- Title
- Keeping it literal: the economy of the Song of Songs
- Creator
- Boer, Roland
- Relation
- Journal of Hebrew Scriptures Vol. 7
- Relation
- http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/JHS/jhs-article.html
- Publisher
- Gorgais Press
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2007
- Description
- The ultimate drive of this essay is to identify the underlying worldview of the Song of Songs. There are two ways one might go about such a task: one would be to take the text at face value and derive a worldview from there. The other, more preferred approach assumes that texts do not give out their worldview so easily. It is there, but only indirectly. So we need to find a means of looking awry, redirecting our attention to other features that show up that worldview despite the text. In other words, this essay might be regarded as an exercise in estrangement – an effort to make the text strange again so that we see it differently. In order to carry out such an estrangement effect, I focus on three matters: metaphor, ecocriticism and Marxism. Let me state my argument before unpacking it. I argue that the Song of Songs, or rather the second chapter that is my focus, operates according to what may be called an allocatory worldview. Rather than represented directly, it shows up in the fabric of the language, particularly its imagery. So we need to look elsewhere in order to locate it; hence my focus on metaphor, breaking the metonymic axis and then exploring what world is constructed when the images of nature coalesce. In developing this argument, I question the so-called “literal” readings of the Song, ones that assumed and continue to assume in various ways that the Song is about human love and sex (rather than about divine love). How this can be a literal reading is beyond me, for it merely substitutes one allegory for another, a carnal allegory for a divine allegory. The Song has as much to say directly about human sex and love as it has about divine love – that is, almost nothing. So, interpretations that take, in all the senses of the word, the Song as literally about sex between human beings must make allegorical moves comparable to the long-standing patristic and medieval tradition which took it as an allegory of God’s love for Israel or the Church. Elsewhere I have challenged such literal readings by taking them as far as they will go. Following a challenge from Stephen Moore (personal communication), I wrote a carnal allegory of the Song, a pornographic reading no less. By contrast, here I pursue directly what a purely literal reading might yield.
- Subject
- Song of Songs; worldview; sex and love; Hebrew Bible; divine love
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/803140
- Identifier
- uon:6306
- Identifier
- ISSN:1203-1542
- Language
- eng
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