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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > August 2002

The Song of Songs

An ode to intimacy

By Robert Alter

Human interactions in the Bible are on the whole seen from a certain distance. The paucity of narrative detail regarding setting, appearance and posture can make even the most intimate of conversations read like an exchange between talking heads. Physical contact between characters in the rapid narrative reports is usually reduced to the basest notation. One person may carry, grasp, seize, fling or strike another; in the sexual sphere, the man (almost always the subject of these verbs) may know, lie with or come into a woman.1 But that is all the reader learns. These summarized notations keep us […]

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Footnotes

1.

Ariel and Chana Bloch, The Song of Songs: A New Translation (New York: Random House, 1995; repr. Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 2000). All translations used here, unless otherwise noted, are from this translation, ©2002 The Regents of the University of California.

2.

See the following articles in Biblical Archaeology Review: Lawrence E. Stager, “The Song of Deborah—Why Some Tribes Answered the Call and Others Did Not,” BAR 15:01; and Philip King and Stager, “Of Fathers, Kings and the Deity,” BAR 28:02.

3.

The Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible is the standard rabbinic textus receptus.

Endnotes

1.

The last of these terms, bo’ ’el, “come into,” might seem to have a certain anatomical concreteness, but the way it is repeatedly used argues that it had become a fixed idiom in biblical usage for a man’s first experience of sexual intimacy with a woman, bearing only a vestigial connection with the physical origins of the expression.