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22 July 2022
The Song of Songs, sometimes known as the Song of Solomon, is a collection of Hebrew love poetry. It is the only such collection in the Hebrew Bible, and poses an immediate challenge. It is basically lacking in theological or moral concerns -- it is about the feelings two young people have for each other. The typical response, both in Judaism and Christianity, has been to insert religious content into it by treating is as an allegory for God's relationship to his people: God and Israel for Jews, Christ and the Church, for Christians.
Beyond the reference to Solomon in the first verse, which scholars don't take seriously as an indicator of authorship, there's nothing explicit to go on about when the book was written.
Unfortunately, in today's Bibles the book tends to look like a play, in which various actors give little poetic soliloquys. Take, for example, this. That's from an online edition of the New King James Version. First, there's the title: "Solomon's Love for a Shulamite Girl." That title's not in the Hebrew, and there's quite a bit of the book where the male singular speaker doesn't seem to be Solomon.
Likewise, the bolded "Beloved", "Shulammite", "Daughters of Jerusalem" are not there in the Hebrew. They're added to guide the reader along. The reader could easily think they're reading the actual book, but they're reading the book plus a layer of commentary. The reader is effectively seeing things that aren't there.
From the poems itself, it is not clear that the whole thing is a single unified composition, conceived as a dialogue. Perhaps it is a collection of several love-poems that have no single thing in common other than genre. So if off in chapter 6 a male voice describes his love for a "Shulammite", we can't automatically assume that the female singular voices throughout the poem are all a single character called "the Shulammite". Of if the first verse describes the work as lishlomo (by Solomon? about Solomon? for Solomon?), that doesn't necessarily mean that the male speaker is in every instance supposed to be Solomon. Even on the unlikely supposition that Solomon himself wrote the book, does this mean that the poem is about his personal love for an individual woman? When Justin Bieber writes a song in which he sings about a girl, is the song always written from the perspective of Real Bieber or does he occasionally take the artistic liberty of singing from another perspective? I don't know. I can't remember enough Bieber lyrics.
The other book of the Bible which is about a man and a woman getting together is Ruth. Ruth is very different: any romance in it is subtle and subdued, while issues of reproduction and economics dominate, at the very least, on the explicit level. In the Song of Songs, on the other hand, we do not find the poems preoccupied with the future household the two lovers will set up, or with child-bearing, or the like.
A while back I read a book by Michael Fox on the Song: The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs. I thought it was quite good, though I'm no expert. Probably a lot of what I learned in the book has now colored the background of my thinking on the book, and I wouldn't be surprised if here and there I inadvertently parrot Fox's view on some things without citing him. Whenever I remember that I'm getting something from Fox, I'll make it known.
Delitzsch, Franz (1891). Translation from the German by M. G. Easton. Commentary on the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes.
Harper, Andrew (1902). The Song of Solomon, with Introduction and Notes.
As with other pages migrated from biblicalambiguities.net, this page may contain material paraphrased or even outright copied without direct attribution from the KJV, RV, ASV, JPS (1917), WEB, NHEB, Kittel's BH, the pre-1923 volumes of the ICC series, or the commentaries on Genesis of Dillmann, Skinner, and Driver. More details on this policy can be found here: biblicalambiguities-general-disclaimer and biblicalambiguities-translation-disclaimer.