Interpretations of the Song have been legion, and there is little agreement among scholars as to its origin, meaning and purpose. The vividly detailed, erotic lyrics, the virtual absence of overt religious themes, and the vagueness of its plot make it a challenge to scholarship and a temptation to imaginative ingenuity. Indispensable to the study of the varieties of interpretation is H. H. Rowley’s essay ‘The Interpretation of the Song of Songs’ in The Servant of the Lord, 1952.
The most egregious errors in the interpretation of this book arise because of a failure or unwillingness to recognize its proper poetic quality. The imagery is too often treated as allegory in the negative sense, the characters and the images standing for persons or qualities for which there are no hints in the text itself. Or the literary allusions are turned into real people and events, as happens in the various dramatic interpretations of the Song.
But the Song is neither allegory nor drama. There is no plot or narrative, and no historical characters are involved, except by allusion (Song 3:7; 8:10–12). Rather, the Song is composed of loosely connected lyric poetry that expresses an emotion, indeed one of the most powerful of emotions: love. A prose description of love would not be as powerful. The poetic imagery expresses an emotion that transcends simple statement. It preserves a level of mystery and appeals to more than the mind-to the whole person.
Dominating everything else in the Song is the fact that it is a collection of pastoral love poetry. The conventions of pastoral, one of the most common literary conventions at every stage in the history of literature, are easy to grasp: the setting is rustic, the characters are shepherds and shepherdesses (usually a fictional disguise), and the actions are those customarily done by shepherds and shepherdesses.
Pastoral love poetry, specifically, adds wooing and courtship to the activities performed by the characters. In pastoral love poetry, nature supplies most of the images by which the lovers express their romantic passions, including their praise of the beloved. Subtypes of pastoral love poetry include the invitation to love (an invitation to the beloved to stroll in a flowery and fruitful landscape is a metaphoric invitation to marriage and the life of mutual love [Song 2:10–15; 7:10–13]) and the emblematic blazon or waṣf (the beloved is praised by cataloging his or her beautiful features and comparing them to objects in nature [Song 4:1–7; 5:10–16; 6:4–7; 7:1–5]).
The metaphors of the book consistently draw upon nature, but it is important to realize that the correspondence is not primarily based on visual similarity. The point of the comparisons is instead the value that the speaker finds in his or her beloved. The lovers and their love are compared to the best things in nature. The poetic mode of the Song is not pictorial but emotional and sensuous in nonvisual ways (including tactile and olfactory). More than anything else, images of nature portray the quality of the beloved, and here we can see evidence of the Hebrew fondness for structure and for how things are formed.
One of the paradoxes of pastoral poetry is that it arose only with the rise of cities and civilization. Images of a royal court, with all its wealth and opulence, frequently break through the fictional façade of the Song’s pastoral world. The world of the Song is filled with expensive clothes, perfumes, rich foods, gems and erotic leisure.
a series of metaphors in the Song which arise from the family. Interestingly, there is little marital imagery as such-no references to husband and wife (except perhaps when the man refers to the woman as his "bride" [Song 4:8–12; 5:1]), but there are significant references to mothers and siblings.
The mothers of the woman and the man support the relationship (Song 6:9; 8:5). The home of the former is a secure place for intimacy (Song 3:4; 8:2). Interestingly, the fathers are never mentioned in the Song; the woman’s brothers seem to take the place of her father. As opposed to her mother, the brothers are an obstacle to love’s intimacy, and she struggles to be free of their influence (Song 1:5–7; 8:8–12).
At one point the woman declares her wish that her lover were her brother, so that she might be intimate with him publicly as well as privately (Song 8:1). On the other hand, the man will often endearingly refer to his beloved as "his sister" (Song 4:9–10, 12; 5:1–2).
The imagery of the Song is pastoral, passionate, erotic, sensuous, hyperbolic, metaphoric and affective. The style aims at an association of feelings and values rather than visual correspondence, and the imagery is symbolic rather than pictorial, figurative rather than literal.
So if the Song is not an allegory or type conveying a spiritual message nor meant to be taken literally, what place does it have in the Canon?
A fair question. It serves as an object-lesson, an extended māšāl (*Proverb), illustrating the rich wonders of human love. As biblical teaching concerning physical love has been emancipated from sub-Christian asceticism, the beauty and purity of marital love have been more fully appreciated. The Song, though expressed in language too bold for Western taste, provides a wholesome balance between the extremes of sexual excess or perversion and an ascetic denial of the essential goodness of physical love.
Bibliography. W. Baumgartner, in OTMS, pp. 230–235; J. C. Rylaarsdam, Proverbs to Song of Solomon, 1964; W. J. Fuerst, Ruth, Esther, Ecclesiastes, The Song of Songs, Lamentations, 1975; S. C. Glickman, A Song for Lovers, 1976; H. J. Schonfield, The Song of Songs, 1960; J. C. Exum, ‘A Literary and Structural Analysis of the Song of Songs’ ZAW 85 1973 pp. 47–79; R. Gordis, The Song of Songs, 1954; L. Waterman, The Song of Songs, 1948.
