The troublesome structure of the third wasf of the Song of Songs

I blogged a couple of days about the four wasfs in the Song; 4:1-7; 5:10-16; 6:4-10; 7:1-9. Of particular interest to me was the back and forth between her (5:10-16) and him (6:4-10). The structure of the interaction is quite clear, albeit complicated.

The section 5:9-6:10 (which I am preaching on in a week or so) comes as a direct response to the conflict in the preceding verses (5:6-7) and the plea to the daughters of Jerusalem to pass on a message to him, should they find him. They ask two questions, which each receive a response from her. The first, in 5:9, is essentially, what is so good about him? The second, in 6:1, asks where he might be found. The section (I discussed the break up here) concludes with his wasf, and that's what I really want to discuss. 

But first, the questions from the daughters of Jerusalem both follow a very similar ABAC structure:

5:9 How's your beloved better

beautiful woman?

how's your beloved better

to charge us so?

6:1 Where's your beloved gone

beautiful woman?

where's your beloved turned

so we can look with you?

Her response to the first question is a wasf (again, check my previous post for a description of this), while the answer to the second is a relatively straightforward answer. Again, to summarise the whole section, we have:

5:9 what is he like?

5:10-16 he's pretty amazing

6:1 where did he go?

6:2-3 down to his garden

6:4-10 she's pretty amazing too

5:9 and 6:1 are very similar, and so is 5:10-16 and 6:4-10. Her second answer (6:2-3) is different, and looks forward to the next scene (beginning 6:11). It is a simple ABAB answer:

6:2a My beloved has gone to his garden

6:2b a description of his garden - spices and lilies

6:3a My beloved and me are each others

6:3b he's browsing among the lilies

So that's all quite interesting, but the wasfs are where I want to get to, and particularly the second. But before we get there, the first wasf has a structure which I foreshadowed in my earlier post, which is to begin and end with praise, and then in the body of the wasf (no pun intended) to talk through the attributes of the body with metaphors and similes. 

A 5:10 my beloved is distinguished among 10,000

B 5:11-16a ten-part wasf

A' 5:11b this is my beloved, daughters of Jerusalem

The wasfs in 4:1-7 and 7:1-9[2-10] are essentially of the same form as this one, even if the one in chapter 7 has a little more going on. But if we can say this is the "standard form"—a list of attributes bookended by a general adoration—then how does the wasf of chapter 6 compare?

The short answer is it's complicated. Sort of. If I were a German text critic of a century ago, I would have no problem excising verses, to make his wasf a mirror of hers. But I would be pressed between two options—mirroring hers and excising 6:8-9, or a chiastic structure excising his wasf (6:5-7) altogether. Here are the two options:

His adoration with wasf (no 8–9):

6:4 my darling is as distinguished as Tirzah and Jerusalem

6:5–7 four-part wasf

6:10 the one who appears like the dawn is as distinguished as the moon and the sun

His adoration with chiasm (no 5–7):

A 6:4 she is majestic like the sight of two great cities

B 6:8 though there be courtly women

C 6:9a my dove, my perfect one, is unique

B` 6:9b the courtly women praise her

A` 6:10 she is majestic like the sight of two heavenly bodies

Both of these have great structural integrity, and I don't know how you could choose between them if you were of a mood to excise one or the other. I really like the way the second chiastic structure draws out the parallel between the three groups of courtly women: 

6:8 Sixty queens there may be,

and eighty concubines,

and virgins (almot) beyond number;

6:9 but my dove, my perfect one, is unique,

the only daughter of her mother,

the favourite of the one who bore her.

The young women (bnot) beheld her

and queens called her blessed

and concubines praised her.

You do need to change the line breaks in the second half of 6:9 to reveal the three-part parallels between 6:8 and 6:9b; EVV have "the young women saw her and called her blessed; the queens and concubines praised her." But the Hebrew order is "Saw her did daughters and blessed her queens and concubines praised her." All you have to do is add "did" before queens (a perfectly acceptable addition in Hebrew) and you've got a perfect mirror to 6:8. This also equates virgins/maidens with young women/daughters, which again makes perfect sense even without the parallelism; with it, it is only enhanced. 

What we are left with then are two wasfs, hers and his, which are a matching pair; his is developed further to include his highlighting her uniqueness, even among the presence of the court harem. 

The final thing to mention is the verb דגל, dgl, a verb which is related to the word for "banner", but, according to HALOT, has some kind of base meaning like to be distinguished, which fits the three uses in the song here. It occurs as a qal passive participle in 5:10 to talk about him, the stand out among 10,000. And it occurs as a niphal participle in both 6:4 AND 6:10 in identical constructions, despite the confusingly different NIV translations. 

What's going on then as the bookends of his speech in 6:4-10 is a comparison of her to two pairs of great things. In the case of 6:4 it is two cities, Tirzah (the erstwhile capital of the Northern Kingdom) and Jerusalem (the capital of the Southern Kingdom and of course all Israel under the United Monarchy). George Athas suggests this is referring to the cohorts of women at two centres of Solomon's power, and others too have problems equating a woman with not just one but two cities. In the case of 6:10 she is compared to the brightness of the moon and the sun. In both cases there are two great objects, there is the exact phrase "as majestic as these distinguished [sights], and there is a description of her to which she these objects are to be compared; in 6:4 it is "my darling" and in 6:10 it is her "appearing like the dawn" which is to be compared to the brightness of the two heavenly luminaries.  

For me the parallelism between the two bookends is primary, and it's worth noting it's not the actual cities and luminaries to which she is compared, but the beauty and brightness of them. And sure, they may be no extant textual evidence of women being compared to cities, but this is the Song, so why not? And I would think the rich history of Jerusalem being personified (cf. esp. Lamentations, Isaiah) would mean this is far from a problem.

In conclusion then, his response in 6:4-10 integrates two separate poetic forms, the bookended wasf, and the chiastic structure, the latter reusing the bookends of the wasf. This enables him to both respond to her wasf (5:10-16) in kind, while also developing on the form to highlight her unassailable uniqueness.

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.

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. 

Reflecting on daily Bible reflections

 Back in late March this year, as we all went into lockdown, as in-person church shut down, I went to sleep thinking maybe I could send something out to encourage people as we were going through all this. My thought was to go through a psalm a day, and, God-willing, by the end of 150 days everything would go back to normal. 

Unless they were very short psalms, I wrote a summary, and at the doxology at the end of each book of psalms I wrote a little reflection on that collection of psalms. I started summarising the NIV11, then the REB, and then I started just translating (the DRV!). I slowed down a bit for Psalm 119, translated the whole stanza, so spent the better part of a month there, but otherwise it took somewhere close to 180 days for the psalms. 

I think often when we read the psalms we don't quite know what to do with them - should we look for the hidden messiah between the lines, like the New Testament seems to teach us to do? I wanted instead to show a Christian reading, which took seriously the struggles of this world (read Psalm 88 for a laugh sometime!) but also knows what it is to rest in God. 

But of course, the pandemic continued. What to do next? People were still struggling, we still weren't meeting in person, and places like Victoria were getting worse, not better. So I moved onto Ecclesiastes, in part because it's comfortable (see my book on the sidebar!), but also because I wanted to give a Christian reflection on each short section of the book. 

With both Psalms and Ecclesiastes, I wanted to model for people how to read Scripture as Christians, not as moralists or legalists, as we often default to, especially with the Old Testament. 

When Ecclesiastes came to an end after a bit over a month, I decided I would do one more book: Genesis. This time something a bit different; I wanted people to read the Bible, not just my summaries. So I asked people to read a whole chapter, and then reflect with me on just one verse. I really enjoyed doing this, and hopefully people appreciated the fact that (if they kept up) they had read a whole book of the Bible - something which some of us take for granted, but many really struggle to do. 

I only got the word out once or twice, and a couple of people join the whatsapp group every now and then. There's a few more than seventy right now, and of those probably two thirds click on the devotion. I don't know how many actually read that, but a couple of people occasionally tell me thanks, or bring it up in discussion - "like you said the other day on Ecclesiastes" - so that's encouraging! I certainly haven't gone viral, but I have encouraged people from my church and a few beyond. 

The way I've done it is start writing at 7:30am and send it out at 8:00am. Sometimes I'll write it in advance, but normally that's my routine, so it's been good for me. It's been pretty labour intensive; here are the word counts from these 262 days: 

Psalms: 73640
Ecclesiastes: 17151
Genesis: 19255

Total words: 110046

So it's taken a bit out of me, but it's also fed me. It's forced me to say something, or, better put, to listen to what God is saying, even from chapters I'd normally skim through (table of nations anyone?). 

But now, I might take a break. I might get back to it, but maybe not. I do hope and pray it encourages people in their own reading and reflecting. I'm grateful that this project was forced upon me, for the discipline it's forced upon me, and for the way that God has used this to encourage others. But now? Time for some time off.