How to Sing the Song of Songs

The two most important factors in interpreting any piece of literature are context and genre.

Last week I argued that the Christ-focused Old Testament context of the Song of Solomon demanded a Christ-focused interpretation.

But how do we interpret the Song in a Christ-focused way? That’s where literary genre comes in, and I want to introduce this by recounting an incident that transformed my own approach to the Song.

A few years ago, in my Old Testament exegesis class, I was working my way through the arguments about whether the Song was to be interpreted literally, allegorically, or typologically, when I noticed one of my students smiling and shaking his head – thankfully quite a rare occurrence.

Eventually I stopped and asked this usually courteous young man what was wrong. He explained a little about his Middle Eastern agricultural background (probably very close to the Song’s original location) and how he had also studied his own ancient culture’s literature at a Master’s level. He then went on to (very politely) express his horror at the way we were approaching this ancient Eastern literature with such a modern Western mindset!

He said that such love-songs were very common in his culture and that they were to be primarily interpreted by the emotions and impressions they evoke rather than by dissecting the words with dictionaries, lexicons, grammars, etc. These songs, he said, were primarily to provoke and stimulate emotions rather than be subjected to cold logical analysis.

That immediately jived with something I remembered that Vern Poythress had previously written on the similar disadvantage Western minds find themselves at when interpreting Biblical typology.

We in the West are not very much at ease with symbolism ourselves. We live in an in­dustrialized society dominated by scientific and technological forms of knowledge. Such knowledge minimizes the play of metaphors and the personal depth dimensions of human living. For many people “real” truth means technological truth, that is, truth swept free of metaphor and sym­bolism…I am convinced that God does not share our general cultural aver­sion to metaphors and symbols. He wrote the Old Testament, which contains a good deal of poetry and many uses of metaphor. Jesus spoke in parables, which are a kind of extended metaphor. Godly Israelites of Old Testament times were able to appreciate His language, whereas we have a hard time with it. We must adapt to the fact that symbols and metaphors can speak truly and powerfully without speaking with pedan­tic scientific precision. A symbol may suggest a deep truth or even a cluster of related truths without blurting everything out in plain talk and making everything crystal clear…To appreciate a symbol, we must let our imaginations play a little, and ask what the symbol suggests. What does it bring to mind? What is it like? What does it remind me of in my own past experience? What does it allude to in other writings by the same author? We must explore all these questions, but endeavor to do so like an Israelite, not like a twentieth-century Westerner.^[i]

Though speaking about two different kinds of biblical literature, my student and Poythress are really making the same point: if we are ever going to understand the original message of the Song, we have to make a difficult journey across cultures and centuries, and be much more imaginative and impressionistic than scientific (And who’s to say which approach is morally superior? It all depends on the divine intention.)

With the Song in particular, we have to dial down the Western academic analysis (and also the Western obsession with sex) and aim to stir up some Eastern emotions and moods. Instead of parsing every word, every tree, every flower, and every body part under a microscope, we should take a step back, let a few verses be sung, and ask ourselves, “What impression is this intended to make upon me? What emotion does this evoke?  What feeling is this calling me to experience or enjoy?” And as this is a Christ-centered song, especially ask, “What emotion is it calling me to feel towards Christ?” and also, “What is it saying about Christ’s feelings towards me?”

This is not easy or comfortable for most of us Westerners who have been taught to suppress emotions and suspect impressions. But why not open the Song, “sing” a few verses and see what happens?!  In the next few days I’ll come back to this and flesh it out a bit more.