The Song of Songs: Between Literal and Alle­gorical Loves

The bulk of this ancient love poem revolves around a dialogue be­tween two young lovers: the Shulamite, as the beloved is called, and her nameless lover.³ There is something utterly refreshing in the frank celebration of love that is found in the passionate exchanges of the two. Nowhere else in the Bible are bodily parts—mouth, lips, tongue, hair, nose, eyes, breasts, thighs—set on a pedestal; nowhere else are the sensual plea­sures of love relished with such joy; nowhere else is sexual desire spelled out with utmost verve. And yet sexuality is never blatant in the Song. Instead we find a nuanced combination of audacity, innocence, and decorum, made possible by a spec­tacular metaphoric web which allows the two lovers to be direct and indirect at once.

Rabbi Akiva’s affirmation of the Song’s sanctity played a pivotal role in shaping the allegorical reading of the ancient love poem. For many centu­ries the predominant tendency in Jewish exegesis was to regard the Song as an allegorical poem whose primary objective was to celebrate divine love. The rabbi­nic commentary on Song 7:4 is exemplary:

“Your two breasts are like two fawns” This refers to Moses and Aaron. Just as a woman’s breasts are her glory and her ornament, so Moses and Aaron are the glory and the ornament of Israel. Just as a woman’s breasts are her charm, so Moses and Aaron are the charm of Israel (Song of Songs Rabba 4:5).⁵

To modern readers, any attempt to regard the Song as pertinent to sacred history or divine love seems astonishingly detached from its literal sense. But from the point of view of the rabbis of late antiquity, the possibility of interpreting the Song as anything but divine would have been unthinkable: why else was the Song included in Scripture if not to serve as a key to the mysteries of the human-divine bond?

A dramatic shift—one of the most dramatic exegetical shifts of all times—took place in the context of European Enlightenment with the rise of a new reading of the Song as an exquisite earthly dialogue be­tween human lovers.⁶ There were various advocates of the literalist Song in eighteenth-century Germany, but Johann Gottfried Herder was undoubtedly the most fervent and famous of them. In his Lieder der Liebe (1778)—a German translation of the Song and a verse-by-verse commentary—he attacks tra­ditional allegorical readings of the ancient love poem.⁷ After centu­ries of distorted readings, he writes, the time has come to admit the obvious:

What then is the content? What does it treat from beginning to end? ... Love, love. It is simply ... what it is and with every word suggests: a love song.⁸ 

The literal character of the poem, its original meaning, was obfuscated by Jewish and Christian exegesis and concealed by mystical allegories of divine love. “I read the book and can find in it not the tiniest sign, not the smallest hint that any other meaning is ... the purpose of the book.”⁹ Herder’s literalist approach is inextricably connected to an endorsement of the ancient love song as an aesthetic touchstone. He regards the Song as a superb product of the Bible’s unparalleled oriental imagination, a text whose subtle meanings are best understood in light of the culture and customs of the Orient. The first shock waves of the literalist readings of the Song made their way to the intel­lectual circles of Jewish Enlightenment in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centu­ries. The scholar and poet Shlomo Löwisohn (1789–1821) provided the most substantive introduction to the literalist-aesthetic reading of the Song within the framework of the Jewish Enlightenment. His most renowned book The Rhetoric of Israel (1816), written in flowery biblical Hebrew, includes extensive adaptations of Herder’s commentaries on the Song. Löwisohn construes the Song as a passionate, triangular drama invol­ving the Shulamite, the king, and the shepherd. King Solomon, who forces the Shulamite to reside in his harem, wooing her fervently, does not succeed in preventing the chaste maiden from running off to meet her rustic lover in the fields. Spurning every royal allurement, she ignores Solomon’s call for her to return to the harem—“Turn back, turn back, O Shulamite!” (Song 7:1)—and remains faithful to her humble shepherd.¹⁰

No interpreter of the Song can remain indifferent to its wonders. The opening scene in the long story of the Song’s reception—its puzzling inclusion in the canon—is a prelude to much that lies ahead. Rabbi Akiva does not merely insist, dryly, that the Song needs to be canonized but rather endorses it with much fervor. Modern readers are no less passionate. Even those readers who have no interest whatsoever in searching for sanctity in the Song regard the poem’s exquisitely profound exploration of human love and bold celebration of the human body as absolutely vital to their lives. For all readers of the Song—whether modern or premodern—the ancient love poem offers much more than a springboard to reflect on love and sexuality. It entails an urgent invitation to sense the unformulated reaches of amorous pursuits.