An Atheist Explores the Bible Part 134: Allegory of the Church, or just a poem about boobs? (Songs 1-5)

Songs 1-5
Allegory of the Church, or just a poem about boobs?

Welcome to another instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Bible version).

In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the King James Bible, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.

For more detail, see the introductory post http://bit.ly/2F8f9JT

For the online KJV I use, see here http://bit.ly/2m0zVUP

And now:

Songs 1

“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.”

Well crikey. Apart from ripping off the lyrics Stephen “Tintin” Duffy, this chapter is pitched as a love song by a “black but comely” woman to her lover. Now, I’ve heard this book spoken of as being an allegory of love of the church. I have my doubts that it’s not as earthy as it seems but I guess we’ll see as we go on. This is supposedly another work by Solomon, perhaps the woman being the Queen of Sheba. There’s a lot of exhortation of beauty here, and some fairly fruity stuff – “he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts”. I can see why slightly staid church folk may wish to try and turn this into allegory.

Songs 2

“The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land”

Our unknown singer compares her beloved to a young hart, both impressively nimble yet also shy. She implores the world not to wake him, but when he does we get a whole load of spring imagery – vines blossom, figs grow, birds sing. I’m presuming that the “voice of the turtle” means turtle doves and nothing to do with tortoises. I can’t help but think of the kind of imagery employed in early love songs and films as a pretty obvious euphemism for sex, but are those drawing the same conclusions from this chapter as I am, or are they and the author of this book tapping into the same wellspring of ideas.

Songs 3

“By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.”

Here the singer spends a few verses seeking for her lover – allegory time: the lost soul seeking God. She finds him, and then we get a fairly detailed description of Solomon’s bed chamber (well, if this was written by Solomon, he’d know, but then so would a lover of his). Allegory here – the great temple of Solomon, or perhaps the kingdom of God (although that concept is more one of later commentators than anything that has been given in the bible so far.

Songs 4

“Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves' eyes within thy locks: thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead.”

It seems here as if this is the man speaking to the woman, whom he refers to throughout as “my sister, my spouse”. An odd relationship; sister perhaps meaning someone as an equal, or a sister in God, or something. It’s obviously not sister by blood – they’re not Egyptians after all!

The man offers a series of compliments to the woman, many of which I would not recommend using – your hair is like a flock of goats? Well thanks. Your teeth are like sheep? I suppose whiteness is the idea behind the metaphor here, but still, it hardly sounds very complimentary. Your breasts are like two twin roes feeding amongst lilies. I guess it’s less crude than two puppies fighting in a sack, but only just.

Then there’s a lot of perfumed imagery, of frankincense and cinnamon, and Lebanese cedar, that invokes warm nights. And, I mean, “Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits.” That’s just laden with innuendo.

Songs 5
“I opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone: my soul failed when he spake: I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he gave me no answer.”

Again we get some innuendo-heavy talk of opening doors from the woman speaker, but here the man, the beloved, has vanished into the night. She goes in search of him and is abused by the nights watch, and so she talks poetically of his beauty. I caved in and read the Matthew Henry commentary, as this felt more allegorical than previously. His reading is that Christ withdraws from the Church because of too many demands. Now, maybe I could just about grant some kind of allegory of a relationship between a man and his faith (not even with God, but his own belief in God), but to put a New Testament spin on this is, I think, stretching credibility. By all means interpret it in that way, but there is no way this was written with that intent in the first place.

Given that the other works attributed to Solomon in the OT are the sections of Proverbs that talks of a Holy Wisdom as a kind of wife of God (Proverbs), and of how the best way to deal with mortality is to enjoy life while you have it (Ecclesiastes), I’m more inclined to believe that the same man would be more likely to write a plain old erotic love poem than some kind of mystical allegory about something several hundred years in his future.