Farewell to Shulamit by Carsten Wilke

Author:Carsten Wilke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Published: 2017-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

6Conclusion

The “anomalies depending on conditions” is the aspect of the Song of Songs that has most intrigued nineteenth-century interpreters, but it is also the aspect that has been most systematically overlooked, if not even repressed, by Bible scholars in recent decades. According to my reading, which attempts to give this aspect its due emphasis, the Song develops a fourfold panorama of social classes and ethnic groups, with the Judaeans standing in the middle between them. These disconnected classes and groups, each being associated with an environment, are differentiated by an amazing amount of detail; they are juxtaposed with an arithmetical sense of proportion and balance; and they are all made to join in the common praise of love.

The Song of Song’s ethnographic frieze depicting Egyptian, Greek, Aramaic, and Arab lovers in front of a Jewish chorus hints at a more profound aspect of its message, which connects the Hebrew text to the Dionysian mysteries. The latter did not just celebrate wine and physical pleasure, but they also enacted a carnival-like equalization of the social order in the course of dance, inebriation, and erotic excitement.468 In the Song, the absence of communication and miscegenation between the couples shows a reluctance to think of the inter-class or even orgiastic promiscuity that was the threatening aspect in the Bacchanals. The use of eroticism to break social boundaries only seems legitimate for the king’s maids, whose praise of their royal master in idyll 1 affirms from the outset a hierarchical erotic framework.

On the literary level, the poetic unity that is given to the experiences from couples in all sectors of ancient society nonetheless leaves an impression of communion. The couples in the court, polis, village, and even the nomads outside it, take part in love-making and practice some sort of joyful consumerism. Their parallel engagement in these universal pleasures of the senses creates the illusion of a quasicultic fraternization.

In the Song of Songs, the spirit and literary pattern of Dionysian celebration is imported into a Jewish context after the most indigestible elements had been filtered out, especially homosexuality, the ruler cult, musical ecstasy, cross-dressing, and graphic phallic language. Yet the Song’s spirituality resembles a Dionysian worldview by seeking the manifestation of the divine in impulsive psychic forces, daímones, rather than in the moral imperative to control them. This experimental theology is famously outlined in the following words of Diotima: “God with man does not mingle: but the spiritual is the means of all society and converse of men with gods and of gods with men, whether waking or asleep […] Many and multifarious are these spirits (δαίμονες), and one of them is Love.”469

Apart from the praise of Eros that ties together all four environments, religion is neither seen as the separating nor as the unifying element in the Song’s ethnography. Though centuries of religious or mythological reading have been avidly collecting possible allusions to cults in the text, the results are mostly unconvincing. There are far fewer references to gods or God in the Song than, say, in the frivolous amatory epigrams of Alexandria.

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