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T he Songs of Solomon (or Odes of Solomon) is one of the great wisdom poetry anthologies of antiquity. No more lyrically powerful and imaginative collection of poems exists in ancient religions. Their eclectic outsider’s vision, the outrageously imaginative symbolism, the conversation with the soul and the divine, the passionate embrace of love, and the separation, search, and encounter with deity—all of these aspects make it a major volume of religious poetry: a book of light, knowledge, and the enlightened voice.

Until 1909 only five odes from this very important hymnbook were known. They appeared in the Pistis Sophia, a gnostic text preserved in Coptic. Then, in 1909, the archaeologist and Syriac scholar J. Rendel Harris discovered a four-hundred-year-old Syriac text of the collection. The original language of the songs was probably Greek, although some scholars argue for a Syriac original. Harris conjectured a Jewish-Christian origin from the first century CE . Others suggest a Jewish original with a Christian redaction. Walter Bauer offers a third possibility, that the songs constitute a second-century gnostic hymnbook.

Scholars disagree over how gnostic the Songs of Solomon really are. Many scholars, from Harris and Gunkel to Bultmann, Jonas, Grant, and Rudolph, take the songs to be gnostic, but others, such as Charlesworth, Chadwick, Burkitt, Braun, and Worrell, do not see them as fully gnostic. In his book The Odes of Solomon, James Charlesworth argues that these songs are not gnostic but a mystical Jewish-Christian hymnbook, “a tributary to Gnosticism which flows from Jewish apocalyptic mysticism.” 1 Whatever the origin and degree of gnosticism, in their present form it is clear that the Songs of Solomon are based on Jewish sacred song tradition as exemplified in the Psalms and Song of Songs, that many of them have been subjected to a Christian overlay, and that their gnostic references are more significant than their mere inclusion in the Pistis Sophia. Harris also points out many quotations of the songs in the works of the early fathers of the church.

The songs were of particular interest because of their christology, that is, the use of Christ as a speaker in the songs, and for their deep dependence on the Gospel of John, which is typical of many gnostic texts. Frequently, the structure of a song consists of a prologue on the part of the singer, then an oracular statement ex ore Christi, and finally a doxology in which the congregation is to participate. 2 In his study of the Songs of Solomon, Gerald Blaszcak notes that they are composed largely in the first person singular as “individual confession songs.” 3

Many of these songs are hauntingly beautiful. The images soar. The diction is rich with surprising references, such as “milk from the lord,” which apologists, dismayed by the female imagery for the divine, explain away as odd symbolism. Here are songs as poetic, profound, and astonishing as the most compelling songs and psalms of the Hebrew Bible. So we read: “The dew of the lord rinsed me with silence and a cloud of peace rose over my head” (Song 35); or, with typical chariot imagery of Jewish mysticism: “I went up to the light of truth as into a chariot and truth took me across canyons and ravines” (Song 38). The beautiful imagery encompasses Christian vocabulary as well: “My heart was cloven and there appeared a flower, and grace sprang up” (Song 11). The thought of all three prevailing traditions, Jewish, Christian, and gnostic, is suggested in Song 7: “The father of knowledge is the word of knowledge. He who created wisdom is wiser than his works. ”