Gender and the Shaping of Desire in the Song of Songs and Its Interpretation

The work lives to the extent it has influence. Included within the influence of a work is that which is accomplished in the consumption of the work as well as in the work itself That which happens with the work is an expression of what the work is. -Karl Kosik' Take a look at introductions to commentaries on the Song of Songs or at recent essays on the book, and you will often find a common tale concerning the Song and its readers. This tale of reading and misreading can be summarized as follows: Long ago, in ancient Israel a poet wrote passionate poetry about human love that we now find in the Song of Songs. Somehow this poetry found its way into the Hebrew Scriptures. Then, in the early centuries of the common era, Jews and then Christians, confronted with such erotic material in the heart of the canon, reread the Song as a song of love between God and God's people. This misreading was then perpetuated through various grotesque elaborations through the centuries. Those who read the Song correctly as a song of love were brutally persecuted. Only in recent years was the Song liberated from the dark ages of its misinterpretation. Using the tools of biblical criticism, scholars uncovered the original focus of the Song on human love and unmasked the repressive interpretations of the past as the misreadings that they were. Although this tale is not universal, it is remarkably pervasive. For example, the key element of attack on earlier readings is evident in the following comments by Marvin Pope in the introduction to his commentary on the Song of Songs: The flexibility and adaptability of the allegorical method, the ingenuity and imagination with which it could be, and was, applied, the difficulty and virtual impossibility of imposing objective controls, the astounding and bewildering results of almost two millennia of application to the Canticle, have all contributed to its progressive discredit and almost complete desertion.2 Lest we see this understanding as isolated, I include a second quotation, this time from one of the most able German commentators on the Song, Othmar Keel: ... zu welch willkurlichen unbefriedigenden and haufig himmelschreiend grotesken Rusultaten das "tiefere" Verstandnis der Allegoristen fiirhte, ist in jeder Geschichte der Auslegung des Hohelied nachzulesen.3 One can read in any history of exegesis of the Song of Songs what arbitrary, unsatisfactory, and revoltingly grotesque results were produced by an allegorical search for a "deeper meaning." (My translation) These are but fragments of a broader perspective found in most critical work on the Song of Songs.4 In sum, this tale of reading and misreading of the Song of Songs has an almost mythic power. One reason for this may be that this tale resonates with the "myth of repression" that Michel Foucault has documented in modern discourse about sex. This myth tells us that we are in a time of liberation from a long process of sexual repression in the Western world. Yet Foucault and others have pointed out that the very discourses that are used as evidence for sexual repression, say in the Victorian period, were actually shaping, naming, and even instigating the very practices and development of sexual identities that they seemed designed to suppress.5 Much critical scholarship on the Song of Songs over the last decades has unconsciously participated in this modern construction of sexualities through reproducing a mini-variant of the myth of repression discussed by Foucault. In place of general sexual repression, we have the specific story of the repression of the original erotic meaning of the Song. In place of more general sexual liberation, we have scholarly recovery of the original erotic meaning of the Song. Recent readings of the Song as promoting non-fertility-related erotic love echo the more general shift in industrialized societies toward nonreproductive sexuality. …