Structure of the Song of Songs

 I started a four week series today on the OT book of the Song of Songs, aka Canticles, aka Song of Solomon. I'm following the four-part structure in George Athas's commentary:

1:1-2:7
2:8-5:8
5:9-6:10
6:11-8:14

As he also did with his Ecclesiastes commentary, these are essentially preaching units rather than clear turning points in the book. And when you survey the literature, it's clear why one would want to be less rather than more prescriptive about the sections. Following especially Michael Fox, recent commentators perceive somewhere between a dozen and four-dozen separate songs; as such the "song" is actually "songs", an anthology of love poems akin to a collection of the short fragments we have of Egyptian love poetry from the New Kingdom (1500-1000 BC). 

David Dorsey has a good summary of the various positions to that point (1990) and suggests yet another approach, which focuses on keywords and refrains, as do Exum (1973) and Shea (1980) before him. They are roughly chiastic, but their choice of keywords and refrains seem somewhat arbitrary. 

The clearest markers in the text to me suggest a straightforward structure as follows. If we take the first verse as the introduction of a narrator, and take the sayings directed to the "Daughters of Jerusalem" as the end of sections, then we are left with the following structure (I have included the final verse of each of the central sections):

1:1 Introduction

1:2-2:7 Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you
by the gazelles and by the does of the field:
Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires.

2:8-3:5 Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you
by the gazelles and by the does of the field:
Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires.

3:6-5:8 Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you
— if you find my beloved, what will you tell him?
Tell him I am faint with love.

5:9-8:4 Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you:
Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires.

8:5-14 Epilogue

It is the variations on this key phrase and the not grossly disproportionately different section sizes which are among the reasons to commend this structure. To my mind the other approaches seem vague and mutually contradictory. 

However, by focussing on this one phrase and its variations, there is one clear phrase which divides the text into roughly equal sections, each concluding with a speech to the "daughters of Jerusalem", who play the role of the audience, substituting in for us. The variations are interesting; unfortunately the two most promising journal articles which look like they deal with this are in Spanish and Hebrew, and not available online. 

It is however worth noting that the first two and fuller iterations of the phrase include the words "gazelles" and "does", both of which sound similar, respectively, to "[Yhwh of] hosts" and "[God] most high". Swear, in other words, not just by creatures in the field, but by the God who created both the creatures and their fields. 

The first and second occurrences of the phrase are identical, and the fourth occurrence likewise, but for the middle phrase (as I've arranged it above). The third is the only one which is vastly different, which could suggest that it plays a different role to the others. However, that being said, its similarity is probably key, and its differences only go to highlight its position and importance.

Despite what I've said, I'm still in the early stages and may well change my mind on everything, but it seems good for now. To paraphrase Michael Fox on Ecclesiastes, it's about whether the structure works; does it make better sense of the text? Or, in other words, does it preach? We shall see.