The Gruffalo and the Song of Songs

 As I continue working through the Song of Songs (I preached the first sermon in our series on Sunday), I started looking at the part of the Song which is most easily explained with reference to the popular children's book, The Gruffalo. If you aren't aware of this, it's a fun story about a mouse's ruse to scare off various predators with reference to an horrible, made up, animal. 

He has terrible tusks and terrible claws
And terrible teeth in his horrible jaws.
He has knobbly knees and turned out toes
And a poisonous wart at the end of his nose.
His eyes are orange, his tongue is black;
He has purple prickles all over his back.

Essentially what the mouse is doing is walking his eyes up and down the (supposedly) imaginary creature and describing him. And that's what happens in the Song of Songs! This technique is far older than the Song and is obviously still in use (Julia Donaldson published her tale in 1999). 

This technique is given an Arabic name, "waṣf"  (or just "wasf" if the s with a hireq doesn't come out), and there are four substantial wasfs in the Song. Three of them (4:1-7; 6:4-10; 7:1-9[2-10]) are him describing her, and they are always addressed to the second person ("you"). Only one of them is her describing him (5:10-16), and interestingly it is addressed not to the second person but to the third ("he"). I find this especially interesting because she does most of the talking in the song, but evidently, at least from the wasfs (as well as the vibe), much more about him than too him (I could and should work out the actual proportion some time). 

As they come in chapters 4;5;6;7, they are all found in the latter half of the book (again, roughly; there are eight chapters), but all four of them cover essentially the same sorts of terrain. Of five elements, they all contain at least one instance of it (with one exception), and furthermore, each of them has some mention which could be seen to do with the court or the military or something in that vein. 

Here are the four wasfs then in summary,

You can see that I've smudged a few words together as "lovely/darling", with דוד (beloved), יפה (beautiful), רעיתי (my darling), תמתי (my perfect one), and so on. I think it's fair to lump in belly for him with breasts for her; and commentators love to say that hand (5:14) must be a phallic euphemism, but there's very little that people won't say is a euphemism for something, especially in the Song. But grammatically that's a bit weird, because it's literally "pair of hands" (it's in the dual form). 

If we have a look at the categories across the four wasfs, we can see how common the common things actually are: 

Only breasts/torso fails to rate a mention in chapter 6; otherwise all the categories are consistently found across the four wasfs. There are of course some extra elements (4:7 for instance) which doesn't fit so well into any category, but by and large there is a remarkable consistency both in content and, to a certain extent, in order also (far more than one would expect if it were a collection of various poems).

Of particular note for me is that the lovely/darling category bookends the wasfs (notwithstanding its triple appearance in chapters 6,7). The wasfs are thus sealed off as distinct units, even if they still are important in their context. 

Also of note, reading through George Athas's commentary, is the use of military imagery. Athas reads the Solomon character negatively, and sees references to the tower of David (4:4), the queens and concubines (6:8-9) as signs of her oppression and her immanent assimilation into Solomon's harem. I wonder whether the references to the tower of Lebanon watching over Damascus (7:4-5) and to Tarshish [stones?], pillars, and Lebanon (5:14-15) are further illustrations of this theme. Towers are military buildings, and these places, whilst far off and beautiful, are also places of power and oppression, which simple viticulturists (she) and shepherds (he) cannot hope to withstand.

I don't think I need to say anything about the other categories - they're all fairly self-explanatory. There are some questions around the translation of teeth in 4:2 and 7:9, as there are with many words in the Song. 

So it's worth looking out for these wasfs when you come across them in the Song. They reuse and develop imagery from elsewhere in the Song, they bounce off each other, and as you get into the individual wasfs themselves, there is much more to look into. I'm particularly interested the way 5:10-16 and 6:4-10 work with each other, which I hope to blog about soon - my next sermon, in a couple of weeks, is on 5:9-6:10.