Shir Hashirim Research Articles

Spanish and Ladino Versions of The Song of Songs

The biblical Song of Songs has undergone numerous translations into Spanish and Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) since the Middle Ages. While some translations exclusively feature the original biblical text, others also incorporate translations of the Aramaic interpretations found in Midrash Shir Hashirim. A comparison of these translations highlights a distinction in orthography between medieval and post-medieval renditions. The former are exclusively rendered in Latin letters, whereas the latter are presented in either Hebrew or Latin script. Medieval, and pre-17th century Ladino translations, encompass solely the biblical renderings, whereas post-medieval translations, dating from the 17th century onwards, encompass the translations of both the biblical text and the Aramaic interpretations. This paper specifically examines and contrasts the first three verses of the initial chapter, analyzing translations from three medieval sources and six post-medieval sources. The observed variations in these translations can be attributed to factors such as orthographic conventions, chronological influences, and the geographical locations of publication. Through these comparative analyses, it becomes evident that Ladino translations of biblical texts tend to adhere more closely to the original Hebrew source and maintain a stricter fidelity to established norms when compared to translations of the Aramaic texts.

An Ancient Sung-Poem and Vehicle for Kabbalah: The Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible

The biblical poem entitled Shir Ha-Shirim (The Song of Songs) composed by Shlomo, the third King of the united tribes of Israel about 1,000 years before the Common Era was composed in Hebrew. However, it was also translated and sung by numerous bards in ancient Arabic dialects, as well as being translated to Kurmanji Kurdish. The King composed this poem to substantiate the primeval identity of his kingdom and its connection to the expanses leading up to Jerusalem and the mountain range surrounding Jerusalem. The poem’s underlying meaning leans on the King’s knowledge of the ancient science of Kabbalah. The eight chapters included in the Hebrew Bible as debated in the first century CE, and recorded by the mishnaic Sages of Tiberias in the second century CE, now constitute what we have on record of the Song of Songs. The external shell of the poem, the first chapter of which mentions apple-wine and love, and tribal ethics, symbolizes and reminds of the first moment of love’s intoxication and knowledge. The King is mentioned in the Qur’an as the prophet Suleimān and is known in English as King Solomon. This study ends with an original translation of the Song of Songs with Notes.

“My Children, Read This Passage Every Year”: Composition and Meaning in Pesikta de-Rav Kahana by Arnon Atzmon

Reviewed by: “My Children, Read This Passage Every Year”: Composition and Meaning in Pesikta de-Rav Kahana by Arnon Atzmon Amit Gvaryahu Arnon Atzmon. “My Children, Read This Passage Every Year”: Composition and Meaning in Pesikta de-Rav Kahana. Jerusalem: Magnes, 2021. 451 + pp. [in Hebrew] Arnon Atzmon’s book, billed as a study of “composition and meaning” is so much more than that. It is a new and important introduction to the curious work Pesikta de-Rav Kahana (PdRK), offering new answers to basic questions of provenance and dating regarding this work. Although PdRK was not printed during the Italian Renaissance, it became known to scholars when Leopold Zunz published his Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden (Leipzig, 1832). Zunz reconstructed its structure and posited its order, and also noted that its medieval readers knew it alternatively both by the name Pesikta and the longer Pesikta de-Rav Kahana. Zunz’s work paid off: in 1868 Solomon Buber had already found manuscripts of this work and published an edition of the full work (Lyck, 1868). A hundred years and two world wars [End Page 180] later, the European communities that produced this scholarship were no more. In New York, Bernard Mandelbaum published a new edition of PdRK (New York: JTS, 1969). Like Vayikra Rabbah, and unlike Bereshit Rabbah, PdRK is a homiletic midrash—that is, it expands and expounds selected verses of a lection read in a synagogue. It is conventionally grouped with those two works as a “classical midrash” as opposed to “late midrash,” like Tanḥuma or Pesikta Rabbati. Each of its sections, called pesikta in the manuscripts and in scholarship, begins its first few subunits with an exposition of the first verse of the lection. The final subunits of the pesikta often end with a homily on the last verse of the lection, with homiletic expansions on some of the middle verses in between. The lection is from the Torah in some pesikata (the plural form), from the Prophets or the haftarah in others. PdRK only contains homiletic material for special days: holidays and Sabbaths where the regular order of reading a lection from the Torah and a corresponding haftarah was stopped for a calendar event, like the weeks between 17 Tammuz and Sukkot, or the weeks between 1 Adar and Passover. It presents a lectionary similar in many ways to the one practiced in modern synagogues. However, this was not the lectionary that the earliest rabbis knew. The Mishnah (M. Megillah 3:4–6) prescribed completely different readings for many of the holidays. Some are mentioned as an alternative tradition found in the parallel Tosefta (T. Megillah 3:5–9), while others are not known in tannaitic literature at all. At some point, the lections in the Mishnah—all from the laconic list of holidays in Leviticus 24—were abandoned and the new lections adopted. These new readings are significantly more narrative oriented: the Exodus story is read on Passover; the story of the giving of the Law at Sinai on Shavuot; and the story of Sarah’s pregnancy (Gen 21) on the New Year. These readings are also reflected in the synagogue poetry of Eleazar ha-Kallir. Atzmon offers the novel theory that Pesikta and its lectionary grew in tandem, with homilists scrambling to assemble sermon material from across the rabbinic tradition for these new lections. He does this through detailed studies of “composition and meaning” concentrated in part B of the book—its central and longest part. The detailed readings of part B cover almost all of PdRK and carefully support the claim that there was a conscious redactor shaping the message of each pesikta by using older materials, many of which are known from elsewhere in the rabbinic canon (including, Atzmon claims in part A, chap. 6, Shir ha-Shirim Rabbah). For some lections—like those with parallels in Vayikra Rabbah—this was an easy process. But for others, the task was harder. Some pesikata are not smoothly read; their seams show and so does the redactor’s effort. Atzmon shows that the most infelicitous pesikata are the ones for lections not mentioned in the Mishnah. The fact that the sources of...

Active/Passive, ‘Diminished’/‘Beautiful’, ‘Light’ from Above and Below: Rereading Shekhinah’s Sexual Desire in Zohar al Shir ha-Shirim (Song of Songs)

In Zohar al Shir ha-Shirim, the Zohar’s reading of Song of Songs, Shekhinah, echoing themes associated with the Shulamite of the biblical text, consistently initiates cosmic union. Sexual desire in the zoharic texts is a form of capital necessary to facilitate sefirotic intercourse, although scholarly readings of the zoharic corpus often identify Shekhinah as a passive receptacle. This, however, is only true if the endemic contradictions within the texts are glossed over. In Song of Songs, the Shulamite’s sexual ‘initiative’ is core. This was not lost on the author(s) of Zohar al Shir ha-Shirim, who, in struggling to explain Shekhinah’s sefirotic role in line with the erotics of Song of Songs, inescapably echoed the ‘depatriarchalizing’ themes of the biblical text. As this article demonstrates, in Zohar al Shir ha-Shirim, Shekhinah is active and repeatedly encourages and frustrates cosmic sexual intercourse. Zohar al Shir ha-Shirim shows that it is possible to reread Shekhinah’s role beyond the androcentrism of the authors as well as scholarly assumptions about her passivity.

Postvernacular Prufrock

Abstract This article offers an explorative reading of a parodic Yiddish rendition of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” entitled “Der shir hashirim fun Mendl Pumshtok” that was composed by Isaac Rosenfeld and Saul Bellow during their student years in Chicago. The article argues that, by measuring themselves against the main representative of high modernism and by giving a markedly ethnic inflection to Eliot’s poem, Brooks and Rosenfeld attempted to transcend the assumed provincialism of their situation and elbow their way into the American literary canon. More generally, the article suggests that parodic “translations” of this kind, by highlighting the postvernacular dimension of literary language (Shandler), extend the purview of translingual studies by valuing performativity, orality, and collaboration over and against competency as defining elements of linguistic border crossing in an age that has sometimes too hastily been characterized as post-national or post-Romantic. The article thus points to the relevance of what the author calls literary amphilingualism, a prevalent but understudied phenomenon in translingual studies.

VIOLENCE AND THE LIBERATED WOMAN: BRENDA FASSIE’S SONG “NAKUPENDA” AS A HERMENEUTICAL LENS FOR READING THE SONG OF SONGS

Although it is widely argued that the Hebrew Bible contains texts which caricature violence against women, the present article shows that some biblical texts could also offer liberating possibilities to oppressed women in South Africa. The interest of this article lies in bringing Brenda Fassie’s song “Nakupenda” (I love you) into conversation with the Song of Songs in order to produce an interaction between the biblical text and an African popular song. In the reading of both songs, the issue of violence against women as well as women’s (sexual) independence in the context of patriarchy is highlighted. In conclusion, the author of this article draws liberating lessons for women in South Africa from the actions of the woman protagonist in the Shir ha-Shirim and of the female lover in Brenda Fassie’s song “Nakupenda”.

“For Love is as Strong as Death”

Taking Another Look at Levinas on Love Set me as a seal upon your heart. For love is as strong as death. Shir Hashirim [Song of Songs] In "Questions to Emmanuel Levinas," Luce Irigaray criticizes Emmanuel Levinas's conception of love by claiming that for Levinas, "to caress consists not in approaching the other in its most vital dimension, the touch, but in the reduction of that vital dimension of the other's body to the elaboration of the future for himself."1 That is, Irigaray interprets Levinas's conception of love as that which needs to be redeemed by fecundity and which is only redeemed for the man. Levinas 's work, she charges, does not account for the female experience in sexuality, degrades the woman by rendering her experience in sexuality as that which is devoid of the divine, and finally, it maintains a structure that privileges heterosexuality. Irigaray's analysis of Levinas's work points to what might be considered the most damning elements of Levinas's thought, and her view needs to be taken seriously. However, I think there are alternative readings of Levinas's conception of the "feminine" in general and his description of love in particular. My goal in this essay is to re-examine Levinas's conception of love that we find in Totality and Infinity,2 while being mindful of Irigaray's worries about this conception. This task is completed in part by taking seriously Levinas's claim in the preface to Totality and Infinity that Franz Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption is "a work too often present in this book [Totality and Infinity] to be cited" (TI 28/xvi).3 The Labor of Love In contrast to the ethical relationship, Levinas identifies the love relationship as a return to the same. Yet for Levinas, the role the feminine plays in making transcendence possible extends beyond the dwelling and into the erotic relationship. Following a structure that we find in both Sartre and Rosenzweig, Levinas's description of the love relationship is a relationship wherein what the lover wants is not just to love the other [the beloved], but to have the Beloved love him back.4 Love both presupposes the exteriority of the other while also going beyond this exteriority of the other, of the beloved (TI 254/232). Taking up the Aristophanes myth in Plato's Symposium, Levinas's view of love is a mixture of immanence and transcendence (TI 254/232). Levinas disagrees with the implication of fusion signaled by the myth.5 However, he does find compelling the ambiguous notion of love not only as a relation in which there is a return to the self, but also as a relation in which the self is transcended. The face of the other-of the beloved-reveals within it what is not yet. It reveals the future that is never future enough, a future that is "more remote than possible" (TI 254-55/232-33). Finally, the ambiguity of love lies in the possibility of the Other to appear as an object of need and yet still retain its alterity, "the possibility of enjoying the Other, of placing oneself at the same time beneath and beyond discourse." The love relation is ambiguous precisely because the ethical has not disappeared. Rather, the face of the Other is hidden by the erotic, by the intimacy of love. In the "Phenomenology of Eros" Levinas tells us that "love aims at the other; it aims at him in his frailty [faiblesse]" (TI 256/233). Love aims at the tenderness of the Beloved. For Levinas, the tenderness is not something added to the Beloved. Rather, the Beloved "is but one with her regime of tenderness" (TI 256/233).6Levinas's analysis continually uses language that presents the image of the Beloved cast below while the lover is taken to new heights. The Beloved is "dark," "nocturnal," "clandestine," "deep in the subterranean dimension" (TI 257/234). The Beloved equivocates between virginity 7 and profanation (or solicitation), between modesty and immodesty (TI 257-58/234-35), between hiddenness and exposure. …

Scenes from Shir Ha-Shirim (Song of Songs) for Soprano, 2 Tenors, Bass Soli and Chamber Ensemble

Scenes from Shir Ha-Shirim (Song of Songs) for Soprano, 2 Tenors, Bass Soli and Chamber Ensemble

The Plight of the Song of Songs

wrote down some throbbing sentiments which he had heard sung about a couple in love. That anonymous editor's romantic bent is revealed in the superlative he used in the Hebrew title, Shir ha-Shirim, meaning the loveliest song. His disposition is also exposed in the dedication to Solomon, the greatest lover in the Israelite tradition at least on a quantitative scale! The Song of Songs is a song consisting of songs about intimate love. The editor probably contributed little to either the content or the organization of his collection. Like stringing a necklace, he loosely put together folk lyrics of varying lengths which added different facets of beauty to the unifying theme. He alternated frequently the male and female voices, but showed little concern for the sequence of ideas in arranging the stanzas. The editor no doubt thought the meaning of his anthology would be transparently clear to readers. Even in his own day similar poems of the same genre were commonplace in the Near East from Egypt to Mesopotamia.' What can be more easily understood universally than love's old sweet song? If John Milton is correct in assuming that simplicity and sensuousness are the basic ingredients of poetry in any language,2 the Song of Songs should not have caused difficult problems of interpretation. It is one of the pranks of history that a poem so obviously about hungry passion has caused so much perplexity and has provoked such a plethora of bizarre interpretations. Even some contemporary scholars appear baffled by the Song of Songs. For example, T. J. Meek begins his commentary on the Song with this amazing and forbidding note: Of all the books of the Old Testament none is so difficult to interpret.3 During the past century some scholars have

Corrections and Notes to Agadath Shir Hashirim (Concluded)

Corrections and Notes to Agadath Shir Hashirim (Concluded)

Corrections and Notes to Agadath Shir Hashirim

Corrections and Notes to Agadath Shir Hashirim

Agadath Shir Hashirim (Concluded)

Agadath Shir Hashirim (Concluded)

Agadath Shir Hashirim

Agadath Shir Hashirim