Endnote 2 – Unlocking the Poetry of Love in the Song of Songs

The last attempt at finding a definable structure in the Song is in Edwin C. Webster, “Pattern in the Song of Songs,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 22 (1982), pp. 73–93. Webster thinks that separate poems were arranged in a balanced form within chiasmi. Roland E Murphy, Wisdom Literature: Job, Proverbs, Ruth, Canticles, Ecclesiastes, Esther [The Forms of the Old Testament literature, 13] (Eerdmans Publishing Co.: Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1981), develops a structure for the Song of Songs (pp. 97–124). In 1979 (“The Unity of the Song of Songs,” Vetus Testamentum 29 [1979], pp. 436–443, and “Interpreting the Song of Songs,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 9 [1979], pp. 99–105), he took a different approach by concentrating on the unifying devices that are used within the Song: refrains, themes, and vocabulary/phrases. In my review of Pope (Maarav, 1979, pp. 192–194), I alluded to the use of “linkage” to obtain such a unity, but such devices necessarily alert us to the activities of editors rather than to those of the poets.