Abstract
Ever since the sexual revolution when it was determined that woman would no longer passively submit to the rigid and degrading roles inflicted upon her by patriarchy, woman has been searching for new ways to express herself and individuate as a woman. Womanhood has been in the making since then and the exploration of the endless possibilities that are open for a woman to express herself as a woman has been exhilarating. This introduction situates the book in this movement of exploration as well as explores the genre of wisdom literature to which the Song of Songs belongs.
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Notes
- 1.
Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 283.
- 2.
Ibid.
- 3.
Ibid., 74.
- 4.
Ibid., 273.
- 5.
Anais Nin, In Favor of the Sensitive Man (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1994), 10.
- 6.
Ibid., 29.
- 7.
Ibid., 10.
- 8.
Cf. Catherine Chalier, Reading the Torah, translated by Michael B. Smith (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2017). In this fascinating work, Chalier argues that the Torah is not a rigid text meant to remain solidified through time, but rather a fluid text, ever susceptible to being revitalized by the new interpretations that each generation brings to the table. It is precisely this ability to remain open to new interpretations which makes for the lasting relevance of the Hebrew Bible and not, as some might think, its existence as a rock-solid immutable text.
- 9.
Cf. Simone De Beauvoir: “Eve was not created for herself but as Adam’s companion and drawn from his side. In the Bible few women are noteworthy for their actions: Ruth merely found herself a husband. Esther gained the Jews’ grace by kneeling before Ahasuerus, and even then she was only a docile instrument in Mordecai’s hands; Judith was bolder, but she too obeyed the priests and her exploit has a dubious aftertaste: it could not be compared to the pure and shining triumph of young David” (The Second Sex, 303).
- 10.
Numbers 27.
- 11.
Judges 4–5.
- 12.
Not to mention the subversive roles at times adopted by the Matriarchs. I am reminded here of God telling Abraham to heed his wife Sarah’s voice in chasing Hagar away. I am also reminded of Rebekah’s subversive move to forcefully make her youngest the heir to God’s blessing.
- 13.
Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays About Judaism (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1997), 31.
- 14.
This is also Bloch’s observation: “The Hebrew Bible, an anthology of works composed over the period of nearly a millennium is a very heterogeneous collection … [and] not every book meets the test of piety” (Chana Bloch and Ariel Bloch, The Song of Songs: The World’s First Great Love Poem [New York: The Modern Library, 2006]).
- 15.
I am thinking of the book of Ecclesiastes’ subversion of the creation story replacing God’s description of the world as “good” with his own perspective on it as “meaningless.” One can also understand the book of Job and the suffering endured by the pious man Job as a subversion of the Pentateuch’s worldview that piety attracts divine blessing and providence. The Book of Proverbs even is subversive in its sourcing wisdom in human experience of a father teaching his son rather than in divine wisdom.
- 16.
In the Mishnah there exists a discussion between the rabbis where the Song of Song’s legitimacy is put into question. In this portion of the Mishnah, Rabbi Akiba famously salvages the Song by saying: “All of eternity in its entirety is not as worthy of the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel” (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Yadayim, 3:5).
- 17.
Cf. Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority,” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, edited by Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Carlson (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 1992).
- 18.
André Lacocque, Romance She Wrote (Salem, OR: Trinity Press International, 1998), 17.
- 19.
This subversive character of the Song of Songs has also been observed by Whedbee who notes the “subversive spirit of the Song, representing an inversion of customary roles in patriarchal and royal society” adding that “at the beginning and ending of the Song, the woman appears in the commanding and controlling position, inviting the king to kiss her and then sending away her lover at the end with an imperious ‘flee away’” (“Paradox and Parody in the Song of Solomon.” In The Song of Songs: A Feminist Companion to the Bible, 1st series, edited by Athalya Brenner [Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993], 268).
- 20.
Cf. note 21.
- 21.
Actually for Carol Fontaine the latter interpretation of the Shulamite’s blackness as testifying to her being a black woman is much more plausible than the common interpretation of her dark skin stemming from her belonging to the working-class people who typically were a shade darker for having to work in the fields all day: “I still wonder what has made modern readers so colorblind, preferring to spin out a tale of class conflict between urban and rural women. It certainly cannot be because these issues of race have been settled in the lived contexts of most of the critics! Though the Bible is not explicit on this topic, later traditions connected the Queen of Sheba with the songs of the Shulamite, as have artists through history” (Carol Fontaine, “The Voice of the Turtle,” in The Song of Songs: A Feminist Companion to the Bible, 2nd series, edited by Athalya Brenner and Carole Fontaine (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 179.
- 22.
I’m referring here of course to the beautiful piece by Tupac “Keep your head up” released in 1993.
- 23.
As such, the text makes a powerful countercultural and subversive move within the Biblical context which has traditionally been less than courteous with its black characters. Thus, according to André Lacocque, “against this background of texts that place negative judgment on Africa or that treat a black woman with contempt, the Shulamite proudly declares herself to be black and beautiful. Her blackness is by no means a flaw, but rather adds to her attractiveness” (“I am Black and Beautiful.” In Scrolls of Love: Ruth and the Song of Songs, edited by Lesleigh Cushing Strahlberg and Peter S. Hawkins [New York: Fordham University Press, 2006], 167). Carol Fontaine makes a similar point: “Before there was black power or the defiant afro hair cult instead of straightening, there was the Song, calling out to a racist culture that cherished its Bible that blackness did not rule out the presence of beauty” (Carol , Fontaine. “Song? Songs? Whose Song? Reflections of a Radical Reader,” in Scrolls of Love: Ruth and the Song of Songs, 299).
- 24.
This is all the more the case when one considers that the Hebrew conjunction translated as “yet” also translates as “and.” Another possible translation might then be “dark am I and lovely.”
- 25.
I sometimes wonder whether the person who coined the term “black and beautiful” did it with our Song in mind. Arguably not, since it is not until recently that the expression in Hebrew has been translated as possibly also meaning “black and beautiful” and not only as commentators suggested in the past “black yet beautiful.” The Hebrew preposition waw which connects black with beautiful holds the double meaning of “yet” and “and.”
- 26.
This ostentatious absence of the father has been noted by Trible who counts “seven references to the mother, without a single mention of a father” thereby underscoring “anew the prominence of the female in the lyrics of love” (“Love’s Lyrics Redeemed.” In The Song of Songs: A Feminist Companion to the Bible, 2nd series, 116).
- 27.
Such rules were quite specific and are enumerated as follows by Renita Weems: “Sex in Israel was completely confined by law to marriage; any deviations, according to the law codes, bore fatal consequences for women and severe penalties for men … considerable care was taken especially in Hebrew law to define when, with whom and under what circumstances sex was permissible and when the boundaries of intimate relations might be undermined” (Battered Love: Marriage, Sex, and Violence in the Hebrew Prophets [Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995], 4–5). Add to these rules concerning marriage the complex principles guiding courtship and/or any social interactions between men and women as would later be compiled in rabbinic literature: “Rules of etiquette prohibited a man’s meeting alone or talking privately with a woman (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Kiddushin 4:12b; 81a) or even talking to her at all, except in the most minimal way (Roberto Badenas, Meet Jesus [Pittsburgh: Autumn House, 1995], 82). In our text, all of these laws are broken by the Shulamite.
- 28.
This has been observed by Chana Bloch in her recent translation and commentary on the Song of Songs. Commenting on the lovers’ freedom she says: “For centuries exegetes have considered their relationship chaste, ignoring the plain sense of the Hebrew. The word dodim which occurs six times in the Song is almost always translated as love, though it refers specifically to sexual love. Moreover, the metaphors of feasting suggest fulfillment, particularly when they are in the perfect tense and the verb to come into or to enter often has patently sexual meaning in Biblical Hebrew” (Chana Bloch and Ariel Bloch. The Song of Songs: The World’s First Great Love Poem, 3). Furthermore, the habit of the lovers’ meeting secretly in the countryside and night and of parting at day break is further indication, according to Bloch, that the lovers are not married (cf. Ibid., 3).
- 29.
Ibid., 176.
- 30.
Ibid., 49.
- 31.
Ibid., 7.
- 32.
Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1978), 161.
- 33.
Ibid., p. 151.
- 34.
André Lacocque, Romance She Wrote, 72.
- 35.
Thus the Song of Songs might be read as a reflection on a young maiden’s initiative journey to love in order to crystallize the wisdom, lessons of love to be learned from it as Daphna Arbel observes: “The woman in the Song of Songs appears to describe a process in which she reflects upon her feelings of love and attraction towards her lover” (Daphna Arbel. “My Vineyard, My Very Own, Is for Myself,” in The Song of Songs: A Feminist Companion to the Bible, 2nd series, 91).
- 36.
The idea that the Song of Songs might have been authored by a woman, and perhaps even by the Shulamite herself, has been put forth by a number of commentators. Chana Bloch, for example, observes that “the prominence of women in the Song and the unusually sympathetic rendering of a woman’s perspective, has led some readers to wonder whether the author might have been a woman. … In the case of the Song, the questions arises naturally, since women are associated to some extent with poetry and song in the Bible. … Perhaps it would help to explain why the Song is so remarkably different in spirit from much of the Bible” (Chana Bloch and Ariel Bloch. The Song of Songs: The World’s First Great Love Poem, 20). Bloch adds that the fact that the text mentions Solomon as the author of the book does not mean anything since “it was common practice in Antiquity to attribute works of literature to eminent figures from the past” and as such, “no one takes the attribution of 1:1 seriously today” (Ibid., 21). Athalya Brenner makes the same observation regarding a possible female authorship of the Song basing it on the extraordinary absence of the “male bias generally found in Biblical literature” (The Song of Songs: A Feminist Companion to the Bible, 1st series, 32). Goitein gives an argument for the female authorship of the book based on the fact that, contrary to most erotic works of the Near East, our Song contains not only extensive descriptions of the woman’s body but “the novelty of our book is perhaps precisely in the fact that it also contains a detailed description of the male beloved” (“The Song of Songs: A Female Composition.” In The Song of Songs: A Feminist Companion to the Bible, 1st series, 58).
- 37.
Song 2:7, 3:5, 8:4.
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Doukhan, A. (2019). Introduction: The Unconventional Feminine. In: Womanist Wisdom in the Song of Songs. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30052-4_1
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