Prof. Scott B. Noege1Chair, Dept. of Near Eastern Languages and CivilizationUniversity of Washington

"Song of Songs."

First Published in:A Reader's Guide to JudaismChicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers (2000), 570-571.

570 SONG OF SONGS

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Song of SongsBloch, Ariel and Chana Bloch, The Song of Songs: A New

Translation with an Introduction and Commentary, NewYork: Random House, 1995

Brenner, Athalya (editor), A Feminist Companion to theSong of Songs (Feminist Companion to the Bible, 1),Sheffield, Souch Yorkshire: Sheffield Academic Press,

- 1993Falk, Marcia, LOL'eLyrics from the Bible: A Translation and

Literary Study of the Song of Songs (Bible and LiteratureSeries, 4), Sheffield, Souch Yorkshire: Almond, 1982;revised as The Song of Songs: A New Translation andInterpretation, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990

Fox, Michael V., The Song of Songs and the AncientEgyptian Love Songs, Madison: University of WisconsinPtess, 1985 '.

Pope, Marvin H., Song of Songs (Anchor Bible, 7C), GardenCity, New York: Doubleday, 1977

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Perhaps no ocher book of the Bible has elicited as ~uch com-ment as the Song of Songs. The variety of interpretation is notmerely the product of recent times, for diverse interpretivestrategies were present already in antiquity, as the debate overwhether the poem should enter the canon of Scripture demon-strates. The discovery of ancient Near Eastern texts since themid-19th century has opened new corridors of interpretation.Yet, despite the wealth of comparative material, no consensushas been reached with regard to the Song's overall meaning,purpose, history, or original context.

As the entries below will attest, scholars have srudied theeight-chapter poem from a variety of perspectives and havebrought a variety of theoretical frameworks to bear upon theSong. Most of the important analyses and discussions of theSong remain largely inaccessible to a lay public, scattered asthey are in scholarly journals and technically erudite mono-graphs. Even some of the entries below, which are exception-ally accessible to general readers, contain some technicallinguistic and philological data. Nevertheless, these works arerepresentative of the most important advances in currentunderstanding of the Song of Songs.

The recent translation of the Song by BLOCH and BLOCHbenefits from the expertise of a world-renowned Semitist anda first-class poet. The result is a sensuous account of sexualawakening. The Hebrew text accompanies both the Englishtranslation and the commentary at book's end, and the fre-quent use ot transliterations helps make the Song completelyaccessible to nonscholars. No conjectures are offered as toauthorship, although linguistic evidence is used to place thedate of the Song in the third century B.C.E.The commentarydiscusses the Song's place in the canon of Scripture and thehistory of its interpretation. This translation uniquely repre-sents the passionate love d~scribed in the poem not as unre-quited, but as consummated. The sexual delights in the Songare presented as reciprocal, tender, and erotic. Eros fills theIsraelite landscape, and the lovers celebrate it. Although notportrayed as a drama, the poem carries dramatic effect, andBloch and Bloch treat it not as an anthology of poetic snip-pets, but as a unity.'--""

BRENNER's inaugural volume of the Feminist Companionto the Bible series is a collection of essays that investigate theSong from a variety of feminist critical perspectives. Writtenby a diverse array of scholars, the selections are generallycohesive and accessible to nonscholars. The articles aregrouped into six units: the history of feminist readings of theSong; female authorship and culture; intertextual connectionsand the critique of patriarchy; structure and discourse; genreinterpretation; and a scholarly retrospective. Each of the 20essays offers a unique and insightful contribution to currentunderstanding of the poem. Topics addressed in the essays runthe complete gamut of hisrorical inquiry on the Song, includ-ing the poem's female voice, audience, sexual imagery, andeventual canonization. The essays represent the most recentadvances in feminist scholarship on the Song and demonstratea fruitful union between feminist approaches to text and otherinterpretive strategies.

FALK offers an English translation along with a discussionof the Song's context, genre, themes, and motifs. Her trans-lation, while at times straying from the Hebrew original,nonetheless captures the rapturous beauty of the poem. Herapproach is primarily literary, paying special attention to thepoem's structure. Falk sees no reason to treat the poem as asingle text, opting instead to view the book as a collection of31 lyric poems. In the analytic section of the book, Falk chal-lenges the notion that the Song contains "bizarre, comical, andpuzzling" imagery in those units of the Song commonly calledwasfs, poetic sections that elaborately describe the humanbody. Falk contends that "sexist interpretation of thewasf. . . and of the Song in general is a striking example ofhow the text can be distorred by culturally biased reading."She also argues, for a variety of reasons, that the compositionwas penned by a woman and concludes that the Song itselfspeaks to mutuality and balance between the sexes.

FOX offers the only major study of the poem's relationshipto Egyptian love poetry. Based on his comparisons, Fox arguesthat the Song of Songs "though often considered a loose col-lection of short songs, is in fact an artistic unity!' He replacesthe popular allegorical interpretation of the text with one thatunderstands the poem as simply exploring the subject of sex-ual love between human beings. In addition to an in-depthcommentary, examination of the Song's social setting, andcompositional analysis, Fox provides a comprehensive discus-sion of the Egyptian materials and appends hieroglyphic tran-scriptions of the Egyptian texts themselves. These featuresmake Fox's study valuable to scholar and nonscholar alike.

POPE's hefty volume remains the most comprehensive studyof the poem to date. Virtually every aspect of the poem is dis-cussed, from the ancient translations and the date of the book,to prosody, generic classification, and the medieval commen-taries. One of Pope's most important contributions is his dis-cussion of the history of interpretation of the Song, whichcovers a great deal of territory, from the early allegorizationof the poem and later dramatic and mystical interpretations,to more recent feminist and psychoanalytical approaches.Based on a wealth of comparative data, especially fromMesopotamia and Ugarit, Pope concludes that the Song orig-inally served as a cui tic hymn for use in non-Israelite ferrilityworship. While some of this work, especially the commentary

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section, is philologically and linguistically oriented, the greatmajority is accessible to a general audience. It also provides awealth of bibliographic information on the Song.

SCOTT B. NOEGEL

South AfricaAbrahams, Israel, The Birth of a Community, Cape Town:

Cape Town Hebrew Congregation, 1955Heilig, Jocelyn, "The Jewish Community in South Africa,"

in Living Faiths in South Africa, edited by MartinProzesky and John de Gruchy, New York: St. Martin'sPress, and London: Hurst, 1995

Hoffmann, N.D., Seyfer ha-zikhroynes, 1916; translated asBook of Memoirs: Reminiscences of South African Jewry,Cape Town: Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies andResearch, University of Cape Town, 1996

Shain, Milton, The Roots of Antisemitism in South Africa,Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia,1994 .

Shimoni, Gideon, Jews and Zionism: The South AfricanExperience (1910-1967), Cape Town: Oxford UniversityPress, 1980

Sutcner, Immanuel (editor), Cutting through the Mountain:Interviews with South African Jewish Activists,Johannesburg: Viking, 1997

' "The study of the Jews of English-speaking countries hasachieved a new prominence in the aftermath of the destruc-tion of European Jewry in the Holocaust. Although the Jew-ish community in the United States is clearly the most studiedEnglish-speaking community, Jews in Canada, New Zealand,Australia, Great Britain, Zimbabwe, and South Africa havealso merited the attention of historians and sociologists. Thenumber of Jews in South Africa beaked at 118,000; since the1970s, many South African Jews rave immigrated to Australia,the United States, and Israel, andlthe Jewish population in thatnation is currently around 85,000. Because of the historicalcontext of apartheid, the histor1 of the Jews of South Africa

has a character that is unique In modern Jewish history. Inorder to understand the full picture of how Jews have inter-acted with modernity in differ~nt social and political con-

texts, it is critical for the scholar fOtake into account the SouthAfrican Jewish experience. I

One of the classic books on ie Jewish experience in SouthAfrica is SHIMON!, a detailed account of the Jewish com-munity in South Africa up to 967 that places that commu-

nity's history in the context o~ Zionism. The author coversmost of the important political Issues and particularly empha-

sizes the relationship between +e Jews and the ruling groupsin the country. , ,

One of the best overviews ~or those seeking informationabout the Jewish community in South Africa in the 1990s isHELLIG, which was published las part of a collection of arti-

cles on all of the major religionr in the country. Heilig adeptlygives a brief outline of the historical background of SoUthAfrican Jewry and presents a Ivivid picture of the different'-/

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aspects of Jewish life in contemporary South Africa. Particu-larly interesting is her account of the unobservant OrthodoxJews who constitute the majority of the South African Jewishcommunity. Nevertheless, Heilig correctly points out that therehas been a tremendous revival of Torah study, worship, andobservance, particularly in Johannesburg. She describes thedevelopment of small, informal prayer groups evoking theEastern European shtiebl that have gained popularity at theexpense of large institUtionalized synagogues.

One of the most interesting historical documents of SouchAfrican Jewry is a memoir by HOFFMANN that was wriccenin Yiddish and originally published in 1916. The authordescribes the origins of the community and evaluates relationsbetween Jews and Afrikaners. He also presents a great deal ofinformation about the lives of South African blacks, althoughhe displays a prejudiced perspective characteristic of his time.This document can be read in conjunction with ABRAHAMS'shistory of the Jews in the Western Cape Province until the endof the Anglo-Boer War in 1902. Other classics of South AfricanJewish history include Louis Herrman's A History of the Jewsin South Africa (1930), and GustavSaron and LouisHotz's TheJews in 'South Africa: A History (1955).

SHAIN is a masterpiece describing the history of anti-semitism in South Africa up to 1930. His work is particularlyimportant because, although the history of racism in SouthAfrica has long been recognized, historians before Shain typ-ically suggested that antisemitism was a foreign phenomenonthat was introduced into South Africa in the 1930s throughNazi propaganda. Shain shows, however, that antisemitism

.had deep roots in South African society that dated back to thelate 19th century. Using not only the expected political sourcesbut also plays, novels, caricatures, and jokes, Shain's bookserves as a central source for the history of Jewish-Christianrelations in South Africa.

Since the end of apartheid, there has been an increasinginterest in the role that Jews did or did not play in the Strug-gle to end institutionalized racism. SU1TNER presents a col-lection of interviews with South African Jewish activists; thebook is named for a statement in the Talmud that insists "let

justice cut through the mountain." The collection includesinterviews with many of the most important antiapartheidactivists, including Joe Siovo and Ronnie Kasrils, both ofwhom were important figures in the armed struggle of theAfrican National Congress against the apartheid government.Also included are interviews with the Nobel Prize-winningauthor Nadine Gordimer, musician Johnny Clegg, politicianHelen Suzman, and Rabbi Ben Isaacson. The book is a veryrich source of material on Jewish activists and can form thebasis for a great deal of future analysis.

DANA EVAN KAPL-\~

Spain

Aronsfeld, c.e., The Ghosts of 1492: Jewish Aspects of theStruggle for Religious Freedom in Spain, 1848-1976(Jewish Social ScudiesMonograph Series, no. 1), NewYork: Conference on Jewish Social Studies, 1979