chapter III

., brings before us a beautiful maiden brought from a distant region to the court, but not quite happy: she is entreated to forget her people and enjoy the dignities and luxuries offered by her lord, the King. This psalm is remarkable in its intimations of a freedom of sentiment accorded to the ladies wooed by Solomon, and the same spirit pervades Canticles. Its chief refrain is that love must not be coerced or awakened until it please. This magnanimity might naturally connect the name of Solomon with old songs of love and courtship such as those utilised and multiplied in this book, whose composition might be naturally entitled "A Song (made) of Songs which are Solomon's."

The heroine, whose name is Shulamith,--(feminine of Shelomoh, Solomon) [20]--is an only daughter, cherished by her apparently widowed mother but maltreated by her brothers. Incensed against her, they compel Shulamith to keep their vineyards to the neglect of her own. She becomes sunburnt, "swarthy," but is very "attractive," and is brought by Solomon to his palace, where she delights the ladies by her beauty and dances. In what I suppose to be one of the ancient Solomonic Songs embodied in the work it is said:

"There are threescore queens, and fourscore concubines, And maidens without number: Beyond compare is my dove, my unsoiled; She is the only one of her mother, The cherished one of her that bare her: The daughters saw her and called her blessed, Yea, the queens and the concubines, and they praised her." [21]

Thus far the motif seems to be that of a Cinderella oppressed by brothers but exalted by the most magnificent of princes. But here the plot changes. The magnificence of Solomon cannot allure from her shepherd lover this "lily of the valley." Her lover visits her in the palace, where her now relenting brothers (vi. 12) seem to appear (though this is doubtful) and witness her triumphs; and all are in raptures at her dancing and her amply displayed charms--all unless one (perhaps the lover) who, according to a doubtful interpretation, complains that they should gaze at her as at dancers in the camps (vi. 13). [22]

Although Russell Martineau maintained, against most other commentators, that Solomon is only a part of the scene, and not among the dramatis personæ, the King certainly seems to be occasionally present, as in the following dialogue, where I give the probable, though of course conjectural, names. The dancer has approached the King while at table.

Solomon--

"I have compared thee, O my love, To my steed in Pharaoh's chariot. Thy cheeks are comely with plaits of hair, Thy neck with strings of jewels. We will make thee plaits of gold With studs of silver."

Shulamith, who, on leaving the King, meets her jealous lover--

"While the King sat at his table My spikenard sent forth its odor. My beloved is unto me as a bag of myrrh That lieth between my breasts, My beloved is unto me as a cluster of henna-flowers In the vineyards of En-gedi."

Shepherd Lover--

"Behold thou art fair, my love, behold thou art fair; Thine eyes are as doves, Behold thou art fair, my beloved, yea pleasant: Also our couch is green. The beams of our house are of cedar, And our rafters are of fir."

Shulamith--

"I am a (mere) crocus of the plain."

Chorus, or perhaps the Lover--

"A lily of the valleys."

Shepherd Lover--

"As a lily among thorns So is my love among the daughters."

Shulamith--

"As the apple tree among forest trees So is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, And his fruit was sweet to my taste."

Thus we find the damsel anointing the king with her spikenard, but for her the precious fragrance is her shepherd. Against the plaits of gold and studs of silver offered in the palace (i. 2) her lover can only point to his cottage of cedar and fir, and a couch of grass. She is content to be only a flower of the plain and valley, not for the seraglio. Nevertheless she remains to dance in the palace; a sufficient time there is needed by the poet to illustrate the impregnability of true love against all other splendors and attractions, even those of the Flower of Kings. He however puts no constraint on her, one song, thrice repeated, saying to the ladies of the harem--

"I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, By the (free) gazelles, by the hinds in the field, That ye stir not up, nor awaken love, Until it please."

This refrain is repeated the second time just before a picture of Solomon's glory, shaded by a suggestion that all is not brightness even around this Prince of Peace. The ladies of the seraglio are summoned to look out and see the passing of the King in state, seated on his palanquin of purple and gold, but escorted by armed men "because of fear in the night." In immediate contrast with that scene, we see Shulamith going off with her humble lover, now his bride, to his field and to her vineyard, and singing a beautiful song of love, strong as death, flame-tipped arrow of a god, unquenchable, unpurchaseable.

Though according to the revised version of vi. 12 her relatives are princely, and it may be they who invite her to return (vi. 13), she says, "I am my beloved's." With him she will go into the field and lodge in the village (vii. 10, 11). She finds her own little garden and does not envy Solomon.

"Solomon hath a vineyard at Baalhamon; He hath let out the vineyard to keepers; Each for the fruit thereof was to bring a thousand pieces of silver: My vineyard, which is mine, is before me: Thou, O Solomon, shall have the thousand, And those that keep the fruit thereof two hundred."

There was, as we see in Koheleth, a prevailing tradition that Solomon felt the hollowness of his palatial life. "See life with a woman thou lovest." The wife is the fountain:

"Bethink thee of thy fountain In the days of thy youth."

This perhaps gave rise to a theory that the shepherd lover was Solomon himself in disguise, like the god Krishna among the cow-maidens. It does not appear probable that any thought of that kind was in the writer of this Song. Certainly there appears not to be any purpose of lowering Solomon personally in enthroning Love above him. There is no hint of any religious or moral objection to him, and indeed throughout the work Solomon appears in a favourable light personally,--he is beloved by the daughters of Jerusalem (v. 10)--though his royal estate is, as we have seen, shown in a light not altogether enviable. Threescore mighty men guard him: "every man hath his sword upon his thigh because of fear in the night," and the day of his heart's gladness was the day of his espousals (iii. 8, 11).

It is not improbable that there is an allusion to Solomon's magic seal in the first lines of the hymn to Love (viii. 6). The legend of the Ring must have been long in growing to the form in which it is found in the Talmud, where it is said that Solomon's "fear in the night" arose from his apprehension that the Devil might again get hold of his Ring, with which he (Aschmedai) once wrought much mischief. (Gittin. Vol. 68, col. 1, 2). The hymn strikes me as late Alexandrian:

"Wear me as a seal on thy breast As a seal-ring on thine arm: For love is strong as death, Its passion unappeasable as the grave; Its shafts are arrows of fire, The lightnings of a god. [Jah.] Many waters cannot quench love, Deluges cannot overwhelm it. Should a noble offer all the wealth of his house for love It would be utterly spurned."

Excluding the interrupting verses 8 and 9, the hymn is followed by a song about Solomon's vineyard, preceded by two lines which appear to me to possess a significance overlooked by commentators. Shulamith (evidently) speaks:

"I was a wall, my breasts like its towers: Thus have I been in his eyes as one finding peace. Solomon hath a vineyard," etc. [as above.]

The word "peace" is Shalôm; it is immediately followed by Shelomoh (Solomon, "peaceful"); and Shulamith (also meaning "peaceful"), thus brings together the fortress of her lover's peace, her own breast, and the fortifications built by the peaceful King (who never attacked but was always prepared for defence). Here surely, at the close of Canticles, is a sort of tableau: Shalôm, Shulamith, Shelomoh: Peace, the prince of Peace, the queen of Peace. If this were the only lyric one would surely infer that these were the bride and bridegroom, under the benediction of Peace. It is not improbable that at this climax of the poem Shulamith means that in her lover she has found her Solomon, and he found in her his Solomona,--their reciprocal strongholds of Shalôm or Peace.

Of course my interpretations of the Song of Songs are largely conjectural, as all other interpretations necessarily are. The songs are there to be somehow explained, and it is of importance that every unbiassed student of the book should state his conjectures, these being based on the contents of the book, and not on the dogmatic theories which have been projected into it. I have been compelled, under the necessary limitations of an essay like the present, to omit interesting details in the work, but have endeavoured to convey the impression left on my own mind by a totally unprejudiced study. The conviction has grown upon me with every step that, even at the lowest date ever assigned it, the work represents the earliest full expression of romantic love known in any language. It is so entirely free from fabulous, supernatural, or even pious incidents and accents, so human and realistic, that its having escaped the modern playwright can only be attributed to the superstitious encrustations by which its beauty has been concealed for many centuries.

This process of perversion was begun by Jewish Jahvists, but they have been far surpassed by our A. S. version, whose solemn nonsense at most of the chapter heads in the Bible here reached its climax. It is a remarkable illustration of the depths of fatuity to which clerical minds may be brought by prepossession, that the closing chapter of Canticles, with its beautiful exaltation of romantic love, could be headed: "The love of the Church to Christ. The vehemency of Love. The calling of the Gentiles. The Church Prayeth for Christ's coming." The "Higher Criticism" is now turning the headings into comedy, but they have done--nay, are continuing--their very serious work of misdirection.

It has already been noted that the Jewish doctors exalted Bathsheba, adulteress as she was, into a blessed woman, probably because of the allusion to her in the Song (iii. 2) as having crowned her royal Son, who had become mystical; and it can only be ascribed to Protestantism that, instead of the Queen-Mother Mary, the Church becomes Bathsheba's successor in our version: "The Church glorieth in Christ." And of course the shepherd lover's feeding (his flock) among the lilies becomes "Christ's care of the Church."

But for such fantasies the beautiful Song of Songs might indeed never have been preserved at all, yet is it a scandal that Bibles containing chapter-headings known by all educated Christians to be falsifications, should be circulated in every part of the world, and chiefly among ignorant and easily misled minds. These simple people, reading the anathemas pronounced in their Bibles on those who add anything to the book given them as the "Word of God" (Deuteronomy iv. 2, xii. 32, Proverbs xxx. 6, Revelation xxii. 18), cannot imagine that these chapter-headings are not in the original books, but forged. And what can be more brazenly fraudulent than the chapter-heading to one of these very passages (Revelation xxii. 18, 19), where nothing is said of the "Word of God," but over which is printed: "18. Nothing may be added to the word of God, nor taken therefrom." But even the learned cannot quite escape the effect of these perversions. How far they reach is illustrated in the fate of Mary Magdalen, a perfectly innocent woman according to the New Testament, yet by a single chapter-heading in Luke branded for all time as the "sinner" who anointed Jesus,--"Magdalen" being now in our dictionaries as a repentant prostitute. Yet there are hundreds of additions to the Bible more harmful than this,--additions which, whether honestly made or not originally, are now notoriously fraudulent. It is especially necessary in the interest of the Solomonic and secular literature in the Bible that Truth shall be liberated from the malarious well--Jahvist and ecclesiastical--in which she has long been sunk by mistranslation, interpolation, and chapter-headings. The Christian churches are to be credited with having produced critics brave enough to expose most of these impositions, and it is now the manifest duty of all public teachers and literary leaders to uphold those scholars, to protest against the continuance of the propaganda of pious frauds, and to insist upon the supremacy of truth.

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