than as a single poem. Its unity is sought through a study of recurring themes, settings and motifs rather than through plot and character. The country girl, the shepherd and the king (see 1:4, 12; 7:5) are all taken to be conventional figures rather than characters in the normal sense.6 Solomon himself is seen not as a participant in the love-making of the poem, but as an ideal figure whose name is invoked from time to time because of the rich connotations it has. He is a patron and symbol rather than a suitor. Sometimes unity of a different kind is found in the presence of chiasms and other formal structures. But essentially what unifies the poems, on this view, is that they are all exemplars of the same kind of love poetry. Any semblance of plot or of a developing relationship between particular lovers is illusory and should be disregarded.

Marcia Falk’s Love Lyrics from the Bible (1982) is a sensitive study of the book in this mode. Her division of the work into thirty-one poems is based on literary and structural analysis, with particular attention to changes of setting, subject matter, speaker, audience, mood and so on. She admits that this is highly subjective and that others differ from her in the number of poems they recognize; but she maintains that this does not greatly matter. What her analysis focuses on ultimately are themes which transcend the individual poems. She finds three voices in the poems: singular male, singular female and the voice of a group of onlookers. That is all they are, however – voices. The poems are not about particular lovers, but about love itself.

She identifies four ‘contexts’ or settings which recur throughout the collection. There are two basic settings, country and city, and each of these has two further sub-categories. For convenience, we may be display them as follows (the diagram is my own, not Falk’s):

A different mood is created by each setting. The cultivated countryside consists of pastures where shepherds graze their flocks, and of woodlands, gardens, vineyards and gentle valleys full of flowers. These are symbols of paradise, and in this setting love is innocent and ideal, like that of Adam and Eve before the fall (1:15–17). An entirely different mood is created by reference to scorching sun, storm, lightning and flood (8:6–7). Here love is linked with the powerful, elemental forces of nature. Love is not all sweetness; it can also be a torrential force, destroying all in its path. Within the city, indoor settings – the king’s chambers, the speaker’s bedroom, the mother’s house – are supportive environments for love. Here love can take its course away from prying eyes (3:1–4). In contrast, the city streets constitute a hostile environment where disdain, disapproval and even physical violence are encountered (5:7–9). Against these backgrounds, love is presented in its many aspects: love innocent and ideal, love torrential and powerful, love privately enjoyed, love threatened – the many faces of love.

In addition, five recurring themes are identified. The first is what Falk calls ‘the beckoning of the beloved’. The invitation to love takes many forms: elaborate praise of the beloved (4:1–7), entreaty (‘Arise, my love. . . and come away’, 2:10, my translation), or description of the lush countryside (the implicit argument is, ‘All nature is mating, why not we?’, cf. 2:11–13).7. In tension with this is the second theme, ‘the banishment of the beloved’. Courtship is interrupted because of the disapproval of family members, and the voluntary but painful separation of the lovers (she tells him to leave). This produces moments of great pathos (2:17; 4:6; 8:14). The third theme, ‘the search for the beloved’, deals with the sense of loss that is experienced whenever the beloved is not near (3:1–5; 5:2 – 6:3). The fourth theme, ‘the self in a hostile world’, is about the sense of self-worth that comes from loving and being loved (1:5), and the final theme, ‘the praise of love itself’, simply makes explicit what is implied in the other four (8:6–7). Collectively, these themes indicate that

. . . the emotional fabric of the Song is not wholly joyful, but sometimes interwo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titles in this series
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Series preface
• Author's preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The Song of Songs: Garment of love
• 2. Ruth: Garment of kindness
• 3. Lamentations: Garment of suffering
• 4. Ecclesiastes: Garment of vexation
• 5. Esther: Garment of deliverance
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index of modern authors
• Index of Scripture references
• Index of ancient sources
• Notes
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright