The Song of Sones
A generation ago there was a powerful school by which it was taught that the great difference between the Old Testament and the New is, that, whereas in the Old Testament God is a King and Judge, in the New He is our heavenly Father; and it was added that the great merit of Jesus as a teacher was to have carried the world away from the stern faith in God the Judge by revealing the twin truths of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. In England this was the drift of the preaching of the Broad Church; in Scotland the same ideas obtained wide circulation through the amiable and fascinating pages of George Macdonald; and even so wise and intelligent a foreign observer as Professor Dorner expressed at the time the opinion that this school was destined to carry all before it in Great Britain.
The movement of theological thought since that time, however, has not proved favourable to the fulfilment of the prophecy. Attention has been concentrated as never before on the teaching of Christ; and it has been seen that, instead of dropping the Old Testament idea of God as King, He gave to it so much prominence that the Kingdom of God is the very name in the Gospels for His teaching as a whole; and, as for the idea of God as Judge, one of the most arresting elements in the doctrine of Jesus is that He Himself is the Judge of men, who at the Last Day will sit on the throne of His glory and separate those gathered before Him, as a shepherd divideth the sheep from the goats.
In like manner attention has been directed by scholars to the Old Testament with a keenness of investigation never known before, the writings of the prophets especially attracting the eyes of students; and it has been seen that the highest conception of God there is not that of a King or Judge. On the contrary, Jehovah is constantly presented as standing to His people in a relation higher than even that of Father. He is the Lover and Husband, and Israel is His bride or wife. The entire history of Israel was embraced within this commanding idea. Jehovah was conceived as having rescued Israel, like an imprisoned maiden, from the bondage of Egypt, and borne her away into the desert, where, with Sinai for the altar and the covenant as the contract of marriage, He made her His own. She subsequently proved faithless to Him, and the Exile was represented as a divorce, by which He put her away. But His love was not extinguished. He took her back again “as a wife of youth “; and the prophets were continually exhorting the people to loyalty under the image of the faithfulness of a wife. Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel are all fond of this imagery, handling it with astonishing freedom and illustrating every phase of the relationship between God and His people by corresponding experiences in domestic life. The sixteenth chapter of Ezekiel, for example, is a prolonged allegory of unparalleled beauty and pathos, in which the profoundest religious ideas are set forth by means of their counterparts in the relations of a married pair.
But the Song of Solomon is the most expansive embodiment of this Old Testament idea. It makes use of the most pronounced and luscious language ot human passion. The lovers address each other in the style of unmeasured hyperbole which in the East appears to be the natural language of affection. Thus, the one lover says:
Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair.
Thine eyes are as doves behind thy veil;
Thy hair is as a flock of goats,
That lie along the side of Gilead.
Thy teeth are like a flock of ewes that are newly shorn,
Which are come up from the washing, whereof everyone hath
twins,
And none is bereaved among them.
Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet,
And thy mouth is comely.
Thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate.
Behind thy veil.*
And the other says:
My beloved is white and ruddy,
The chiefest among ten thousand.
His head is as the most fine gold,
His locks are bushy and black as a raven.
His eyes are like doves beside the waterbrooks,
Washed with milk and fitly set.
His cheeks are as a bed of spices, as banks of sweet herbs.
His lips are as lilies dropping liquid myrrh.
His mouth is most sweet; yea, he is altogether lovely.
This is my beloved, and this is my friend,
O daughters of Jerusalem.f
The scene lies partly in Jerusalem; and this affords the opportunity of describing the splendours of Solomon’s court, as, for example, in the following account of a royal journey:
Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness like pillars of smoke?
Perfumed with myrrh and frankincense,
With all the powders of the merchant?
Behold, it is the litter of Solomon;
Threescore mighty men are about it,
Of the mighty men of Israel.
They all handle the sword, and are expert in war;
Every man hath his sword upon his thigh,
Because of fear in the night.
King Solomon made himself a palanquin
Of the wood of Lebanon.
He made the pillars thereof of silver,
The bottom thereof of gold, the seat of it of purple,
The midst thereof being paved with love
From the daughters of Jerusalem.
* iv. 1-3. t v. 10-16.
Go forth, O ye daughters of Zion, and behold King Solomon With the crown wherewith his mother crowned him in the day of
his espousals And in the day of the gladness of his heart.*
And partly it lies in the country, where opportunity is found of describing the pleasantest aspects of nature and country -life, as in the following account of the coming of spring:
Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away;
For, lo, the winter is past;
The rain is over and gone;
The time of the singing of birds is come,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.
The figtree ripeneth her green figs,
And the vines are in blossom;
They give forth their fragrance. J
Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.f
The rustle and rush of awakening life, the answering voices of cooing mates, and the tumult of holiday sound through the whole work. The language flashes like the jewelled hilt of an Oriental sword, and at every movement new loveliness is disclosed, like the fluctuating colouring on a peacock’s neck. But that which gives to it life, movement and glow is love.
II
The book is of the nature of a parable or allegory. On the surface it appears only to be a story of human love, but there is a deeper meaning underneath.
* Hi. 10-16. “• I0I3-
In our Lord’s parables sometimes the human story is unbroken and consistent from first to last, while at other times the divine meaning peeps through. In the Song of Solomon so completely is the artistic reserve maintained that it has sometimes been doubted whether there is an inner meaning at all. This ought not to be called in question; but yet on the surface there is the human story, and it is necessary, first of all, to ascertain, if possible, what this is.
It is not easy to make it out. It is told, like the story of a drama, in a series of dialogues between different speakers; but there is no list of the dramatis persona at the beginning, nor are there marks in the text to show where one speaker leaves off and another commences.
As it used to be understood, King Solomon is the hero of the piece. In a progress through the northern part of his dominions with his court, he happens, in a rustic spot called Shulem, to glance through the latticed enclosure of a country-house, where he sees a maiden of exquisite beauty disporting herself, in the innocence of girlhood, under an apple-tree. Falling in love with her on the spot, he woos her to be his wife, and the ladies of the court tell her of his amiability and opulence. Her heart is won, and she is carried away to Jerusalem, where the royal nuptials are celebrated.
This is a simple story. But to many minds it is repulsive for the reason that Solomon was a man who, by the polygamy which he practised, sinned grievously against the sacredness of love and the sanctity of marriage. Of course the book might refer to an early period of his life, when he was still acting in the spirit of the wisdom given him in answer to his famous prayer at his coronation. But unfortunately the book itself mentions that at the time to which it refers there were in his court threescore queens and fourscore concubines.
Hence a different reading of the story has been proposed and is now widely accepted.* It is, that the heroine, at the time when Solomon first saw her, in the circumstances described, was already betrothed to a shepherd of the neighbourhood, simple and pure like herself. It is to him, and not to Solomon, that her speeches of love and constancy are addressed. Solomon tries to win her love, and his efforts are backed by the persuasions of the ladies of the court; but she indignantly rejects all his advances. She is carried off to Jerusalem, but is not dazzled by the splendours of a palace. Even there she finds opportunity of meeting with her shepherd-lover, who has followed her to the capital;
* “He is full of the Song of Solomon, reading it in Hebrew: and he said that most people knew nothing about it, that in the coarselypainted, misrepresented, ununderstandable story, given in the Bible translation, there is hardly a trace of what he calls ’ the most perfect Idyl of the faithful love of a country girl for her shepherd, and of her resistance to the advances of a great king, that ever was written.’” — Tennyson, A Memoir, vol. ii., p. 51.
and at last she escapes with him, or is released by the King, when he has been convinced that his suit is hopeless. In the closing chapter she is seen approaching her mother’s house, leaning on her beloved, while she sums up the whole incident in the words:
Many waters cannot quench love,
Neither can the floods drown it.
If a man would give all the substance of his house for love,
He would utterly be contemned.* So difficult is it, when the entire book is taken to be a dramatic whole, to distribute the utterances among the various speakers and to win from the details a consistent action that some scholars, giving up the attempt altogether, have regarded the book as a miscellaneous collection of separate pieces, with only the connection that they were intended for the prolonged celebration of an Eastern marriage. As they are all on the subject of love, the temptation would lie near to regard them as a handful of wildflowers from the field of profane Hebrew poesy transplanted into the garden of Holy Scripture. But it may be advantageous to begin with such a reading of the book, so as to familiarise the mind with the words and the ideas. Herder’s classification is as good as any; and he
* viii. 7.
assumes that there are the following separate poems — (i) i. 1-4; (2) i. 5-8; (3) i. 9-14; (4) i. 15-ii. 7; (5) ii. 8-14; (6) ii. 15; (7) ii. 16, 17; (8) iii. 1-4; (9) iii. 5; (10) iii. 6; (u) iii. 7-1 1; (12) iv. i-v. 1; (13) v. 2-vi. 3; (14) vi. 4-9; (15) vi. 10-viii. 4; (16) viii. 5-7; (17) viii. 8-12; (18) viii. 13, 14.
The spirit of the whole is, however, so unique, and there are so many echoes between one portion and another, that the impression of connection and unity forces itself on the student. We may, therefore, next give the division attempted by Delitzsch, a scholar whom this portion of Scripture attracted from the very beginning of his academic career and who was in many ways specially gifted for extracting the secret of such a composition. To him Solomon is the hero; the King and the Shulamite are the interlocutors; and the ladies of Solomon’s court are the chorus. (1) i. 2-4, the court-ladies; (2) i. 5-7, the Shulamite; (3) i. 8, the court-ladies; (4) i. 9-1 1, Solomon; (5) i. 12-14, the Shulamite; (6) i. 15, Solomon; (7) i. 16-ii. 1, the Shulamite; (8) ii. 2, Solomon; (9) ii. 3-7, Shulamite; (10) ii. 8-17, Shulamite; (11) iii. 1-5, Shulamite; (12) iii. 6, a citizen of Jerusalem; (13) iii. 7, 8, second citizen; (14) iii. 9, 10, third citizen; (15) iii. II, the crowd; (16) iv. 1-5, Solomon; (17) iv. 6, Shulamite; (18) iv. 7-15, Solomon; (19) iv. 16, Shulamite; (20) v. 1, Solomon; (21) v. 2-8, Shulamite; (22) v. 9, the court-ladies; (23) v. 10-16, Shulamite; (24) vi. 1, court-ladies; (25) vi. 2, 3, Shulamite; (26) vi. 4-9, Solomon; (27) vi. 10, court-ladies; (28) vi. 11, 12, Shulamite; (29) vi. 13, the court-ladies and Shulamite; (30) vii. 1-5, the court-ladies; (31) vii. 6-9, Solomon; (32) vii. gb-viii. 4, Shulamite; (33) viii. 5a, b, a villager of Shulem; (34) viii. 5c, d, e, Solomon; (35) viii. 6, 7, Shulamite; (36) viii. 8, Shulamite; (37) viii. 9, Shulamite’s brothers; (38) viii. 10-12, Shulamite; (39) viii. 13, Solomon; (40) viii. 14, Shulamite.
According to Ewald, Solomon is not the hero who succeeds in winning the affections of the heroine. This place belongs to a shepherd-lover, about whom the heroine is constantly thinking when she gives expression to her feelings. Solomon and his corrupt court represent, on the contrary, the attractions of idolatry and worldliness, which were always attempting to draw Israel away from allegiance to Jehovah. Ewald supposes the action of the poem to extend over five days; and the following is the division proposed by him — First day, i. 1-7, the Shulamite; 8, the court-ladies; 9-1 1, Solomon; 12-14, Shulamite 515, Solomon; 16-ii. 1, Shulamite; 2, Solomon; 3-7, Shulamite. Second day, ii, 8-iii. 5, Shulamite. Third day, iii. 6-1 1, citizens of Jerusalem in front of one of the gates; iv. 1-7, Solomon; iv. 8-v. 8, Shulamite. Fourth day, v. 9, court-ladies; 10-16, Shulamite; vi. 1, court-ladies; 2, 3,
Shulamite; 4-vii. 9, Solomon; vii. 10-viii. 4, Shulamite. Fifth day, viii. 5a, b, shepherds of Shulem; 5C-14, Shulamite.
IV
If the intention of the poet was to delineate pure wedded love, then, in so far as he was successful, he could not help depicting at the same time, whether he intended it or not, the love of Jehovah to Israel or of Christ to the Church; because, as is proved byscores of passages in both the Old Testament and the New, the pure love of man and woman, whereever it exists, is a type of the relationship between the Redeemer and the redeemed.
It is constantly taken for granted that the supreme doctrine of Christianity is the fatherhood of God; but there is a higher and more typical species of love than that of father and son; and this has its counterpart in religion likewise. The love of man and woman is, in not a few respects, extremely different from that of parent and child. A father’s love has no choice, it springs up of necessity as children are born, and it is the same to all his children; and a child has for its parent an affection of which it cannot remember the beginning. On the contrary, in the love of man and woman there is a choice — even, it may be said, a certain arbitrariness — for can anyone tell why love kindles at the sight of one face and not at that of another?
The answering love, likewise, may have a verydistinct and clearly remembered beginning. Now, in religion there are experiences corresponding to both of these types of human affection; and these have been laid hold of by opposite schools of religious thought; for this is our way: we take one half of the truth and make of it a watchword or party-badge, leaving the other half to be similarly appropriated by others. There are those who dwell exclusively on the love which God has for all His children, and which He cannot help having, any more than an earthly father can help loving his offspring; and they believe that all men have in them at least the rudiments of religion, because they have a religious faculty and religious wants. All are God’s children, they think, though they may not yet be aware of the fact, and what they require is to realise the sonship they alreadypossess. Others, on the contrary, dwell by preference on the special love which God has to His own. He chose Israel to be His peculiar people from among all the nations; and living Christians are conscious that God has separated them from the rest of the world, though they cannot tell why they have been taken and others left. These can often remember, too, very distinctly the point at which their own love to God was first kindled, and perhaps they would describe their previous state of mind as one of enmity against God.
193 N
In both these rival views there is truth; but the profounder truth belongs to the one which compares the relationship between God and the soul to that of the most august, intense and typical form of human love. It was through sympathy with this point of view that the book with which we are now dealing was admitted into the canon of Scripture. In the Middle Ages it was the favourite book of Scripture in the religious houses, and the most noted sermons of the greatest preacher of the period, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, are on the intercourse between Christ and the human spirit, who employ towards each other the language of the Canticles. Indeed, wherever the mystical conception of religion has flourished, it has found in this book its natural expression. The Evangelical Revival, which produced such rapturous expressions of love to Christ as are to be found in the Olney Hymns, did not feel the language of the Song of Songs too warm for its emotion; and people still alive can remember how aged preachers used to bring to the communion-table sermons and addresses founded on texts out of this book. Very suddenly, however, and completely has this passed away. It is difficult to say whether the change is due to a difference of taste or a decay of sentiment; and it is equally difficult to say whether it is temporary or permanent.
The other alternative is that the Song is a poem of unwedded love, or rather of love not yet wedded, the heroine being the Shulamite and the hero her shepherd- lover; and it is an interesting question whether, if identified as such, it would have been entitled to a place in the canon. There are those who would answer this question in the affirmative. Supposing the book was written as a protest against the irregularities of Solomon’s age and especially of that erring monarch himself, they maintain that the restoration and the maintenance of a lofty tone on this branch of human existence formed a motive not unworthy of divine inspiration.
Certainly religion is profoundly interested in the ideals of human love prevailing in any community. This is a subject which is supposed, by the rules of conventionality, to be excluded from the pulpit; it has been handed over to the novelists and the dramatists, who have adopted it as their stock in trade; but too much depends on it, not only for the happiness but likewise the goodness of human beings, to justify the occupants of the pulpit in leaving it to others, without the influence of religion and the guidance of the Bible. A human life is never more directly in the way of being either made or marred than in the hour when the heart is given into the custody of another. Next to the grace of God, there is no gift of Heaven more precious than a pure and successful affection. Where, on the contrary, the intercourse of the sexes is regulated by low and false conceptions of what love is, society is corrupted through and through, the homes of the people lose the inward cohesion on which peace and prosperity depend, and ultimately the State, which is a structure reared on the sunk arches of the home, verges to its fall. All these dangers must have threatened the Jewish community when King Solomon was setting to his subjects such an evil example; and a book like this may have been the very thing required to counteract the prevailing tendencies.
Pure human love, even apart from religion, may, in many respects, be called the greatest thing in the world; but it may also be called a prophecy and promise of the advent of religion. There are secrets in religion which nothing else can illustrate so well. Take, for instance, the purifying power of love. The entrance into the heart of a pure affection is the one thing which can put an end to the struggle with lust in which many aspiring souls are entangled, or rid the imagination of the images begotten there by unholy passion. It purifies and sweetens the whole atmosphere, till nothing base can live in it. This, however, is precisely the way in which pure religion operates. Its secret is what was called by Chalmers the expulsive power of a new affection. It is Christ in the heart that drives out selfishness and worldliness.
No less suggestive is another aspect of the same experience. It is notorious how love can make difficult things easy and impossible things possible. Services which, if demanded by others, would be menial and irksome become light as air when they are required by one whose image is filling the heart. But this is the very secret, too, of following Christ. To the loveless the cross of Christ is an intolerable bondage; but to the loving His yoke is easy and His burden light.
According to the logic of things, the love of God and Christ ought to be primary and supreme in human experience, all other forms of love being deduced from this one and put into their own places of subordination. In point of fact, however, the majority learn love the opposite way. The love of parents, the love of brothers and sisters, the love of friends, the love of sex may all be known before the love of God and the love of Christ. If so, these are harbingers of a greater and more perfect experience still to come; and whatever anyone has learned from these preceding affections of its rise in the heart and its history — of its sweet secrets, its delightful memories and its powerful influence — may be a reminder that for him the history of the heart is still incomplete, and that he can never know the best which life can afford until he loves the Lord his God with all his heart and with all his soul, with all his strength and with all his mind, and until he is able joyfully to answer the question of the Saviour, 11 Lovest thou Me?”