Song of Songs (2): On figures
Hermeneutics and all that jazz
"We read the Bible literally"
You know, almost no-one reads the Bible literally.
"We read the Bible literally, not literalistically"
Okay, now you are making up words.
Before we can even get into the Song of Songs as a text, we need to stop and talk about the nature of language, and literal vs non-literal meaning. The literal meaning of words is to take them in their most direct, conventionally accepted way. For example, if I say "the classroom was a zoo", to take this literally is to imagine that the space in which class took place was a zoo, complete with animals, zookeepers, and all other zoo-related paraphernalia. That is possible. But, more likely, such a statement is a metaphor, and so it is not-literal language. It's figurative language. I'm making a comparison and evocation of 'zoo', bringing to mind animals, and by association dis-regulated behaviour, and suggesting that the classroom had that atmosphere.
We use figurative language all the time, and it's part and parcel of how language works. Being a strict literalist is being a bad language user. Which is why I say no one is a literalist. Except maybe a small number of early North African readers, who thought that God had a physical arm and physical eyes and so on, because that was being 'literal'.
The line between figurative and literal is not always clear though. When I say, "look at the table legs", is "legs" literal or figurative? It depends on what your straightforward definition of "leg" is. Arguably the leg of the table began as a metaphor applied from animals and humans, as people looked at the first tables and thought, "hmm, what do we call that part that sticks out from the flat bit, goes to the ground, is long and skinny, and holds it up? I guess it's a bit like a 'leg'". It's a metaphor that's de-figurised over time to have a 'literal' meaning to refer to that part of a table.
Nor will, "I read the Bible literally, except when I find a bit I can't, and then I read it figuratively" hold up. I think that's a mistaken hermeneutic because it's trying to privilege literalism in the wrong way. These kinds of approaches are trying to say "I take the Bible seriously and authoritatively" but they're wrong-headed about it because they are trying to defend an interpretive approach that has no warrant, in the Bible itself, and outside the Bible.
So, when we come to the Song of Songs, we're dealing with a text that is poetic, and it's full of figurative language. It invites us to read it figuratively, and we would be mis-reading it to not read it figuratively. The question is, how layered are the metaphors?
The Song has for a very long time been read allegorically. In this, the male lead of the Song represents God, and the female lead represents God's people; or, in a Christian 'key', this is Christ and the Church. What people mean by 'allegory' differs. For example, Athas1 critiques the traditional allegorical approach, because he considers it a type of reading in which only the symbolic meaning matters, the coherence of the non-symbolic level doesn't. I don't know where he got this idea about allegory more generally, but it's not consistent with traditions of allegorical reading at large. Indeed, some approaches to allegory insist on the 'plain' meaning having such coherence. I do agree, however, that some forms of allegorical reading of the Son attempt to map every detail to some 'symbol', without any form of "interpretive control".
I actually think the Song doesn't necessarily need such a strict label. Rather, it works in figurative language in two directions. Firstly, the Song is erotic without being explicit. It uses an abundance of pastoral, agricultural type imagery to speak often frankly, but never vulgarly, about love, bodies, and sex. It very much is an extended narrative poem about love and sex. Secondly, precisely because the trope of God and Israel as Husband and (un)faithful Bridge runs through the Hebrew Prophetic literature, it's very hard not to read the Song as entering into that tradition. I think this is the right figurative 'key' to read the poem canonically and theologically, without attempting to 'map' every symbol to something symbolised.
I haven't said anything yet about date, and this could be the time to do so even though it seems tangential to the above discussion. Athas offers a very late date, post-exilic, in fact in the Hellenistic period and more specifically under Antiochus IV. Part of that has to do with the language of the text. Other commentators, such as Tremper-Longman, think it's far less certain and that it can't really be dated at all. It has to be at least Solomon or later though! The reason I bring this up is that Athas argues that this gives a highly specific context for the figurative reading he proposes: the pressure of Hellenisation as a force leading to apostasy and syncretism, parallel to the proposed marriage to Solomon within the text. I am not so sure that such a specific date/context can be asserted, but I do think that this kind of context makes sense of the figurative drama and narrative of the Song, which I suppose we will explore in our next post!
All my references to Athas are: Athas, George. Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs. Edited by Tremper Longman III and Scot McKnight. The Story of God Bible Commentary. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic, 2020.