Robert Alter - Song of Songs - Passover - Kisses Sweeter Than Wine - "Wondrous" - "Delicate Yet Frank Sensuality Celebration of Young Love" - The Art of Biblical Poetry - Shabbas Pesach - 200+ days for Hostages and the IDF in the War Against Hamas and Iran - Am Yisrael Chai

Song of Songs - Pesach 2024

MS: Little did I know in 1964 that this song of teenage puppy love, of the longing for sweet kisses, comes from the Hebrew Bible:

The staying power of the poetry of the Song of Songs is simply unbelievable.

Robert Alter on Song of Songs:

Chapter 1 - Notes

1. The Song of Songs. In biblical idiom this formation indicates a superlative—the best of songs. The exquisite poetry that follows surely justifies the title.

2. Let him kiss me. The Hebrew yeshaqeini puns on yashqeini, “let him give me drink,” since the kisses are likened to wine.

loving. The Hebrew dodim suggests lovemaking, a sense already understood in the Middle Ages. The medieval Hebrew poet Yehudah HaLevi concludes an allegorical poem clearly based on that Song of Songs with this explicitly sexual line, spoken by the beloved (Israel) to God: “Put your strength in me, for I will give you my loving [dodai].” One should note that the young woman begins by imagining her desirable lover from a certain distance, in the third person, and then in the second half of the line closes the gap by addressing him more intimately in the second person.

3. For fragrance. The Song of Songs revels in the pleasures of all five senses.....

[MS: See similar thoughts on Song of Songs in My Jewish Learning: Understanding the Song of Songs, "unabashedly sensuous, even at times quite erotic, paeon to love. ...memories of (when) loves richness ... firsr touched with its magic"]

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In The Art of Biblical Poetry, (2011), Alter's master work on the Bible's unique literary style, in Chapter 8, The Garden of Metaphor, p.231-32:

“The SONG OF SONGS comprises what are surely the most exquisite love poems that have come down to us from ancient Israel ....

The most likely sources of distinction, however, between the Song of Songs and the rest of biblical poetry lie not in chronology but in genre, in purpose, and perhaps in social context. Although there are some striking love motifs elsewhere in biblical poetry in Psalms, between man and God, in the Prophets, between God and Israel- the Song of Songs is the only surviving instance of purely secular love poetry from ancient Israel.

The erotic symbolism of the Prophets would provide later ages an effective warrant for reading the Song of Songs as a religious allegory

but in fact the continuous celebration of passion and its pleasures makes this the most consistently secular of all biblical texts …. "

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Alter's Introduction to Song of Songs is just one of Alter's 28 essays, often overlooked, in his translation of all of the Hebrew Bible. Alter writes that these poems are "wondrous". pp.583-84:

"The extraordinary variegation of the books of the Hebrew Bible in style, genre, and outlook is one of the most exciting aspects of this anthology that spans nearly a millennium. But even against that background, the Song of Songs stands out in its striking distinctiveness—a distinctiveness that deserves to be called wondrous.

The delicate yet frank sensuality of this celebration of young love, without reference to God or covenant or Torah, has lost nothing of its immediate freshness over the centuries: these are among the most beautiful love poems that have come down to us from the whole ancient world.

Famously, the erotic nature of the Song constituted a challenge for the framers of the canon, both Jewish and Christian, and their response was to read the poems allegorically—in the case of the early rabbis, as the love between the Holy One and Israel, and in the case of the Church fathers, as the love between Christ and the Church. “If all the writings are holy,” Rabbi Akiva proclaimed in a discussion of the Song’s canonicity, “the Song of Songs is holy of holies.”

Both religious traditions, however fervently they clung to this allegorical vision, never succeeded in entirely blocking the erotic power of the text. There are, for example, medieval Hebrew liturgical poems that earnestly follow the theological plot of the allegory yet knowingly or sometimes unwittingly let the young lovers’ delight in the carnal consummation of love make its presence felt.

Little is known about the origins of these poems. Different elaborate theories have been proposed about them: that they are wedding poems, that they should be read as drama, that they originated in poems to a pagan love goddess, that they constitute a single architectonic poetic structure, that they are direct adaptations of Egyptian or Mesopotamian love poetry. All such theories should prudently be rejected. ...

....

Much of the enchantment and the sensual richness of the celebration of love in the Song inhere in its metaphoric language.

Some of the metaphors drawn from the animal kingdom and from architecture ... may seem a little strange to modern readers, though that probably was not true for the ancient audience. Other figurative comparisons—eyes like doves, breasts like twin gazelles, kisses sweeter than wine—retain all their lovely expressiveness after more than twenty-two centuries.

There is a recurrent shuttling between the metaphor and its referent, in some instances creating a sense of virtual interchangeability between the two that enables the poet to speak candidly of sexual gratification without seeming to do so. In a related kind of poised ambiguity, we often don’t know, because of the figurative language, whether we are inside or outside. ...

Here is an exquisite metaphor from the first chapter: “A sachet of myrrh is my lover to me, / all night between my breasts. / A cluster of henna, my lover to me, / in the vineyards of Ein-Gedi” (1:13–14). A young woman making herself desirable might possibly wear a sachet of fragrance between her breasts. Reading the lines, we of course realize what the lover, playfully miniaturized as a sachet, is doing in that place, but the realization is nuanced in feeling by the charming metaphor. And the concluding verset, “in the vineyards of Ein-Gedi,” leaves us pleasantly hovering between possibilities: has the henna of the metaphor been grown at the Ein-Gedi oasis overlooking the Dead Sea, or rather, in a slide through the metaphoric to the literal, are the lovers actually enjoying their love in the vineyards of Ein-Gedi, as elsewhere vineyards or gardens become their bower?

These ambiguities, always evocative, never arch, between figure and referent .... This distinctive use of metaphor does not explain everything, but it is surely one of the features of the Song of Songs that makes it among the most beautiful collections of love poetry in the Western tradition."

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[MS: Alter's entire translation of The Hebrew Bible, with thousands of Notes and 28 Introductory essays, is available for purchase for under $75, Kindle version, a remarkable opportunity.

In the quotations here, the formatting, edits and additions are supplied as indicated.

For more on the issues discussed here, there is The Robert Alter MS Sefaria Sheet Collection, over 50 sheets currently. For example, Alter's often overlooked Notes and the 28 Introductory essays are discussed at length in Sheets in the Collection.]

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MS: We shall bring the Hostages home to us.

We will not forget.

We will seek justice.

We shall prevail over the Amalek that, in the words of the Haggadah, arises in every generation to destroy us, to erase our Peoplehood and to obliterate Jews' civilization from ancient to modern times.

We prevail. Am Yisrael Chai:

I fear no harm..." - Robert Alter's translation of Psalm 23

April 28, 2024