Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse
We have already looked at the romantic and poetic imagery in Song of Songs enough to suspect that the incestuous translation “my sister, my bride” (NRSV and NAB) must be wrong. The KJV’s “my sister, my spouse” is no better. Other translations, like “my treasure, my bride” or “my own, my bride” may be poetic, but they are inventions of the translators that do not reflect the original Hebrew. So what’s going on?
The very first line of the book—which is actually numbered Song of Songs 1:2, because 1:1 is the title—begins, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth” (KJV). Ths makes it pretty clear what the book is about. Song of Songs deals with romantic, erotic love.
The love story has two main characters: an unnamed man and an unnamed woman. (Incidentally, we also learn from this fact that major characters in the Bible need not have names. This will be important later, as we try to understand Manoah’s unnamed wife.) Because Hebrew has grammatical gender, it’s usually pretty clear who is talking to whom, even when the context would otherwise be ambiguous. For example, the sentence “I slept, but my heart was awake” (Song of Songs 5:2; NRSV) could equally apply to a man or a woman in English, but in Hebrew the feminine verb for “slept” makes it clear that the woman is sleeping.
Even though the grammatical gender in Hebrew lets the reader know who is speaking, we usually find additional clues in the form of an epithet each character enjoys.
The man is frequently called dodi—that is, “my dod.” (Remember from last chapter that the Hebrew suffix -i means “my.”) Translations for dodi include “my beloved,” “my love,” and “my lover,” though in some other situations the word almost certainly means “son-in-law.” Here, based on context, “lover” is probably right. We won’t spend more time analyzing dodi, though, because our focus is on the heroine of Song of Songs, and why she is called “my achot, kalah.”
We will work in reverse order, starting with the easier kalah. Our first task is to get a sense of how words like kalah function in society.
The English word “bride” is interesting because of its surprisingly ambiguous relationship to marriage. A bride may be a woman who is about to be married, one in the process of becoming married, or one who has recently been married. “The bride” walks down the aisle, but even months after the ceremony someone might ask the husband how his “new bride” is doing.
“Wife,” by contrast, refers only to a married woman. So what’s the difference between a “wife” and a “bride”? How is it different for someone to ask “How’s your wife?” compared with “How’s your bride?”
For that matter, by most people’s definition, a man marries his girlfriend. (That is, if a man gets married, it is to his girlfriend. It is not true that if he has a girlfriend he necessarily marries her.) Why is it a “bride” and not a “girlfriend” who walks down the aisle? Similarly, a man marries his fiancée, but, again, we don’t talk about the fiancée attending the marriage ceremony. It’s the bride. Why?
The answers have to do with the importance of marriage in our society and of its various functions. Marriage has legal, societal, and physical aspects, in addition to any religious and moral roles that might be involved.
Marriage is a legal contract between two people. The state is involved, and—at least in America and other Western countries—a representative of the state has to sanction a marriage. The state decides who can marry whom. The marriage has legal ramifications, among them certain rights and responsibilities for the husband and wife, like a change in tax status.
But marriage, unlike almost every legal matter, is also a social contract. Most people wear jewelry that lets other people know they are married, even though those other people are not involved in the marriage or in the legal contract. The U.S. Constitution does not give the president’s spouse any particular role, but society has a title for the role: “first lady,” and maybe someday “first man” (or “first husband”?). The title “Mrs.” originally meant “wife of . . . ,” so “Mrs. Smith” was the “wife of Mr. Smith,” and her fuller name could be, for example, “Mrs. John Smith”—that is, “the wife of John Smith.” The title is still in popular use in America, even though its meaning for most people has changed. (It now means “a married woman whose last name is . . .”.) “Miss” is used for an unmarried woman, and the much newer “Ms.” is used for both. This variety of titles reflects the social importance of marriage.
In addition to its legal and social aspects, marriage also represents a physical relationship between two people (prompting the Scottish novelist and playwright Ian Hay to quip that marriage is a “. . . public confession of a strictly private intention.” Mr. Hay, born John Hay Beith, also sensed the difficulty of translation. In his play House master, one character complains of another that “he can translate English into a Greek not spoken in Greece, and Greek into an English not spoken anywhere”).
Even though the legal and social contracts of marriage could be completely separate, in the United States one ceremony usually marks them both. The state authorizes a socially and legally recognized figure—either a religious leader such as a priest or a representative of the state such as a judge—to oversee the legal process along with the social process. That leader is free to introduce religious content, too. The degree to which the physical contract is connected to the social and legal ones is frequently a matter of debate.
All of this is important because different words refer to different aspects of marriage.
In English, we have a word that refers to a woman in a state of being closely involved—either in the near future, the present, or the near past—in a wedding. That word is “bride.” We also have a word that focuses not on the ceremony but on the result: “wife.” In other words, “wife” is associated with being married, while “bride” is associated with becoming married. (For historical reasons, compounds with “bride” have other meanings, most notably “brideless,” which generally doesn’t mean a man who hasn’t married recently but rather a man who hasn’t married at all. For that matter, “bride” originally may have meant “daughter-in-law.” But we know from Chapter 2 that what words mean and where they come from are two separate issues.)
Unlike “bride,” which refers to a legal status, “girlfriend” emphasizes a woman’s social and physical status, namely that she has a unique physical relationship with one other person (usually her “boyfriend”). In a quirk of English, the social word and the legal word combine after marriage into “wife.” In other words, “being a wife” is a social statement and a legal statement. The social statement is remarkably close to what “girlfriend” means.
Or, at least, a “girlfriend” becomes a “wife” after marriage in the ideal. A husband can have a wife and a girlfriend. Even though that state of affairs is commonly frowned upon, it represents a fairly clear situation. A man has a legal-marriage relationship to one person and something like a social-marriage relationship to another.
Marriage is so important in modern America that we even have a legal term, “ex-wife”—and a related social term, “ex”—that applies equally to an ex-wife and to an ex-girlfriend. And because English is generally nongendered, it also refers to an ex-husband and an ex-boyfriend. (We don’t have an English verb for the feeling one has for an ex, but Russian conveniently does: razlubit’—literally, to “unlove”—is how you feel for someone you used to love. It’s like the English “falling out of love.”)
In addition to the social and legal words, we have terms to express physical relationships, like “lover,” which is compatible with almost any social and legal relationship. A wife, a bride, or a girlfriend—and also a friend, an acquaintance, or even a stranger—can be a lover.
We find another combination of physical, social, and legal aspects in the words “prostitute,” “mistress,” “concubine,” “date,” etc. And even these combinations have variations. A “hooker” and a “whore” both do roughly the same thing, but the second term is generally more insulting.
Even though these words refer to specific combinations of society, law, and physical intimacy, they also, like most words, have other connotations, and here is where we see the difference between “wife” and “spouse.” Just as “hooker” and “whore” refer to the same person but convey different aspects of the relationships involved, “wife” and “spouse” are the same person, but they differ in what they emphasize. All wives are spouses, and all female spouses are wives. But “wife” has a different flavor than “spouse.” And just as these words can have moral implications, they also can have legal, societal, and physical implications beyond what they actually mean. “Wife,” though fundamentally expressing a legal status, also conveys societal information. Even more, “ex-wife,” another legal category, entails a host of societal implications. We don’t have a common word “ex-spouse,” because divorce entails the termination of the “wife” part more than the “spouse” part.
Though we use these words, and others like them, all the time, we don’t usually consciously consider the division into social, legal, and physical qualities of what men and women do together. But if we are to use these words to understand another culture, we must take all three into account.
All of this finally puts us in a position to evaluate the merits of the KJV translation “spouse” and the NRSV translation “bride,” among other possible ways to convey the epithet kalah from Song of Songs. So let’s look at that Hebrew word.
Just to get started, kalah sometimes means “daughter-in-law,” as in Genesis 11:31: “Terah took his son Abram [who will later be renamed “Abraham”] and his grandson Lot, son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law [kalah] Sarai [who will later be renamed “Sarah”], his son Abram’s wife . . .” (NRSV). Terah’s family tree is clear in Genesis, and even if it were not, Genesis 11:31 is particularly unambiguous. Sarai is Terah’s son’s wife, and she is called Terah’s kalah.
(Genesis 11:31 also provides yet another example of how etymology can lead us astray. The Greek word for kalah there is numphi, from which we get the English word “nymph”—that is, a “semidivine . . . beautiful maiden,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, though the word has other, more recent connotations, too. In spite of the etymology, Sarai is a daughter-in-law, not a nymph.)
The word kalah is also the female version of chatan. The pair almost certainly means something like “bride” and “groom,” or “bride” and “bridegroom,” depending on your dialect. But we don’t know what aspect of “bride” and “groom” the words capture. Is it the legal status of marriage? The social contract? The physical relationship? The state of love between a man and a woman? The intention of having children? Or is it some combination?
The more common word for “wife” in Hebrew is simply isha, a word that also means “woman” in general. (The English word “wife,” too, used to mean “woman”—in particular, one of humble background. This is where we get the expression “old wives’ tale.” It’s a tale from uneducated women; it has nothing specifically to do with marriage.)
We see this same sort of situation with the English word “girl.” It refers to children, to young women, and also, at least colloquially (in phrases like “my girl”), to girlfriends; sometimes it even more generally refers to older women. (We’ll talk more about these and similar words in Chapter 8.) The English “girl,” in other words, is any girl, but also one in a particular relationship. The Hebrew isha seems to work that way, too. It means any woman, but particularly a wife.
Hebrew also offers the somewhat rare word pilegesh, which is normally translated “concubine,” or something like it. We know from Genesis 25 that in addition to his wives, Abraham has some pilegeshes, by whom he has additional children. But it looks like “concubine” is a misleading translation, because Abraham’s pilegeshes are also his wives. In addition, Judges 19:1 makes it clear that a pilegesh is also an isha. Furthermore, polygamy was the norm in the Bible, and most men had more than one isha. It is tempting to say that most men had “more than one wife,” but in America a wife is generally the one woman to whom someone is married, so for most people “more than one wife” is almost a contradiction. Instead, we tend to use words like “mistress,” “lover,” or even “girlfriend” for anyone except the “main wife.”
What we see, in the end, is that the word isha is so broad that, in addition to its general meaning as “woman,” it can refer to almost any relationship a woman might be in with a man: wife, certainly, but also girlfriend, concubine, and so forth.
The word isha can also refer to a category we don’t have in America—at least, not officially: sex slave. Slaves and slavery were common in the Bible, though here too we have to be careful, because “slavery” in America most commonly means the horrific condition Africans endured on this continent, and because there are forms of organized forced labor that are considerably less oppressive. We call all of them “slavery,” but the slavery of the Bible may not have been as terrible as the slavery on the shores of America. Whatever the case, slaves in antiquity did a variety of jobs—including, it would seem, providing sex.
Hebrew has a word for a female slave, shifcha, but even though the word frequently refers to a “sex slave,” it really just means any slave who is female, whatever she might be assigned to do. Sarai, for example, has a shifcha named Hagar whom she gives to her husband, Abram, because she herself can’t conceive (it’s a particularly ill-conceived strategy to find happiness at home—but that’s for another time). We read of this in Genesis 16:1. It’s clear that she is simply offering her personal servant, not her personal sex slave, to her husband. Various translations use different words to convey very different apsects of this transaction. So depending on the translation Hagar is Sarai’s handmaid, maid, maidservant, woman, or even slave-girl. The various words in English reflect various combinations of what the Hebrew meant and implied. Hagar was a woman, a servant, a maid, and a slave. We don’t have a word for that combination, probably because we don’t have such people in America.
But servitude was common enough in antiquity that Hebrew has not just shifcha but also ama, which also refers to a female servant. So at this point, in addition to the general isha, which refers to any woman, we have pilegesh, “concubine” or something like it; shifcha, female slave, perhaps in particular a sex slave; and ama, also a female slave, perhaps specifically not a sex slave. English doesn’t have any of these words.
On the other hand, English does have words like “ex-husband,” “ex-wife,” “divorcée,” and so on, perhaps because divorce is common in America. By contrast, no couple in the Bible ever gets divorced. (The concept does seem to be represented, but it’s rare, and we find it only in the abstract. Four out of the five times the Bible refers to divorce at all, it is in the general phrase, “widowed and divorced [women],” as opposed to a particular person.)
Even though there is no divorce in the Bible, men take second wives. In America, if a man marries, divorces, continues to pay child support to his former wife, and marries a new wife, we call one woman “the ex” and the other “his wife.” Perhaps the Bible called them both “his wife.” Certainly, American men have legal and other obligations to their ex-wives. Men in the Bible had obligations to their “unloved” (or “disliked” or “hated”) wife, as we see in Deuteronomy 21:15: “If a man has two wives, one of them loved and the other disliked, and if both the loved and the disliked have borne him sons, the firstborn being the son of the one who is disliked, then on the day when he wills his possessions to his sons, he is not permitted to treat the son of the loved as the firstborn in preference to the son of the disliked, who is the firstborn.”
In short, the terms the Bible uses for relationships between a man and woman overlap only partially with what we now have in English, but we still need a word to translate kalah in Song of Songs. What should we call the heroine?
Our answer might depend on whether or not the man and woman in Song of Songs are married, engaged, or otherwise involved with each other. If they’re married, “bride” and “spouse” seem like good options. If they are not, though, then certainly “spouse” is wrong. And if they don’t plan on getting married immediately, then “bride” is wrong, too. Maybe they are just dating.
But, perhaps surprisingly to the modern reader, the Bible is silent on the issue of commitment here. They may be boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife, high-school sweethearts, or more generally “lovers.” The focus of the book seems to be the physical and emotional relationship between the man and the woman, not their legal status or their involvement with any other potential lovers.
In light of this ambiguity in Song of Songs, we have a third translation option, beyond the common “bride” or “spouse.” We might simply translate kalah as “lover,” akin to dodi. On the one hand, “bride” is poetic in a very different way than “lover.” Furthermore, kalah is reserved for women. We don’t have gendered words for “lover” in English. (There’s no word “lovress,” like “actress” compared with “actor.” We do have a word “mistress,” but it usually means something else.)
So “lover” is not a perfect translation. It doesn’t match the kind of poetry we seem to find in Song of Songs, and it will make it very hard to use different epithets for the man (dod, “lover”) and the woman.
But because Song of Songs seems to have nothing intrinsically to do with marriage, in the end we cannot accept “bride” or “spouse” as a translation.
So “lover” it is for the second word, giving us “achoti (my) lover.” We started with the observation that “my sister, my bride” cannot be the right translation. Clearly, “my sister, my lover” is no better. “Sister” is simply wrong.
To understand the real role of achoti (“my sister”), we have to recognize the fact that even beyond the words—girlfriend, wife, lover, etc., in English, or isha,shifcha,kalah, etc., in Hebrew—the relationship between a man and a woman is always complicated. We tend to speak in this country of “marriages of convenience,” “marrying for money,” “marrying for love,” etc., using “husband” and “wife” for the participants in all of these very different situations. Even a man and woman who marry solely so that one partner can have health insurance are called “husband” and “wife.” And all of that complication is just in the realm of “marriage.” “Dating” is even more ambiguous.
In the Bible, too, the words convey only part of the story, with the added complication that in addition to the various sorts of marriages and involvements we find today, slavery was still common back then. A man and woman might have been involved in a marriage of convenience or an affair. Or the woman might have been the man’s legal slave.
This is why achoti is so important.
There is little doubt that achot literally means “sister,” so achoti literally means “my sister.” We are fortunate that Genesis is replete with family trees, all spelled out in words. For example, from Genesis 24:29 we know that Laban is Rebekkah’s brother. So in 25:20, when we read that Rebekkah was Laban’s achot, we know what family relationship achot represents.
But across the world’s languages, we commonly find that kinship terms such as “brother” and “sister” enjoy expanded meanings. In English, “brother” and “sister” are colloquial terms for friendship, or even inclusion in a social group. “Son” is used not just for progeny but also as a term that includes endearment and sometimes a note of condescension.
In addition to their usually vague expanded meanings, kinship terms often have specific meanings that were once related to the expanded meanings. “Brother,” “sister,” “father,” and “mother” in English are kinship terms, to be sure. They also have expanded meanings. And even beyond that, they are religious terms. A “sister” is a nun, for example.
The reader will remember from the discussion on page 51 that words can be expanded in two ways. There we saw that, on the one hand, a word’s meaning can be spontaneously expanded to mean something new, in which case the new meaning is usually vaguely related to the old meaning. Or a word can acquire a specific new meaning. Here we see both kinds of extension. When “brother” is used to mean “someone like a brother in some vague sense that I have not made clear,” it’s the first kind of extension. That’s what we see when someone calls a friend “brother” (or “bro”). When “brother” is used specifically to mean “monk,” we see the second kind of extension.
The distinction is important. If the meaning of achot in Song of Songs was used to mean “like a sister in some vague way,” we might want to translate it as “sister.” If, on the other hand, it was used for a specific relationship (like “sister” for “nun”) that is not used in English, then “sister” is the wrong translation.
Returning for a moment to the general pattern of kinship terms acquiring specific meanings beyond familial relations, we note that in Modern Hebrew, ach means “brother” but also “(male) nurse,” while achot, in addition to meaning “sister,” means “(female) nurse.” These are examples of specific extensions of the meaning of the Modern Hebrew words ach and achot. It would simply be a mistake to translate the Modern Hebrew achot meaning “nurse” as “sister” in English. Even though both in Modern Hebrew and in English the word achot has general extensions, the English and Hebrew words also have specific extensions, and they do not overlap entirely.
By contrast, if an Israeli calls a friend ach to indicate that they are closer than mere friends, “brother” may be the right translation. That’s because, in this case, both the Modern Hebrew extension and the English one are of the first, more general variety.
This information about English and Modern Hebrew (and many other languages) doesn’t directly tell us anything specific about ancient Hebrew, but it does encourage us to at least look for a nonliteral meaning for achot. So we will.
To help us understand achot, it will be useful to look as well at the related word ach, because it’s clear that ach and achot are essentially the same word in the Bible—the first for males, the second for females.
For example, in Genesis 24:29, which introduces Rebekkah’s family tree, the word for “brother” is ach. In that context, ach and achot are kinship terms, meaning exactly what their English counterparts do.
Hosea 2:3 puts ach and achot in parallel, as does Jeremiah’s prophetic message to the sons of Josiah, which includes, “oh, ach” and, in parallel, “oh, achot.” Both of these make the connection between ach and achot particularly transparent. Whatever ach means, achot is the female variety of the same thing.
Most translations render these lines as “ah, brother . . . ah, sister” or “alas, brother . . . alas, sister,” but clearly these are not kinship terms here. Because “brother” and “sister” in English are, like the Hebrew, not strictly limited to kinship, the translation doesn’t immediately seem so jarring. But we know by now that translating a metaphoric term in one language as a metaphoric one in another just because the two words share the same literal meaning is usually a mistake.
For now, we don’t really care about exactly what Jeremiah or Hosea meant, so we won’t probe the issue further. We do care that “brother” and “sister” seem to be essentially the same word, and that their meanings are not limited to kinship. (Jeremiah is a stronger case for expanding the meaning of ach and achot than Hosea, because we know from looking at the text more generally that Hosea uses kinship words poetically for their imagery. He may have been using “brother” and “sister” to represent kinship terms, and then using those kinship terms poetically, in the same way he uses marriage, for example, and divorce. We’ll look at Hosea’s imagery in the concluding chapter.)
So we know that ach and achot work basically the same way, and we know that their meanings are not limited to “brother” and “sister.” This is, of course, good news for Song of Songs.
Our next task is to figure out what these two words represent. Fortunately, a clear answer will present itself.
To start, we note that both ach and achot are used in phrases that mean roughly “each other.” II Kings 7:6 reads, “. . . a man said to his ach”—that is, “they said to each other.” Ezekiel (Ezekiel 1:9) uses “a woman to her achot” to mean “each other” in the phrase “the wings [of the creatures that Ezekiel envisions] were touching each other.” (Every noun in Hebrew is either grammatically masculine or grammatically feminine. Because body parts that come in pairs tend to be feminine in Hebrew, when k’nafayim, “wings,” touch each other it’s “a woman to her achot” and not “a man to his ach.”) So there is something about ach and achot that means “another one just like this one.” Of course, one aspect of siblinghood is being the same in some sense. The leap from kinship to the expression “each other” or “one another” is not huge, but it is nonetheless a leap—and a leap that we do not find in English. “People nowadays use e-mail to write to their brothers” in English cannot mean “people . . . write to each other.” And, “The captain of the ship spoke to her sister” surely does not mean that the captains of two ships spoke to each other. But the Biblical Hebrew words ach and achot do function in those ways.
Beyond “another one like the first one,” we find a more specific expanded meaning for ach and achot. Numbers 20:14 is an example. When Moses wants to pass through the land of Edom, he sends word to Edom’s king with the introduction, “Thus says your ach, Israel . . .” (NRSV). So Israel is Edom’s ach.
We first note that Moses does not say, “Thus says Moses your ach.” Even though Moses is the one sending the message, he wants to represent the relationship between the people of Israel and, presumably, the people of Edom. It is one of ach ness.
In fact, this language between leaders was entirely typical of much of the ancient world. Rulers would commonly use “brother,” “son,” and “father” to refer to one another. The terms represented power structure. Two kings on equal footing might call each other “brother.” A powerful king addressed a minor one as “son,” and the response was “father.” In a surviving document from the fourteenth century B.C., the relatively minor Adad-nerar I wrote to a powerful Hittite king, calling the Hittite “my brother.” The response was essentially, “Who do you think you are, my son? Why should I call you my brother . . . ?”
We should be careful not to draw conclusions about Hebrew from correspondence in other languages, but we find support for the same pattern in the text of Numbers 20. Moses’ letter to Edom was from one leader to an equal leader. At least, that’s how Moses wanted to portray the situation. In this light, Moses’ request and Edom’s response make perfect sense. Moses wants to pass through Edom’s country, not venturing into fields or vineyards, not drinking water from any well. “The People of Israel will stay on the king’s road” (Numbers 20:17). This would be a perfectly reasonable request from one equal leader to another. Edom refuses the request, though, in response to which (Numbers 20:21) “Israel turned away” from Edom. Moses offered friendship based on equality to the king of Edom, and Edom refused.
In II Kings 5:13, we similarly see “my father” used as a sign of respect. The prophet Elisha tells the Syrian general Naaman, who is suffering from disease, to wash in the waters of the Jordan river. Naaman refuses, preferring the waters of his native Damascus. But Naaman’s servants try to convince him to follow the advice of Elisha. “My father,” they begin, making it clear that they are speaking to a superior. They know they are walking a politically dicey path, and to ease the way they start with a term of deference.
In the next chapter, no less than the king of Israel calls Elisha “my father” (II Kings 6:21). Normally a king would not call a prophet “my father,” but normally a king would not ask permission from a prophet before ordering an attack. That is just what happens there, though. “My father,” the king asks Elisha, “shall I kill them?” Elisha has earned the respect of the king, and, accordingly, the king calls him “my father.”
In Joshua 7:19, Joshua chastises Achan. From Joshua 7:1 we know that Achan’s real father is a man named Carmi, not Joshua. Nonetheless, Joshua says, “My son, give glory to the LORD God of Israel and make confession to him” (NRSV). The mighty Joshua is speaking to the less powerful Achan, telling him what to do. He therefore addresses Achan as “my son.”
So we see that “father,” “brother,” and “son” represent power in Biblical Hebrew. Because kinship terms are not typically used this way in English, “son,” “father,” and “brother” are the wrong translations. In English, these terms are used broadly and are not limited to kinship, so the translations don’t jump off the page as wrong. But they are. Moses doesn’t want to portray Israel and Edom as brothers; he wants to portray them as equals. To consider the difference, we might note that politicians do not refer to one another as “son,” “brother,” and “father.”
It is harder to find direct proof that “mother,” “sister,” and “daughter” also represent power structures, because there are far fewer women than men in the Bible, and because the women are less likely than the men to be involved in ambiguous power relationships. But we already know that the female terms are used roughly the way the male terms are, because they appear in parallel.
We also know that there is one case in particular when the nature of a woman’s power relationship would be crucial—and that is when she is with a man. Is she less powerful than the man, equal, or more powerful? All three possibilities are attested to in the Bible. Many readers are surprised that the Bible has the last category, in which a husband serves his wife. While the situation is rare, we do see it in Judges 13. Manoah is basically a bumbling fool (his name translates roughly as “lazy”), and his wife, though unnamed, runs the family and is the one who talks to God. At the other extreme, a woman might be a slave to her husband.
At the beginning of the chapter we saw that the Hebrew words kalah and isha are so general that they include all sorts of power relationships. An isha might be what we would now call a “wife,” on equal footing with her husband. Or she might be a concubine or even a sex slave. Or, at the other and rarer end of the spectrum, she might run the family, as we see with Manoah and his anonymous but dominant wife. Similarly with kalah: A kalah might be a new bride, doted on by her adoring husband, or she might simply be a daughter-in-law, married off to cement a pact or even just for monetary gain.
It is in this context that achoti kalah becomes so important. We have translated kalah as “lover,” recognizing that kalah does not convey any particular state of commitment or any particular hierarchy of power. Inasmuch as the hero and heroine of Song of Songs are dodi and kalah, the heroine might dominate the hero, or she might be his sex slave. We don’t know.
But the addition of achoti makes the situation clear. The hero considers his lover to be “my achot”—that is, as we have seen, “my equal.” She is not his slave. She need not be subservient. She is his equal partner in the relationship, at a time when subservience was considerably more widespread than it is now, and the potential servitude included not merely service but outright slavery.
Song of Songs is about equality between lovers, and the Hebrew phrase means “my lover who is my equal” as opposed to “my sex slave/ concubine/property/etc.” In a world where women were frequently subservient, Song of Songs uses epithets that emphasize not only the physical aspects of the relationship between the unnamed man and the unnamed woman but the power structure between them as well.
They are equals.
So Song of Songs is about romantic, erotic love, but at the same time it centers around equality. The hero is simply “my (male) lover” and—lest there be any question about the nature of the relationship—the heroine is “my equal (female) lover.” The common translation “my sister” completely fails to convey this crucial apsect of Song of Songs.
Finding an English translation that is better is easy (“my equal lover,” for example), but finding one that is entirely accurate is more difficult. Certainly, “my sister, my spouse” and “my sister, my bride” are dreadfully wrong. In addition to the error of “bride” or “spouse,” the word “sister” in English in this context does not convey the sense of equality that is central to Song of Songs.
“My partner, my lover,” comes pretty close in some dialects. But for many speakers, “partner” now primarily means a “same-sex partner.”
We also have another potential translation problem. The Hebrew is very clearly “my achot,” but it is not “my kalah.” Rather, it is “my achot, kalah.” One interesting possibility is that the unnamed male lover in Song of Songs has many female lovers, but only one with whom he is engaged in a relationship of equality. More likely, the “my” modifies the entire phrase. If so, we might translate, “my equal, lover.” But that sounds stilted in English and lacks the poetry of Song of Songs. Two variations, “my lover, my equal” and “my equal, my lover,” seem slightly more poetic, and they are the best we can do. Because the Hebrew puts achoti, “my equal,” even before “lover,” we do the same in English: “my equal, my lover.”
It is perhaps heartening to learn that conscious attention to the role of women in society is as old as the Bible itself, and that in its only full-length description of romantic love, the Bible hits the reader over the head with the centrality of equality in a loving relationship.
The right translation can remind modern readers of this all-important message.