The Song of Songs

Codes of Love

Good

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781498269797
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In this mature work of scholarship, Edwin Good brings his capable talents to translating, interpreting, and commenting on the rich work of the Song of Songs. Known as one of the earliest biblical exegetes to have opened the door to sophisticated literary criticism, he brings this decades-long praxis to opening the great poem's depth. The volume is concluded by an Afterword by Anita Sullivan, the author's wife, who is a poet and translator. Her reflections on the Song's character and importance as poetry provide another dimension to the discussion.

1

Overture

Another Song of Songs Translation?

Well, yes. If I’m to discuss the book, I need to have a translation, as some readers will be unable to read it in Hebrew. If it is not an existing published one it must be one I have made myself. The only translation that I can decide to change if I need to and that is likely to agree with all (or most) of my views will be mine.

And why is it necessary to write about the Song of Songs? Are there not many fine studies, scholarly or not? Of course there are, but mine differs, being mine, from the others. No scholar can resist thinking that his or her account of a subject needs a book (or an article) to give readers the truth available in it. I have wanted for some time to think newly about the Song of Songs.

One of those thoughts has to do with a question of oral composition, transmission, and collection of the book. I suspect that, apart from the peculiarities of my translations and interpretations of the poems, including the analyses by which I have decided to separate poems from one another, the question of oral backgrounds is the point at which my discussion of it most differs from my predecessors. It may also be the most productive of disagreement—or, as one might more deeply wish, of discussion.

The modern scholarship of the Hebrew Bible, beginning from the later eighteenth century, has been focused almost entirely on written texts, how they were written, by whom, and for what intellectual purposes. During the 1950s and later, Scandinavian scholarship was interested in orality, no doubt because of the importance of oral epics and poetry in the Scandinavian traditions. My growing interest in the subject led to a too-brief visit on a sabbatical leave to Uppsala, Sweden, where I was able to meet some of the scholars at the university who were working on oral projects, including Ivan Engnell (1906–1964), the leading figure of the movement, to learn enough Swedish to be able to read some of their works available only in that language, and to begin acquaintance with the methods of study involved in the questions of orality. Apart from an article on the book of Hosea that I wrote in Uppsala, I have not returned to the subject seriously until now.

What I am able to do is limited. I cannot propose original states of the poems. We have only the final forms—except for some repetitions of parts of poems, such as references to gazelles and deer, usually together, and a repeated formula about a group under oath about its relation to love. There are no existing earlier versions, before the repeated revisions, retellings, and modifications that occurred in transmission and the collecting processes. One must assume that changes took place between the first and later oral versions, but they cannot be reconstructed. Second, there are two poetic narratives about a woman going out into Jerusalem in search of her lover, one more extensive than and rather different from the other. We are stuck with what happened to be the last forms recorded, and fortunately they are beautiful. These are the kinds of phenomena that students of orality look for to identify possible oral backgrounds.

Moreover, after having decided for myself about the places where one poem ended and another began, I began to notice words and similarities of sounds among words toward the ends of many poems that were repeated or imitated toward the beginnings of the next poems. They looked to me like linking words, perhaps aids to the memories of reciters or singers about which poem or song came next. Coming after I had concluded where poems ended and other poems began, this observation was not a method by which I separated poems from each other, but it seems now to be a way by which separate poems might originally have been placed together in the oral collecting process.

Some extremely fine studies of the Song, including the one by J. Cheryl Exum that I identify below as the best book available on the Song, have concluded that the book is a single poem, not a collection of several. Well, a high opinion of someone’s work does not require that one agree with all of it—a fact to be expected of my book as well.

Solomon and the Song of Songs

English traditionally titles the book either “Song of Songs” or “Song of Solomon.” That duplicity poses more than one further implication of the title: perhaps that Solomon was the author of the poems, or that they have importantly to do with him. The Hebrew title, Ch. 1:1, is discussed in more detail below at pp. 37–38, where the main portion of the book begins. A phrase in that title, lišelomoh, can be translated somewhat literally “to Solomon,” “by Solomon,” “owned by Solomon,” or “connected with Solomon.” He is mentioned several times in the book as a character or as an iconic figure, and we can assume that the name refers to the only Solomon in the Hebrew Bible, the second king of Israel, the son of David. His death in about 925 BCE sent the nation into a brief civil war, resulting in the permanent split of the twelve tribes into two nations, Israel in the north, Judah in the south. Solomon stands in Israel’s history for the most luxurious kingship, the most extensive harem, the construction of the most impressive buildings, including the Jerusalem Temple, and remarkable wisdom. There are some indications, including the revolt at his death, that he was perceived by his nation as sometimes excessive. A remarkable biography of Solomon, not only while he was alive but also throughout the tradition after his death, is Steven Weitzman’s, Solomon: The Lure of Wisdom (see Bibliography). I recommend it enthusiastically as a very inventive application of the idea of biography, extending to the subject’s continuing presence in the culture long after his death.

As for Solomon’s authorship, 1 Kgs 5:12 (English numbering 4:32) states that he composed three thousand proverbs and 1,005 songs (or poems). From that remark come the traditions that he was the author of the books of Proverbs and the Song of Songs. The tradition also names him the author of Qoheleth (English title, Ecclesiastes), reflecting the tradition of his wisdom. Besides these, a later book, the Wisdom of Solomon, is included in the Old Testament canons of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches,1 and among the Apocrypha (books understood as not quite canonical scripture) of some Protestant churches. Two other books of lesser reputation and dated early in the Common Era are the Psalms of Solomon and the Odes of Solomon, both written in Greek, the latter possibly a Christian book. Neither made it into any canonical biblical list. Only Proverbs, the Song of Songs, and Qoheleth are present in the Hebrew Bible. I must make clear that I do not believe that Solomon was actually the author of any of them. All contain instances of Hebrew vocabulary considerably later than 925 BCE, which points to continuing composition after Solomon had stopped writing or otherwise using words.

The Oral and the Song of Songs

Interested as I am in oral composition and transmission in the ancient Near East, I am fascinated by the way 1 Kgs 5:12 describes Solomon’s authorships. The Hebrew text says not that Solomon “wrote” or “composed” proverbs and songs, but that he “spoke” them. That tradition allows a conclusion that the proverbs and songs came not from his writing hand but from his mouth, and I am interested in the thought that Solomon might have been unable to read or write. I see indications in the Song of Songs of transmission and collection by oral means, and I will point them out as we come to them in my essays on the individual poems. It is more difficult to find indications that the poems themselves were composed and/or transmitted by the oral means of recitation or singing, but I will search for such possibilities. The search is complicated, even compromised, by the fact that no earlier versions of the book exist for our comparisons.

Since the discovery—I call it that, not supposition or assumption—in the last century that the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer were composed and performed orally a long time before they were written down, a great deal of work has been done on other ancient literatures and the question of orality. Most of that work has centered on epics, many of them poetic like the Homeric ones, and other works of narrative poetry. The only other work on orality with respect to the kind of lyric poetry represented by the Song of Songs is a chapter in Albert B. Lord’s posthumous book, The Singer Resumes the Tale. Chapter 2, “Oral Traditional Lyric Poetry,” (pp. 22–68), deals entirely with South Slavic lyric poems and is based almost entirely on observations of repetitions from one poem to another. Fortunately, he was able to work with oral poetry still in living memory and in multiple versions. I mentioned above signs of what I think is orality, especially in the relations among the separate poems in the Song, and in repetitions of phrases from one poem to another as well as some poems that may be revised and altered versions of other poems in the book. The processes by which this poetry was composed, transmitted, performed, revised, and collected together are concealed in the long centuries when all of that was happening. We now have only the outcome of those events.

I admit that I cannot prove oral origins or transmissions of these poems. Scholars are supposed to accomplish that goal in order to make scholarly claims. I think I see indications but not sufficient evidence to claim the truth of the matter. Thinking about it, I found some remarks by and about a modern Hungarian poet that are worth including. Sándor Kányádi (b. 1929), remarks in a book, In Contemporary Tense (2013)2 that, giving a reading of poems in a Romanian village, he asked a question of a little schoolboy: “What do you think a poem is?” The boy answered, “A poem is something that you have to tell.” Kányádi remarked that he had been “brushed by a breeze coming from the beginning of time.” A poem must be told. Homer knew that, the Romanian schoolboy knew it.

It is a complex statement. “Something that you have to tell” can mean several things. You have to tell it in contrast to reading or writing it. And who has to tell it? The poet? Anyone who hears it? Anyone who reads it, memorizes it? The reviewer of the book suggests that all those things are different from telling. She also insists that telling must be oral, and that the boy may have thought that “had to tell” referred both to the poet and to whoever came into contact with the poem. You and I must tell the poems we hear and read. But sometimes it is necessary to tell them by the somewhat inferior means of writing. I wish I could hear a poet speak—tell—these poems in Song of Songs in the language in which they came to be, so that I could get a sense of the sounds they intended to lay upon the world. I am a musician, for whom the most important thing that happens in the world is sound. Unfortunately, classical Hebrew is a dead language, at least in terms of the actual sounds it made. We know the sounds Hebrew makes now, but no language maintains its sounds intact for two thousand and more years. Meanwhile, we can only guess at how these poems might have sounded in the telling—or the singing. What were the rhythms of song or speech? And what the melodies of speech (which we think of as inflection—one does not speak in a monotone) and song?

You are perfectly at liberty to believe the numbers of Solomon’s proverbs and songs given in 1 Kings and the decrees of tradition as to authorships. Like most modern scholars, I do not believe any of it, any more than I believe that King David wrote the Psalms that are credited to him in the Bible. That does not mean that those who made these authorial ascriptions were telling lies, which are falsehoods that their tellers know...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• 1: Overture
• 2: The Song of Songs
• 3: Assisting with the Translation: A Contemporary Poet Takes a Look at an Old Poem
• Bibliography