Poetic and Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament
REL 310
Week 9 Class Notes - Part 1
Song of Songs
The author of the textbook gives one interpretation of who the characters are in the Song of Songs.
There is another interpretation, which I prefer, and that is that it is a set of dialogues between the Shulamite (the girl) and her lover (who may or may not be King Solomon), without any third party trying to force the girl into a marriage which she did not want. Solomon may have written this set of dialogues to illustrate the beauties of human love in general, rather than himself being in love with a girl called the Shulamite, or he may indeed have loved a girl from the the north country and brought her as a bride to his palace, where she felt that the other women looked down on her.
Note on page 831 - "hapax legomenon", plural "hapax legomena" is a Greek term meaning "spoken once" or "mentioned once" used for words which only occur once in the Bible. They are sometimes difficult to translate properly because one can't look at how they are used in other places to help with translating them in the passage under consideration.
"Syntax" means the grammatical structure of a sentence - the order of the words and how they function together to give the sense of the sentence.
Finding out who is being addressed : In old English, we used to show whether one person or several people were being addressed : "you" was used when talking to a group of people, "thou" was used when talking to one person. Now-a-days "thou" is sometimes used when speaking to God, or when one wants to sound Shakespearian, or in a few dialects such as those in the North of England.
In modern English, "you" can mean one or several people, and is also used for either a man or a woman.
Hebrew uses different words for one man, one woman, a group of women, or a group of men. By analyzing the forms of the Hebrew words, one can distinguish who is being addressed in the various parts of the Song of Songs, and use that to work out who the speaker is likely to be.
Go here for the text of the Song of Songs, marked so as to indicate the probable speaker
Copyright © 1999 Shirley J. Rollinson, all Rights Reserved
