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Bible - OT - Song of Songs: Song of Israel

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The Targum on the Song of Songs, deftly translated and annotated by Philip Alexander (The Targum of Canticles: Translated, With a Critical Introduction, Apparatus, and Notes (Aramaic Bible)), has its amusing oddities. The bride in the cleft of the rock in 2:14 is Israel at the Red Sea, hemmed in by Pharaoh behind and the Red Sea to the front, and on the two sides with “deserts full of fiery serpents that bite and kill men with their venom.” She cried out to the Lord, and Yahweh answered in the words of the Song: “O Congregation of Israel, that resembles the spotless dove shut up in the clefts of the rock and in the hiding-places of the cliff, let Me see your form and your upright deeds. Let Me hear your voice, for your voice is sweet when you pray in the Little Sanctuary, and your form is comely through good deeds.”

Augustine would have approved the gloss on the white teeth of the bride, which are “the Priests and Levites who offer up your offerings, and eat holy flesh, tithe and heave-offering, which are pure from any violence or robbery.” The temples like pomegranates are like the “King, who was their head” and “as full of precepts as a pomegranate” – understood, I expect, to mean “as a pomegranate is full of seeds.” The eighty wives and sixty concubines inspire an allegory of a Greek invasion and siege of Jerusalem: “the Greeks arose and gathered together sixty kings from the sons of Esau, clad in chain-mail and mounted on horses, and cavalry, and eighty commanders from the sons of Ishmael, riding on elephants, not to mention the rest of the nations, peoples and tongues that were without number, and they appointed the wicked Alexander as head over them, and they came to wage war against Jerusalem.”

A number of the basic moves in the Targum, though, are defensible and illuminating. For instance:

1. The temple is at the center of the Targum’s interpretation of the Song. Many modern commentators have noted the link between the temple and the palanquin of Solomon in Song 3:6-11, but few have noted what the Targum notes, that the armed men who precede the palanquin are “Priests and Levites, and all the tribes of Israel.” That is, the priests and Levites stand guard at the “coach” built by Solomon. When incense is mentioned, the Targum immediately turns to the temple setting.

2. The Targum takes the references to “daughters of Jerusalem” and other maidens as references to other nations and cities. If (as Revelation asserts) Jerusalem is the harlot city that reigns over the kings of the earth, it seems plausible that she was once the bride-city surrounded by an international company of bridesmaids/attendants.

3. The Targum takes the entire Song as the story of Israel – her captivity in Egypt, the marriage covenant at Sinai, the coming of Yahweh in the Shekinah, Israel’s painfully inconsistent love for Yahweh, her temple and her exile. Though the Targum is often Procrustean with this scheme, finding a place for Daniel and for the Maccabees toward the end of the Song, it’s on the right track to see Israel’s history as the sounding board against which the Song resonates.

4. Some of the specific interpretations are, I think, quite good. Many waters cannot quench love is expounded as these words from Yahweh: “Even if all the nations, which are likened to the waters of the sea, which are many, should gather together, they would not be able to quench My love for you. And if all the kings of the earth, which are likened to the waters of a river that flow strongly, should assemble, they would not be able to blot you out from the world.” Still too schematic, but the thrust of the comment is just right. On 4:13, which compares the bride to a paradise of pomegranates, the Targum says that when Israel obeys, when young men love their wives and raise righteous sons (!), “their scent is like the sweet spices of the Garden of Eden, cypress and crocus.” This gets two things right, I think: First, that the faithful obedience of the bride is the aroma, and second that this aroma arises from the bride as if from Eden. When the lover is compared to a tree in whose shade the woman finds refreshment, the Targum thinks of the Shekinah, the shade of Yahweh over Israel. The “house of wine” in 2:4 is Sinai.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 at 6:56 am

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Bible - OT - Song of Songs: Song of Israel

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