Having now spent five sessions laying foundations for understanding the Song of Songs, it is time to ask whether it is truly a spiritual composition or just about sex. It becomes immediately necessary to reply with the question, “Are those mutually exclusive categories?” If they are, the spiritual reading must be discarded, because sex runs through it like fat in bacon.
Last time, we saw Origen arguing that any erotic interpretation of the poem must be rejected. This forces readers to filter all meaning through some sort of allegory. Not that allegory is bad (Jesus’ parables are all allegories), but as Thomas Percy (1729–1811) noted, it is necessary to understand the plain meaning of the poem before pressing on to any deeper interpretation.
So how sexy is it, really?
This depends a lot on who you ask. It is hard to read the Song without noticing that it is full of kissing, and breasts, and mutual admiration of physical attributes, but not much is going to get rejected by the family filter on your browser. This, however, may simply be because the family filter is not very good at reading between the lines. Some of us remember the old joke about the psychologist showing Rorschach pictures to a client who constantly sees erotic images. When the doctor points out that there may be an issue, the patient replies, “Hey, you’re the one showing me all the dirty pictures!”
Are modern scholars simply seeing sex when there is none? We do seem to live in a sex-obsessed society. Certainly, Origen would agree with this, but consider the following oft-quoted passage:
Open to me, my sister, my darling,
my dove, my perfect one.
For my head is drenched with dew,
my hair with droplets of the night.
…My love thrust his ‘hand’ through the opening, [1]
and my feelings were stirred [2] for him.
Song 5.2, 4 (HCSB)
The context leaves us just enough wiggle room to read this as either sexual or chaste, depending on our own temperament. That restraint (or ambivalence) is one of the reasons for seeing more of an influence from Egyptian love poetry, with its erotic metaphors, than from the more explicit Mesopotamian marriage of the gods material.
There are some cases, though, where more risqué meanings may be hidden in double-entendre. ‘Hand,’ for example, may be a euphemism for male anatomy (as in Isa. 57.8), and ‘mouth’ for the feminine equivalent (Prv. 30.20)[3]. In other cases a plainer eroticism could be lost in translation. The translators themselves may be concerned to keep it G-rated. Some words could go either way.
So, if that is the plain meaning (recalling Percy’s exhortation above), can it still be spiritual? I believe the answer is, ‘yes,’ but a fuller investigation will have to wait until the next entry in this saga.
[1] Lit., hole, cave. But there is a door in the context, too, so some read this as ‘keyhole,’ which would have been larger than the ones we are familiar with.
[2] "my insides churned."
[3] The ‘kisses of the mouth’ in 1.2, though, are what they sound like, according to Egyptologist Michael V. Fox, distinguished from the ones with the nose—what we might call ‘Eskimo kissing.’
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