“Merely a Love Poem”?: Common Sense, Suspicion, and the Song of Songs

Abstract

Abstract In medieval Christendom, library catalogues typically begin with what their male compilers perceived to be the most significant, valuable and veracious of all books, the Bible. After copies of the Bible, or parts thereof, they list commentaries of the church fathers on biblical books, authoritative guides to apt interpretation. Little wonder that Western feminists have regarded the Bible with special suspicion, or that the biblical book that seems to twentieth-century readers the least overtly “religious” book of the canon, and therefore the least suspect, the Song of Songs, was chosen as the subject of the first volume in the series The Feminist Companion to the Bible. As the editor of the series, Athalya Brenner, says, this book “can be read from the outset as less biased ideologically ... than other texts of the Hebrew [and Christian] Bible,” since the subject matter of Shir ha Shirim, Song of Songs, is apparently “neither theological nor even religious” but rather “heterosexual love and its erotic manifestations” (Brenner 1993:28). Nor, apparently, does the heterosexual love voiced in these lyric poems composed some twenty-three centuries ago exclude the female perspective or privilege the male. According to Phyllis Trible, “there is no male dominance, no female subordination, and no stereotyping of either sex” (1978:145).“Ecce tu pulchra es, arnica mea, ecce tu pulchra, oculi tui columbarum” (Behold, you are beautiful, my beloved, behold you are beautiful, your eyes are the eyes of doves, says the male lover) (Song of Songs H14).2 The female lover—neither speaker is named or identified in the text— replies, reciprocating, “ecce tu pulcher es, dilecte mi, et decorus, lectulus noster floridus” (Behold, you are beautiful, my beloved, and lovely, our little bed is flowery) (1:15).