All you need is love.
The Beatles
The Book Song of Songs (also called the Song of Solomon) is one of the more obscure book in the Bible. It follows Ruth in the Hebrew Tora and Ecclesiaties in the Christian Bible. Somtimes attributed to Solomon, as a tribute to him as Israel’s greatest poet and wisest man. It is a love poem written between 400 and 450BC and was probably taken from a long oral tradition. During the Middle Ages it was arbitrarily divided into eight chapters and was never a unanimous choice to be included in the Holy Writ. In the Jewish tradition it was mainly read on the final day of Passover and may have come from earlier traditional marriage feast and ceremonies.
It is written in an intense style that resembles the love poetry of many other ancient cultures. The book never mentions God nor does it contain any mention of any of the promises of the convent of Abraham, which places it into the category of wisdom literature. It makes allusions to twenty five plants, ten animals and four places that usually have connections to romantic feelings and love. The places mentioned were famous for certain things, Lebanon, for its fragrant cedars, Gilead, its balm, Amana, great snow capped mountains, and Tirza, the capital of the Northern Kingdom.
Many see the book as an allegory of God’s love for the Church and as a guide for how we should love God. Traditionally, there are three ways to read this book: using literary unity, as a systematic organization of love poems or as a random collection of love poems. Moving between the passion and the looking for the attention of lovers it is an enigma to many who have tried to study it. Medieval qabbalists looked for a sacred code in it while Bernard of Clairvaux wrote eighty-six homilies(sermons) on the first two chapters. The use of “my darling ” and the word ra’yati in speaking of the woman in the text are unique to the book and not found in any other part of the Bible. This is also true of almost fifty other words used in this poem. The Oxford Companion to the Bible says of this book, “The power of its beauty is its celebration of and appeal to love.” (710) This book also points out that the New Testament contains no reference to this book.
When interpreting this book several methods were employed over the centuries. One was allegorical, in Aramaic culture it was seen as representing the Lord’s love for Israel, while Origin saw it as showing Christ’s love for the Church and the human soul. Some have seen it as a drama telling the story of a shepard’s courtship of a Shulammite maid with King Solomon portaryed as his rival. Others see it as originating in ancient ritual involving death or marriage while a minority try to tie to God’s saving plans. The most common interpretation is as a celebration of human love as a gift from God to ber enjoyed and treasured.
Let him kiss me with kisses of his mouth-
for your love is more delightful than wine.
Pleasing is the fragrance of your perfumes;
your name is like perfume poured out.
No wonder the maidens love you.
So begins the great love poem of the Bible as it describes a girls vision of her lover. This is a poem about love which is at the base of the entire message of the Bible and of God’s message for humanity. The title Song of Songs is the Hebrew way of saying it is the best song in the world. By repeating the word, such as Lord of Lords or King of Kings, the author is saying that this book is number one. It is the best of the best and nothing else compares to the work. It is an instant classic and there is nothing else that compares to it in this world in beauty, power or majesty.
Love is an emotion that runs through the entire Biblical text from Genesis to Revelation. Jacob loves Rachel from first sight, ( Genesis 29: 18-20), sexual lust is seen in the story of Amnon and Tamar ( 2 Samuel 13) family affections ( Genesis 22-2, 37- 3), the Book of Ruth is a story of love between and mother and her daughter-in-law, and long term intimacy is shown the story of Elkanah and Hannah (1 Samuel 1). The bond of friendship is seen in the relationship between David and Jonathan. The whole convent between God and Israel was based on the love of God for the Israelites.
In Leviticus people are admonished in several places to “love your neighbor as yourself.” In the Gospel of Mark, (5: 43-48) Jesus expands this from loving a neighbor to loving ones enemy as well, reminding his followers that loving those one likes is easy, but to be perfect, one must also love those one despises as well. Christ’s crucifixion is seen as the ultimate sign of God’s love and love becomes the cornerstone of Christianity.
St. Thomas Aquinas said of love that it is not only, “in all the soul’s powers, but also in all the parts of the body, and universally in all things.” Of love the Greek poet Lucretius in his poem The Way Things Are: Invocation to Venus,
without you nothing has ever come
into radiant boundaries of light…
Without you nothing is ever glad,
and nothing is ever loveable.
The philosopher Dionysus would proclaim that beauty and goodness are beloved by all things and Aquinas called it the natural tendency of all creatures and the habit of the divine and St Augustine called love the basis of the entire Law of Moses. The book continues as the friends of the beloved proclaim:
We rejoice and delight in you;
we will praise your love more than wine.
Her lover describes her :
I liken you, my darling to a mare
harnessed to one of the chariots of Pharaoh.
Your cheeks are beautiful with earrings,
your neck with strings of jewels.
We will make you earrings of gold,
studded with silver.
The horses of Pharaoh were considered the finest and most beautiful of all horses in the ancient world, thus the beloved is the most beautiful of women. The lover calls her, “a lily among thorns,” and as a “apple tree among the trees fo the forest.” thus not only does she stand out a beautiful, but in her company, her lover finds rest and fulfillment. Poet Robert Burns would express a similar sentiment when he proclaims:
O my love’s like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my love’s like a melodie,
That’s sweetly played in June.
Songwriter Stephen Foster also echoed this in his song:
Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me,
Starlight and dew drops are waiting for thee;
Sounds of the rude world heard in the day,
Lull’d by the moonlight have all passed away.
The beloved goes on to say of her lover, “See! The winter is past; the rains are over and gone. Flowers appear on earth; the season of singing has come, the cooing of doves is heard in our land.”
Shakespeare in his famous play, Romeo and Juliet, also uses many earthly things to describe a loved one. In describing Juliet, Romeo says:
But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!-
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou fair amid art more fair than she:
So using the moon, stars, sun, mountains, rivers, or animals, one can describe the beauty of a beloved in terms that transcend an ordinary description of a person. One can describe how the beloved lights up a room or transforms a gloomy day into a glorious one. Much like all love songs and poetry, the appearance of the beloved clears the dark clouds away and one is uplifted to the light. It is an often repeated theme in all poetry and music and as Three Dog Night said, “what’s wrong with that.”
The poet Shelly would say of lovers,:
The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the oceans;
The winds of heaven mix forever
With sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In another being mingle-
Why not I with thine.
The book of Ecclesiastes, even though it dwells on many of life’s dark emotions states that, “Two are better than one.” The Roman Virgil would proclaim that love can conquer all.
So what is this love that can conquer all, St. Paul proclaims that, ” love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices in the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Paul says of love that it never fails, while such things as knowledge, prophecy, and languages will pass away. He famously states that three things remain, faith, hope, and love, but he concludes that love is the greatest of these perfect gifts of God.
In the text, the lovers use many pictures to describe the one they love, and in this the goodness of God’s gift is shown. By comparing each other to what people belive to be beautiful and confronting, the author wishes to show that his gift is completely natural and a primal urge of all human kind. It makes one feel special, or as the lover states, “I am the rose of Sharon, a lily of the valley.” Of love Aquinas said that it is, “in all the soul’s powers, but in all the parts of the body, and universally in all things.”
For Augustine, love was an analogy of the relationship and the process of human self knowledge and self-love. he would analyze all of humainity according to their loves, and his great work, The City of God, was a history of love. Thus love becomes the foundation stone of all Christian theology, and the reason behind all the acts of God.
So, what is the difference between how love was seen in ancient days and today may lay in the importance of desire. Before the twelfth century, most love poems dealt with lost love as the grieving over the loss of once enjoyed happiness. Historian J. Huizinga wrote in his great book, The Waning of the Middle Ages:
When in the twelfth century unsatisfied desire was placed by the troubadours of Provence in the centre of the poetic conception of love, an important turn in the history of civilization was effected.
Huizinga went on to say that now love could now embrace all kinds of ethical aspirations. He would conclude, “Love now became the field where all moral and cultural perfection flowed.” Thus love became a means or an excuse for many behaviors over time.
John Locke would argue that self-love led to love of others and Dante wrote that this love of neighbors led to the perfect love of God. Shakespeare’s Richard III wants love, but since he does not love himself he cannot obtain it. While in the extreme self-love becomes the destructive emotion of narcissism, this can be restrained by charity and compassion. Love can be seen in the motives behind many figures in history and literature. Macbeth’s love of power and his wife drove Shakespeare’s play and Henry VIII’s love of Anne Boylen and his nation caused him to break with Rome and bring the Reformation to England.
How does love affect history, Clyde Burrow was a basic two bit crook who was ridiculed by Pretty Boy Floyd as nothing but a rank amateur. But add his lover, Bonnie Parker, he becomes one part of the legendary Bonnie and Clyde which was romanticized in song and screen. Nicholas II of Russia loved his queen, Alexandria, so much that he acceded to her desire to keep Rasputin at court and not revel her son’s illness. The love of God and Church drove Sir Thomas More to martyrdom as well as many of the martyrs written of by John Foxe.
Thus love can forgive many transgressions one can commit, especially if one does these for love. Love of justice is what drove Martin Luther King and many others to lead great movements for the rights of people to live as one should. But, it is not always good coming from love, evil can come from love of excess or of the wrong things. Machiavelli argued that the love of riches, fame, and worldly success destroyed beauty, truth and goodness. Love of power drove Stalin to create one of the most oppressive states in history. Love of money drove many to crime and into evil and vile actions. But the lure of such things is strong, as the book of Ecclesiates proclaims, “money is the answer for everything” (chapter 10: 19). While many like to point out that money cannot buy health and happiness, humorist Gary Larsen once mused that we, “may have been looking in the wrong store.” This is why Paul warned us that (1 Timothy 6:10), “For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.” So we see that love, like all human emotions has potential for both good and evil. Good as it was originally intended by God, evil from our nature after the fall.
Is then love eternal, unable to fade or die, unfortunately, no, it can fade and die. Only the love of God is eternal, and that gets tested many times. Love, like any emotion can change, fade and die over the life of a person. The book of Ecclesiates speaks of a time to love and a time to hate. Hate is the opposite of love, and while love burns warm and long lasting, hate burns hot and is usually short lived. It spawns many of the bad emotions in humans: envy, lust, greed, all of the evils of humanity. Hate is the opposite of love and can be the destroyer, if we let it, for love can conquer hate and all the emotions that it spawns, The Roman philosopher Virgil proclaimed that “love conquers all,” and it does when we are open to it.
How does the text address the disappointments of love, it does by describing the beloved feelings at finding her lover gone:
I opened for my lover
but my lover had left; he was gone.
My heart sank at his departure.
I looked for him but did not find him.
I called but he did not answer.
The watchman found me
as they made their rounds in the city.
They beat me, they bruised me;
they took away my cloak,
those watchman of the walls!
O daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you-
if you find my lover,
what will you tell him?
Tell him I am faint with love.
Thinking she has lost her lover has led her to feel abandoned by those whom protection is expected. She cries out to all to find him and tell him how much she loves him. When one feels that love has been lost or unattainable, one feels cut off from all that is the world. It is a loneliness that hurts, a feeling of worthlessness and total rejection for mall the world. As much as a beloved could brighten a day, now one cannot see any sun, or light. One can feel as Othello did when he said, “then you must speak of one that loved not wisely, but too well.” When one is in this place it feels that all have deserted you and you have become an outcast in the world. One feels as if you are unworthy of love or of any compassion at all. One wails as the old song asked, “how can a loser ever win.” The world becomes a cold and distant place in which one is only passing through. Unwelcome, unwanted, and apart from all of humanity.
This feeling is best described, by two singers, Janis Ian and Janis Joplin. Ian spoke of finding the truth at seventeen, that, “love was ment for beauty queens,” who were perfect in every way. She portrays herself as one who belongs to a group that invented fantasy lives and lovers on the phone. They would only engaged in love when they were ready to, “cheat themselves at Solitaire.”
While Ian speaks of a person who is so disconnected that love only comes in a fantasy, Janis Joplin would speak of a different feeling of lost love. It would make on feel that “freedom was just another word for nothing left to lose.” One is so deep in the dark valley of despair, so chained by regret and grief that freedom itself is defined by have so little that nothing can be taken from you. One feels at this point that if one takes no chances, one suffers no disappointment.
For the beloved in Songs the end is much better, her lover returns and after she compares him to the cedars in Lebanon, as well as doves, jewels, gold and ivory, she declares that he has:
My lover has gone down to his garden,
to the beds of spices,
to browse in the gardens
and gather lilies.
I am my lover’s and my lover is mine;
he browses among the lilies.
This is interpreted by some a s a sexual reference and seen as a celebration of the physical relationship of love. The book finishes with more descriptive language of the beauty and desirability of the lovers and describes love as being as strong as death and states that all the money in a house cannot buy it. It ends with the beloved addressing he lover with a plea that has been given to many who love:
Come away, my lover,
and be like the gazelle
or like a young stage
on the spice-ladened mountains.
So like many lovers, she asks him in the end to leave the world behind and join her. Join her in a place that is far away from the crowd. A place where they can find their own little world of love.
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