Episode 288: Havilah Dharamraj - The Song of Songs Is More Than Biblical Bridgerton
What if the Song of Songs isn’t just ancient love poetry but a key to unlocking deeper biblical conversations about a better world? In this episode of The Bible for Normal People, Havilah Dharamraj explores how intertextual readings connect Song of Songs with the prophets, revealing themes of deity-devotee connection, sacred marriage, divine hope, and a return to Eden. Join them as they explore the following questions:
What is the Song of Songs, and how does it fit within the biblical canon?
Why was the Song of Songs included in the Bible alongside books like Kings or Isaiah?
How has the interpretation of the Song of Songs evolved in Jewish and Christian traditions?
What role does allegory play in understanding the Song of Songs?
How does the Song of Songs interact with themes in the prophets, such as Hosea, Isaiah, and Ezekiel?
What is the significance of the Song of Songs’ perspective on love and relationships?
How does intertextuality enrich the understanding of the Song of Songs?
Why has the Song of Songs been challenging for preachers and readers to engage with?
What cultural and historical contexts shape the metaphors of the Song of Songs?
What does the phrase “love is as strong as death” mean, and how can it be understood?
How does the Song of Songs offer an alternative to patriarchal and violent metaphors in the Bible?
In what ways does the Song of Songs symbolize a return to Eden?
What can modern readers learn from the Song of Songs about divine and human relationships?
How does the Song of Songs contribute to the broader narrative of hope and restoration in the Bible?
Quotables
Pithy, shareable, sometimes-less-than-280-character statements from the episode you can share.
“[The Song of Songs is] poetry, of course—love poetry, comparable perhaps to anthologies of love poetry in Egyptian literature in which human lovers converse with each other, speak of each other. There is also a 12th century Sanskrit drama in India which is analogous to Song of Songs in that it is a conversation, a very dramatically coherent series of conversations, between deity and devotee, very similar to how the Song of Songs has often been interpreted.” — Havilah Dharamraj
“[Song of Songs is] considered to belong in the wisdom category. And so it's to be read alongside Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and Job. That's what it's supposed to be.” — Havilah Dharamraj
“[Song of Songs is] thought of as having been written by Solomon…in his youthful years as a king. Proverbs, perhaps in midlife, and then Ecclesiastes, perhaps in old age. So somewhere in the minds of those who put that part of the canon together, it was [aligned] with wisdom literature. But what we do with it is another question.” — Havilah Dharamraj
“The Song of Songs was traditionally read at Passover, signaling this long tradition within Judaism that it was read allegorically. Just as much as the Exodus event demonstrates God's love for His people Israel, so does the Song of Songs. The Song of Songs can be read as a love poem that sits alongside the Exodus event.” — Havilah Dharamraj
“As with any other book in the canon, I don't know how much we can retrieve of the author's intention for the book. And so all we know from this end, as a reader, from the point of reception history, is that almost right from the very start, [Song of Songs has] been read allegorically. Was that just to avoid embarrassment? We do not know.” — Havilah Dharamraj
“Song of Songs comes in as an alternative, a possibility for a return to the ideal, and says it doesn't have to be this way. A different relationship is possible. What's happening here, whether on a human level or on the divine human level, it's a post-Eden tragedy. And it doesn't have to be this way. Song of Songs presents an alternative to both human and divine patriarchy.” — Havilah Dharamraj
Mentioned in This Episode
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Pete: On today's episode, I've got the ever wonderful nerd in residence Anna Sieges Beal as my co-host, and we're talking about how the Song of Songs makes sense of everything with Havilah Dharamraj.
Anna: Havilah is faculty in the Department of Biblical Studies at the South Asia Institute of Advanced Christian Studies in Bangalore, India. Her areas of academic interest are Old Testament narrative, reception centered intertextuality, and comparative literature conversing with biblical texts with the sacred texts of other faiths.
Pete: And I'll tell you folks, we had a great conversation with Havilah and I can't wait for you to hear it. And so let's just get into it.
Anna: All right, let's go!
[Teaser clip of Havilah speaking plays over music]
Havilah: “So when I put the Song of Songs in conversation with these bits of the canon, with respect to the relationship between deity and devotee, that is uh, Yahweh Israel, uh, Christ and the church, I saw that there was a much richer conversation possible. In terms of the sacred marriage metaphor, when you brought the Song of Songs into the conversation, because the Song of Songs brings into the conversation hope.”
[Ad break]
Anna: Well, Havilah, we are so happy to have you here with us today. I'm really interested in the work that you do. And today we're going to be talking about the Song of Songs. And so I was just hoping that you could introduce us to that part of the Bible, talk about maybe the genre and its place in the canon. Cause I don't know that very many people are totally familiar with Song of Songs.
Havilah: Oh, that surprises me because when I was a child, I had this Good News Bible with those line drawings in it. And I know that that book was particularly intriguing. I mean, the poems were modest enough, but the suggestion was that this is a book you should read surreptitiously, you know. So it was of great interest, I remember, back in Sunday school to us kids.
Genre? Poetry, of course. And love poetry, comparable perhaps to anthologies of love poetry in Egyptian literature. In which human lovers converse with each other, speak of each other, so love poetry, yes. There is also a 12th century Sanskrit drama in India which is analogous to Song of Songs in that it is a conversation, a very dramatically coherent series of conversations between deity and devotee, very similar to how the Song of Songs has often been interpreted. So that is of particular interest to me, and I hope one day to do a conversation between the Song of Songs and this Indian 12th century Sanskrit piece.
Pete: Can I ask a question just following up on that? Because I know, you know, having taught the Bible for many years, a question that I get a lot is what is the Song of Songs even doing in the Bible itself?
Havilah: Right, yeah.
Pete: Why do you think somebody made the decision to include Song of Songs in a book that also has things like 1 and 2 Kings or Isaiah? What's it doing there?
Havilah: Yeah, suppose even preachers, pastors don't know what to do with the book, so you hardly hear any sermons from that book. And so I'm not surprised at all. It's considered to belong in the wisdom category. And so it's to be read alongside Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and Job. That's what it's supposed to be.
Additionally, it's thought of as having been written by Solomon. Solomon writing it in his youthful years as a king. Proverbs, perhaps in midlife, and then Ecclesiastes, perhaps in old age. So somewhere in the minds of those who put that part of the canon together, it was off a piece, I think, with wisdom literature.
But what we do with it is another question.
Pete: Yeah, so sort of, there's love poetry, but there's also a wisdom dimension to the Song of Songs?
Havilah: The wisdom dimension. Practical wisdom, similar to Proverbs, “live a meaningful, happy, full life,” and Song of Songs deals with one part of it.
Anna: So, the history of interpretation on Song of Songs is kind of all over the place. I'm wondering if you could walk us through like some Jewish interpretation and maybe how Christians have dealt with it.
Havilah: Hmmm. In the Hebrew canon, you have the section called the Megillot, the scrolls, which contain five books, each book being read at one of the major festivals of Judaism. And the Song of Songs opens this section, the scrolls. The Song of Songs was traditionally read at Passover, signaling this long tradition within Judaism that it was read allegorically. Just as much as the Exodus event demonstrates God's love for His people Israel, so does the Song of Songs. The Song of Songs can be read as a love poem that sits alongside the Exodus event.
We know that even as early as the first century AD, a piece of Jewish literature called 4 Ezra documents Israel's self identification as a lily, as a dove. And these are familiar images in the song referring to the woman. That goes on into the medieval period. Medieval Jewish commentaries continue to cast, uh, Yahweh as the male character and Israel, corporate Israel, as the female character. So sometimes the woman is the individual devotee, the individual Jew.
And then, um, Christianity just, uh, follows, uh, Judaism's lead. There's Origen, the church father back in the third century AD, who had a 10 volume work on a book. Now, that's a bit of—
Anna: Really? I did not know that. 10 volumes?
Havilah: 10 volume work, yeah, Origen. And then there is in the medieval period, 12th century, Bernard, Bernard of Clairvaux, had 86 sermons. That is eight chapters long, yeah. So, uh, in all of these cases, what we've done is to read the book allegorically as an expression of love between deity and devotee. In the second half of the 20th century, that's when, um, the call to read the Song of Song as an expression of human romantic love gained increasing audibility—simply because by then we started looking at Egyptian anthologies of human-human love poetry.
And so now I think, uh, the pendulum has swung somewhere in the middle. So we can read Song of Songs as both/and. Both deity-devotee and human-human.
Pete: What fascinates me here is, I don't know if it's, if it's a tension, or maybe I'm just making this up, but between, let's say the original genre of Song of Songs as love poetry, then the allegorical reading of it.
You know, if there's any sense in which you, I mean, this is all very speculative, but maybe whether the author was intending this to be read allegorically or symbolically. I mean, I only, I'm juxtaposing that to what I typically hear, which is, well, it's ancient Near Eastern Tamil love poetry, and it got stuck in the canon because they thought Solomon wrote it. Well, that's probably wrong, but now we're stuck with it. So we have to do something with it to make it palatable for us so it's not just about sex. It's about the divine human relationship, whether Yahweh and Israel or Christ and his church. Right?
So, I mean, could you talk a little bit about just the connection between the genre as intended by the author and then the creative allegorical use of it in the church, if there's any sort of connection between those two, or if they're just trying to solve a big problem?
Havilah: Hmmm. As with any other book in the canon, Pete, I don't know how much we can retrieve of the author's intention for the book. And so all we know from this end, as a reader, from the point of reception history, is that almost right from the very start, It's been read allegorically.
Was that just to avoid embarrassment? We do not know, but we do know Rabbi Akiva who issued this ban on people singing the Song of Songs in taverns. Apparently, yeah, yeah, yeah. And Akiva is what? First century AD? Around the turn of the millennium? Yeah. So it was also being used at, in taverns, you know, people who have, and in fact, they were singing it in male and female parts. So he said, those who are singing it in a high little voice, a female voice. He said, they will not have a part in the age to come, he said.
Anna: Oh, my.
Pete: That's interesting.
Anna: That is.
Pete: Okay. Yeah. I just, I mean, just to follow up on that too, I think I unfairly categorize it as an either/or. I don't really believe that's true, but I just thought I'd categorize it that way.
As we all know, very early on, the Hebrew scriptures themselves were read allegorically before the Christian era. Maybe this text invites itself particularly toward allegorical interpretation, but this is nothing unusual about this one book, because that was common, of course, then in the Christian era as well, not just Song of Songs, but anything you can get your hands on from most of the medieval period.
So it's not that unusual. And I'm going to correct myself. It's not—the Song of Songs is not a problem to be solved. It's more of an opportunity to dig deeper into the mind of God or dig deeper into the relationship between the divine and the human and through highly charged symbolism, I guess.
Havilah: Mhmm. And especially because it's a poetry, it lends itself to a both/and even more readily than say, well, you mentioned Kings, it's hard to read King's allegorically. You can try… [All laughing]
Anna: That's true. It is hard to read that way.
Pete: Origen might say you have to, because it's so violent. You have to read it. You have, that's actually the problem that has to be solved. Right? So it may be a matter of just needing—how is scripture relevant for us, and it may be part of the whole charge to make relevant ancient writings for new settings and for new possibilities, which has been a part of both the Jewish and Christian journeys for two millennia.
Havilah: Yeah, right. How do you make meaning of this beautiful piece of poetry? Even as far back as the Church Fathers, there was a literal reading, but it is that the allegorical reading dominated until about a hundred years ago.
Anna: Well, and I think the allegorical reading is, is in some ways easier for us to, to sink our teeth into. We're not really sure what to do with ancient romantic love songs other than maybe sing them in a tavern. Which seems like kind of—
Pete: [Laughing] I didn’t know that.
Anna: I didn't either.
Pete: That’s fascinating, yeah.
Anna: I think I'm going to like, go down to my local brewery and be like, guys, should we try this on open mic night? [Pete laughs hard] This could be a really good thing.
Havilah: Actually in my country with, um, Bollywood, um, orientation, song and dance sequences, if you've ever watched a Bollywood movie.
Anna: Oh, yes.
Havilah: So these, what we call them, roadside Romeos, will whistle a Bollywood song at a fast paced music. Something like that.
Anna: I love that. A roadside Romeo. And we could bring that back. We could Bollywood-ize the Song of Songs. I think we should. I think that's the next thing that Bible for normal people needs to do.
Pete: I think that's the title of my next book, Roadside Romeo. That's, I'm going to go with that. That's, that's wonderful. [Anna laughs]
[Ad break]
Anna: Well Havilah, what you've done is really interesting. You put the Song of Songs in conversation with the prophets. And so what the prophets are going to do is they're going to kind of lean into this allegory, right? And be like, okay, we're going to have in Hosea, Hosea stands for God and Gomer stands for Israel. And so you've taken Song of Songs and, and you've put those two in conversation. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about how you do that and what kinds of insights it provides.
Havilah: Hmmm. Right. I'll start with saying why I did it. It actually goes far back to my childhood in which we used to sing the song, I don't know if you guys are familiar with it. The chorus is “his banner over me is love.” And there are verses. You remember that it had actions?
Anna: Oh yeah.
Havilah: “I am my beloved and he is mine and his banner over me is love.” And then the next verse, interestingly, is “he lifted me up from the miry clay and his banner over me is love.” Now that is not from the Song of Songs, that's from a psalm. And then in the third verse, it comes back, “Now I am his and he is mine, and his banner over me is love.”
So, you see, we are already doing intertextuality, that is conversing different parts of the canon with each other in Sunday School songs. When we preach, we rarely preach from one single text without reference to any other. So we're doing this. And we do this based on what's technically called the icon, the icon common to the text.
So what's common to the psalm, “lifting me up from the mighty clay” and the Song of Songs “I am my beloved’s and he is mine.” The icon in both is “he loves me, his banner over me is love.” So as readers we almost intuitively look for these icons to allow texts to be put into conversation with each other. And now that is entirely legit because we know that the 66 books in our canon are in conversation with each other. None of them are standalones. They all together make up the world of God, and obviously they are in conversation with each other.
And so it's always, um, disturbed me a bit like an unsolved puzzle that Song of Songs must just stand alone and there's nobody to talk to poor Song of Songs and it's sitting there by itself. So this I think is my effort to invite it to join the conversation that's going on, going on at the table of 66 books.
And then the next question would be, all right, if we are going to put it in conversation with other bits of the canon, which bits would that be? And then I looked for the icon that runs across the prophets and perhaps even goes back as far as Deuteronomy, the icon of sacred marriage. The icon of, uh, marriage, or let's say the relationship between Yahweh and Israel metaphorically constructed as a husband wife relationship, a divine husband and a human wife, a collective human wife. And then these texts came to mind. I mean, then I knew where to seat Song of Songs at the table. And I thought we'd make a small table of Song of Songs, Hosea, Isaiah and Ezekiel, of course. Yeah. And so that is how that conversation started between those books.
Anna: I love that your idea was, well, Song of Songs is kind of lonely, like it doesn't have any friends in the cafeteria. [Pete chuckles] And so let's make a new table where it can be in conversation with others. And I also really love that idea of an icon. I'd never heard that phrase before. You connect texts by way of an icon, that it's something that they have in common and so they can speak to one another. I like that.
Pete: Yeah, could you, let's develop that a little bit more. That's, that's, that is fascinating. I agree. How does juxtaposing, let's start with this. How does juxtaposing Song of Songs with the Prophets, how has that contributed to your understanding of Song of Songs itself? Has it changed what you think about it? Has it given you more insight or depth into the book itself?
Havilah: I looked at four themes in my book, and I put each theme into conversation with one particular prophet. For example, the theme of love and separation, this is those surreal poems you get in Song of Songs, two nighttime poems where the woman goes out looking for her beloved.
The seeking poems we call them sometimes. So I put that into conversation with Hosea 2, in which the seeker is now the man in the partnership, and he's trying to work through how he can get his wife to return to himself, the wife that's running off after other lovers. And then I did the theme of beauty, especially the praise poem in Song 5, which is different from the other three praise poems because here is a woman that's describing her beloved's body. And I put that into conversation with Ezekiel 16, in which the man is describing his beautiful foundling wife. And then in the third section, I looked at the theme of gardens. Gardens as a metaphor for the female lover. And I conversed it with Isaiah 5, the song of the vineyard, as it's called, in which the metaphor is of a husband disappointed with his wife, whom he pictures as a vineyard that he has carefully tended.
And the last and the fourth section in my book looks at the theme of love and jealousy, two sides of the same coin. Love and it's Jealousy in Song 8, where the woman is voicing her love and jealousy. Uh, and I paired that with Ezekiel 23. Those are the difficult texts. Which is a monologue of a husband who, uh, expected love, but hasn't received it. And now is, uh, responding with jealousy.
So when I put The Song of Songs in conversation with these bits of the canon, uh, well, with respect to the relationship between deity and devotee, that is, uh, Yahweh-Israel, uh, Christ, and the Church, I saw that there was a much richer conversation possible in terms of that metaphor, the sacred marriage metaphor, when you brought the Song of Songs into the conversation.
Because, uh, the other three, the prophets, are, um, almost invariably cases where the relationship is broken and things have gone wrong and we haven't mended it. But the Song of Songs brings into the conversation, hope. Or if you're thinking of human-human love, then look at all the texts which deal with human marriages. The Eden text, Genesis 1 and 2, the Pauline Epistles, if you like, even the divorce text. Well, put the Songs of Songs in conversation with all those, and you will see that it adds a whole new infusion of fresh ideas, alternatives, possibilities. So that's what I found happened when I invited the Song of Songs into conversation with other bits of the canon.
Anna: Can you say more about the hopefulness that it brings? Because your conversation partners are these, um, moments of divine violence, right? And usually divine violence against an imagined embodied woman. And what you're mentioning in Song of Songs is that, well, in Song of Songs, we hear a woman's voice. And yeah, could you just say more about the hope that reading these texts together provides?
Havilah: Yeah, I suppose before we say anything about the hope, we have to say something about the violence in especially Ezekiel, bits of Jeremiah also possibly, within the metaphor of divine marriage. Very difficult to understand or accept reading as a 21st century reader.
A little bit of background here is that in ancient West Asia, the category marriage is not primarily about relations between heterosexual partners. That's not what marriage is about. But it is more about relations of power. This is in a world with a patriarchal social structure. And so within a marriage, the relationship is one of power. The man has power over the woman. And so this category marriage as a metaphor could be readily transposed onto say international politics when you have the suzerain and vassal treaties where the suzerain or the overlord, the big one, the empire says to the vassal, I am the powerful one here and you should show loyalty to me.
And so we have an excerpt from a pronouncement of a suzerain over a disloyal vassal. He says, “May your warriors become women, may land after land draw near to them.” What he means by land after land draw near them is repeated rape, land after land. That is male invaders. And so the marriage metaphor now becomes genderized in terms of power where the overlord is male, genderized male, and vassal is genderized as a female. And actually in the Bible, where you have the language of war, the same genderization happens between the victor and the vanquished. There are texts in Nahum, Jeremiah, Isaiah, where an army incapable of victory is dismissed as one made up of women, or a fearful army, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Psalms, Micah, fearful army is genderized as a woman in labor.
When you transpose this idea then of the genderization within the metaphor of the powerful as male and the not powerful as female, to take that into a, um, sacred marriage, which is a deity devotee marriage. Obviously the deity is going to be male and the devotee is going to be female.
I'll give you an interesting example from the cult of Ishtar, Inana or Ishtar, the fertility goddess. Now here you have a female goddess and you have male devotees, and so when the male devotees prepared for union with her, mystical union with her, they were first rendered gender ambivalent because they're men, right? And so in cultic performances, they would carry spindles on one hand and swords on the other. They were made, they processed before the goddess wearing women's clothing on their left sides and men's clothing on the right side. So they were men who were changed into women so that they could achieve union with the goddess and the goddess then assumed maleness. So, it's not about a female body or a male body, it's more about genderization in terms of the powerful party and the not so, the party subject to that power.
And so that is why now when we come to these texts, the difficult texts in Ezekiel, here is incarnation, God speaking to a society that understands male and female in terms of power, genderized power. And so these texts are definitely not a prescription, they are a description through a metaphor that will carry impact to its audience, to its, uh, hearers.
So whether it's the oracles of Jeremiah, Isaiah, Hosea, Ezekiel, you find the male-female gender hierarchy in it where it concerns the divine marriage. And so in our broken world then, it's a gender terror that plays out in the real world, that plays out in this metaphor also.
But here's where the Song of Songs, you asked about hope Anna, this is where the Song of Songs comes in. Where Song of Songs comes in as an alternative, a possibility for a return to the ideal, and says it doesn't have to be this way. A different relationship is possible. What's happening here, whether on a human level or on the divine human level, it's a post-Eden tragedy. And it doesn't have to be this way. And so Song of Songs presents an alternative to both human and divine patriarchy.
Anna: Wow.
Havilah: As to replace the genderization of power. So we're really not talking bodies here. Yeah. We're talking something much higher.
[Ad break]
Pete: When I hear you talk, Havilah, it, I've never really thought of this on my, because I'm not taught this, you know, I wasn't taught this in seminary or graduate school. It's love poetry or it's just allegorical, but this intertextuality is interesting. And You really convinced me. It's almost obvious in terms of the hope that Song of Songs can give to other portrayals of God with violence and gender power plays and things like that. Again, we can't know the author's intention, but I would love to know. Did you realize what you were doing when you wrote this?
And maybe he or she did understand what they were doing when they wrote this we'll never know, but that doesn't mean we can't, that doesn't mean we can't explore those possibilities.
Havilah: And that's the beauty of this kind of intertextual reading. It's called reception-centered intertextuality, which is different from author-centered, where we know that the author had a certain thought going on, and he said, like when we read now for Christmas and Advent, we're going to read the text in Matthew, and then we try to figure out why he was referencing the Old Testament, that's author-centered intertextuality.
But here, this is reception-centered. We are looking at two books in the canon. Uh, two pieces of text in the canon thinking, well, they're talking about the same thing. Let's converse them with each other and see what happens. And then we get this third text, which is the piece I wrote.
Anna: Well, and I love too, how when you do that, it provides hope on both levels. It provides hope on like that level of the allegory, God, deity, and devotee, like you say, and then also on the human level, like you pointed out that relationships don't have to be like this. We don't have to have this power imbalance in relationships. And so I think, I think that's really neat because it speaks to both of those levels that Pete got taught in seminary, either allegory or human relationship, but it heals both.
Havilah: Yeah, in fact, quite a few scholars who talk of the Song of Songs as a return to Eden. And when you talk of a return to Eden, there's two sets of relationships that go wrong there, right? The God-human relationship and the human-human relation, both go wrong. And so in both senses, the Song of Songs is a return to Eden.
Pete: Mhmm. Here's the problem I have, is I have college students, and even when I taught in a seminary that was largely male, I know some of them said, I, if I can be blunt, I'm not married. I can't handle this imagery. Right? From, from, from the, uh, you know, a, a, um, literal love poem angle. But I mean, I don't know much about the history of Christian art, but I know that the Song of Songs is understood as, you know, that it's exactly the sexually powerful metaphor of attraction and mutual desire, not one over the other, that was the object of art. And as you said, the object of commentaries, there's a reason for that.
Havilah: Uh, you know, uh, uh, these male students were saying “this is too much for me.” I'm immediately thinking back to the chapter that we call the fall. Over the fall, the humans were naked and unashamed, right? So we, as post-fall humans, that's how we feel about this book.
Pete: Right.
Havilah: Even more makes the point about it being a return to Eden when you're not ashamed about our sexuality.
Anna: I love that. That's great.
Pete: There's a lot going on in this book. Who knew there was so much happening?!
Anna: There is! It's like the Bridgerton of the Bible. [Pete laughs]
Havilah: Yeah. We should preach it more.
Anna: We should.
Pete: Well, yeah, I, I think, I, I guess I can speak to that, to like, for maybe more evangelical settings. That's gonna be a big problem because it requires a certain willingness to read allegorically, which many evangelicals are not prone to do. I think they do it, they just don't know they're doing it. So what do you do? We just take stories literally. So that's fine if it's Genesis or something. But this, this is just, you just avoid it. I think, you know, you're, you're really helping me to see, to revisit this, to think, no, no, no, no, no. You're really missing something powerfully subversive in the Hebrew Bible.
Havilah: Exactly. Yeah. And I think the reason we evangelicals are particularly reluctant to read it, this particular book as allegory, might be because, you know, we've thrown out the baby with the bathwater when we’ve thrown out tradition as a source of authority. Sola scriptura, but we really don't know what we're doing with the Bible sometimes. Tradition helps us there. It's 2000 years of both Judaism and Christianity, the church fathers, uh, reading it allegorically. I mean, 86 sermons, come on. That's where evangelicals might've lost because we placed ourselves above the tradition.
Pete: That's the legacy of the Protestant Reformation, right? They have Calvin who literally says that allegory is a device of Satan. And so we have this “one meaning” mentality which also meshes with the burgeoning growth of scientific ways of thinking. And you lose that, right? So you're, you're actually, see, you're not that novel, are you? You're actually helping us recover something that the tradition has been doing, but we've just lost sight of that. And we have a different hermeneutic that in the medieval period, they would call boring. Just a literal approach doesn't really tell you much about God in your life and things like that.
Havilah: And every hermeneutic move has its rules. So we still play by rules. It's not so open and subjective that anything can mean anything, right?
Pete: Right. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Which was Calvin's problem I think. But anyway, um, can I, can I ask a quick question? Love is strong as death. How do you understand that? And if you want to work that in intertextually, you can, you don't have to, but it pops up there. And, um, I've always been intrigued by that. So help us understand that.
Havilah: Chapter 8 particularly is a series of poems that look at the nature of love. It's trying to explain what love is. And when you come to this bit, it starts with, “place me like a seal over your heart,” she says. “Like a seal on your arm.” Here is a woman exercising her right over the beloved, and this is so totally countercultural.
A woman was seen as the property more or less, but here is a woman saying, “let me put my seal,” you know, like, uh, those seals that were stamped onto clay jars with the name of the wine merchant, or whoever, oil merchant, whoever, and then it made the jar the merchant’s. So she said, let me stamp you. That's one way to read it. “Let me stamp my seal upon you,” she says, “over your arm, over your heart,” she says, “so that I can declare to the world that you are mine and nobody can have you except me.” So she's talking about the demand for exclusive love. Now in the ancient world, only the man could expect that from his wife. The man himself was a free agent. He could go around and, well, there was prostitution. There was all sorts of things going on. But the woman was his exclusive property.
But here she is demanding it. And she says, “I want you to be mine and nobody else's because love is as strong as death,” and that has to be read alongside the next line. It's a couplet. It's “jealousy as unyielding as the grave.” So the parallel is between love and jealousy. Two sides of the same coin. Jealousy being the jealousy that demands exclusive mutual love, love and his jealousy, hyphenated phrase. Sometimes love and it’s jealousy. If love is strong, jealousy is unyielding.
If love is like death, jealousy is like the grave. Death and the grave are, um, they should be taken for granted. Once you're born into the world, these are things that you can expect will happen to you. And so she says, this is what love is. And that is how love should be understood. As strong as death and as unyielding as the grave. That's what real love looks like.
We know what real death and real grave looks like, but this is what real love should look like, she says, comparing it with. And then she goes on to, and there's this wonderful metaphors out there, it burns like a blazing fire, like a mighty flame, she goes on to say, the consuming power of love, as strong as the consuming power of death and the grave. She can't find perhaps, uh, an equivalent stronger. Than death and the grave.
Pete: You just got me. I have, I'm so busy today, but I'm not going to be able to think of much because I’m going to be thinking of this and how I need to get back into the Song of Songs and understand it.
Anna: Absolutely. Well, Havilah, I have loved this conversation so much. And just kind of as like our final takeaway, what, what would you say readers of the Bible can learn from Song of Songs and the way it's been interpreted?
Havilah: I think the Song of Songs shows us what we're journeying towards, you know, post-fall, what are we journeying towards in our relationship with God? Regaining the Eden ideal when God and humans rejoiced in each other and could sing songs such as are in the Song of Songs, to each other. It gives us this journey through the canon to finish off in the Book of Revelation, which paints in its closing chapters this new Jerusalem descending as a bride, beautiful and ready for her bridegroom, the lamb, and there Eden is restored. There is that great river of life flowing through the main street.
There are the trees and its fruit. There's Eden again and who's the bride and who's the bridegroom? Who's going to be joined together in perfect harmony? It's us and God, Christ and the church. And so I think the Song of Songs helps us to pray that prayer. Come Lord Jesus.
Anna: Amen.
Pete: Yeah. Thank you for that.
Anna: I love that.
Pete: Well, um, Havilah, thank you very much for spending some time with us and for, um, giving us these insights that I, I'm certainly thinking about and going to keep thinking about and reorienting my own thinking about the Song of Songs. And I'm sure many people listening have the same experience right now. So thank you for joining us.
Anna: Yeah, really appreciate it.
Havilah: Thanks.
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