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:
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 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:
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.
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):
His adoration with chiasm (no 5–7):
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:
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment