Song of Songs

by Duane Garrett

The lid of a casket of Tutankhamun. The king is in a garden with Queen Ankhesenamun. The Queen wears a perfumed oil cone in her hair and holds bunches of lotus flowers and mandragora bulbs in her hands.

Werner Forman Archive/The Egyptian Museum, Cairo

Introduction

The Song of Songs is self-evidently love poetry, notwithstanding the desire of people to convert it into something else.1 In this regard, it is unique within the Bible. Being love poetry from an ancient land, it uses imagery that is often lost on us and that can be better understood in light of archaeological discoveries. Also, the Song of Songs follows the conventions of ancient poetry, and comparisons or analogies for interpreting it are best taken from other ancient Near Eastern love songs, not modern love poetry.2

Historical Setting

The current consensus among scholars is that Song of Songs comes from the postexilic period even though 1:1 suggests that it comes from the time of Solomon. The primary argument for dating the text so late is that certain vocabulary appears to come from a later period in biblical history.

Against this, two main arguments can be produced for dating the Song of Songs in the age of Solomon. First, it has strong similarities to Egyptian love poetry from the latter part of the second millennium (see the sidebar on “Egyptian Love Poetry”). It is easier to account for these similarities in the age of Solomon than in the postexilic.3 Second, Song of Songs 6:4 suggests that at the time of writing Tirzah was the one of two grand cities of Israel (comparable to Jerusalem). This best fits an early first millennium date (see comments on 6:4).

Literary Setting

The Song of Songs is a series of short songs sung by a male singer, a female singer, and a female chorus. Together, the songs more or less episodically describe the love of a man and a woman. It would not be correct to call this a drama—it is lyric poetry and not a play. Although made up of a series of individual songs that are sung by various combinations of the three performers (such as a solo by the woman, a duet by the man and woman, a chorus song, and so forth), the songs together are a unified opus that focuses on a major event of life: love and marriage.

A close analogy for the poetic genre of the Song of Songs is in the Nakhtsobek Songs from the Papyrus Chester Beatty I love songs (see “Egyptian Love Poetry”). The subject of the Nakhtsobek Songs is quite different from that of Song of Songs, although both deal with the sexual relationship. The Nakhtsobek Songs tells of a young man who became ensnared in the pleasures of a prostitute. Like Song of Songs, it has three singing parts: a man, a woman, and a female chorus.4 The Nakhtsobek chorus appears to represent the girls of a brothel, who sing of how delightful will be the man’s night with the prostitute. The solo woman represents a prostitute who has enticed the man, and she sings of how boldly she went and took him. The man’s first song tells of how he is captured by the charms of the lady, but in his second song he finds the door to her barred. She will not receive him again until he comes with sufficient payment. The man vows to bring an extravagant number of gifts to ensure that the way to her is always open. In short, the songs tell of how a young man became emotionally and financially enslaved by a prostitute. There is no narrative or drama here, but the songs together form a coherent work that focuses on a single episode in life, the entrapment of a young man by a prostitute.5

Song of Songs in similar fashion uses the various singing parts to give us a picture of the lives of a man and woman. It deals with mature love, not prostitution and infatuation, but it is similar to the Nakhtsobek Songs in structural conception. Individual songs work together to give the audience a coherent if highly poetic interpretation of the joy and significance of sexual love. Like the Nakhtsobek Songs, Song of Songs focuses on a single moment of life, but here it is the marriage and first union of a man and woman.