OK, got your next round? 🍺🍺🍺 Good! Where were we? Oh yeah, Case 5, Song 5:2–7:11. Last I was telling you about the first part, 5:2–8. We left off when the woman looking for her beloved got caught by a band of men who beat her. She invoked her band of women to tell her beloved about her painful pining for him. In what comes next, 5:9–6:3, the women answer her and she answers them back.
Song 5:9–6:3
1 How’s your beloved so much more than any other, O most beautiful of women?
2 How’s your beloved so much more than any other, that you adjure us so?
1 מַה־דּוֹדֵךְ מִדּוֹד הַיָּפָה בַּנָּשִׁים
2 מַה־דּוֹדֵךְ מִדּוֹד שֶׁכָּכָה הִשְׁבַּעְתָּנוּ
3 My beloved — luminous red, eye-catching over ten-thousand!
4 His head — finest gold
5 His hair — mounds, black like a raven
6 His eyes — like doves on waterways
7 Swimming in milk, sitting in a setting
8 His cheeks — like a spice-bed, towers of powders
9 His lips — lilies dripping running myrrh
10 His hands — cylinders of gold lined with beryl
11 His abs — a slab of ivory
12 His thighs — pillars of alabaster
13 His look — like the Lebanon, a hunk like the cedars
14 His cheek — sweets, and all of him — savories
15 This is my beloved and this is my love, O sisters in Jerusalem
3 דּוֹדִי צַח וְאָדוֹם דָּגוּל מֵרְבָבָה
4 רֹאשׁוֹ כֶּתֶם פָּז
5 קְוּצּוֹתָיו תַּלְתַּלִּים שְׁחֹרוֹת כָּעוֹרֵב
6 עֵינָיו כְּיוֹנִים עַל־אֲפִיקֵי מָיִם
7 רֹחֲצוֹת בֶּחָלָב יֹשְׁבוֹת עַל־מִלֵּאת
8 לְחָיָו כַּעֲרוּגַת הַבֹּשֶׂם מִגְדְּלוֹת מֶרְקָחִים
9 שִׂפְתוֹתָיו שׁוֹשַׁנִּים נֹטְפוֹת מוֹר עֹבֵר
10 יָדָיו גְּלִילֵי זָהָב מְמֻלָּאִים בַּתַּרְשִׁישׁ
11 מֵעָיו עֶשֶׁת שֵׁן מְעֻלֶּפֶת סַפִּירִים
12 שׁוֹקָיו עַמּוּדֵי שֵׁשׁ מְיֻסָּדִים עַל־אַדְנֵי־פָז
13 מַרְאֵהוּ כַּלְּבָנוֹן בָּחוּר כָּאֲרָזִים
14 חִכּוֹ מַמְתַקִּים וְכֻלּוֹ מַחֲמַדִּים
15 זֶה דוֹדִי וְזֶה רֵעִי בְּנוֹת יְרוּשָׁלִָם
16 Where did your beloved go, O most beautiful of women?
17 Where did your beloved head off? And we’ll seek him with you!
16 אָנָה הָלַךְ דּוֹדֵךְ הַיָּפָה בַּנָּשִׁים
17 אָנָה פָּנָה דוֹדֵךְ וּנְבַקְשֶׁנּוּ עִמָּךְ
18 My beloved went/goes down to his garden to the spice-beds
19 To graze in the gardens and pick at the lilies
20 I am my beloved’s, and mine is he — who grazes in the lilies
18 דּוֹדִי יָרַד לְגַנּוֹ לַעֲרוּגוֹת הַבֹּשֶׂם
19 לִרְעוֹת בַּגַּנִּים וְלִלְקֹט שׁוֹשַׁנִּים
20 אֲנִי לְדוֹדִי וְדוֹדִי לִי הָרֹעֶה בַּשּׁוֹשַׁנִּים
I don’t know if you noticed, but the women answering — that’s new for the Song. It’s a development. Up until this point, they are only invoked and addressed. They don’t speak up and reply. It’s like until now they were in the speaker’s head, and now they pop out, come to life, and interact with her. This is similar to the guards. Earlier she mentions their presence, says that they chance upon her, asks them a question, and immediately passes them by (Song 3:4). They flit across the screen to be seen, talked of, and talked to, but not to act or be interacted with. (Yes, phrase after phrase ends with a preposition, but Yoda I am not.)
These old ears of mine have heard a lot in their time, 👂🏼👂🏼 and they pick up on how the women speak. They speak twice (lines 1–2 and 16–17), both times they ask a question, and they ask it in a distinctive way. Both times they start with a simple question (“how,” “where”), then they name their addressee (“O most beautiful of women,” sleuths call this the vocative), then they repeat the question and extend it:
1 How’s your beloved so much more than any other, O most beautiful of women?
2 How’s your beloved so much more than any other, that you adjure us so?
1 מַה־דּוֹדֵךְ מִדּוֹד הַיָּפָה בַּנָּשִׁים
2 מַה־דּוֹדֵךְ מִדּוֹד שֶׁכָּכָה הִשְׁבַּעְתָּנוּ
16 Where did your beloved go, O most beautiful of women?
17 Where did your beloved head off? And we’ll seek him with you!
16 אָנָה הָלַךְ דּוֹדֵךְ הַיָּפָה בַּנָּשִׁים
17 אָנָה פָּנָה דוֹדֵךְ וּנְבַקְשֶׁנּוּ עִמָּךְ
The questions prompt the dreamer to draw her beloved ever more vividly, until he is actually there. I tried to express this in my translation. The dreamer’s answer to the first question of “what, how,” lines 3–14, could be a long line of verbless sentences, which in English would get us “is, are” in each one. That would make a series of statements, propositions, definitions. Yaaawn! 🥱😴 Because she is rendering his qualities to her friends from her mind’s eye, dropping the verbs altogether conveys his sensuous, tangible presence to her, immediacy. This way, the list is an experience. This sense that she is experiencing him, not defining him, goes with the fact that taken as a whole the set of comparisons just doesn’t add up to anything (gold + black raven + white doves + milk + spices + lilies & myrrh + beryl + ivory + alabaster + cedars = ⁉️). Put all those images together into a single human body and you come up with something unrecognizable and meaningless. 🤨😕😵 If anything, the effect could be comical and totally kill the mood. (Sleuth Fiona Black is brilliant on this. See below.) But linger over each one as a separate moment of touching and being inspired, and it is erotically charged…and charging. ⚡️⚡️⚡️ (Sleuth Elaine James is brilliant on this. See below.)
The dreamer’s answer to the second question of “where,” in lines 18–20, makes the beloved even more present to the dreamer. Going down to a bed of spices (distinctive smells) and picking at lilies (prodding, pulling, stroking) shows up throughout the Song as images of lovemaking, which we spent some time on back on Case 2 (Song 2:8–17). Also, the beloved’s use of perfective verb (יָרַד “went down/goes down”) to describe the beloved is another example of a pivot pun. As an answer to the women’s question, “Where did your beloved go?” it refers to the past, “He went down to his garden.” To judge by what comes next, it is also the beginning of her own reverie; she uses their question to drift off somewhere in her own mind. So it belongs to the present, “My beloved goes down to his garden.” (We talked about perfective verbs (and imperfective ones and aspect) and about pivot puns before. Refresh your memory here.)
Now stay with me here, but if you remember, the lover is already having a reverie; she is a dreamer. She is not dreaming about dreaming here, but transitioning within her reverie from a scene in which she seeks her beloved to one in which she simply has him. But the transition happens through a question by the women about where he went and the dreamer’s answer about where he goes. A sleuth doesn’t meet this kind of technique every day, you know. You just have to sit back and marvel. Anyway, in the section that comes next (6:4–7:11), the lover’s beloved is so completely present in the reverie that he talks to her directly. It’s what he says while they are together and he is “picking at the lilies.”
This is another instance where hearing the tone plays such a crucial role. After the lover goes on at length telling her friends how beautiful her beloved is, triggering the most exotic and wondrous sensations, their offer to help her find him is not just them being a bunch of devoted friends who’d actually rather be watching the soaps or doing math homework. They want a look at him too! All that oooohing and aaaahing in anticipation helps push the beloved to her own private oooohing and aaaahing together with him.
Let me make one more point, about some of the ways this poetry creates the mood of sensuous immediacy:
☝️ Like elsewhere the Song, the similes and metaphors in lines 6–7 (5:12) are grammatically ambiguous; is it the eyes or the doves that are “swimming in milk” and “sitting in a setting”? As you consider the options, they start to run into each other and blend together, because actually it doesn’t really matter. This blending effect gives the imagery and the scene a more immediate, sensuous, and fluid feel. mmmmm
✌️ In lines 18–20 (6:2–3), the dreaming lover ends her bit of speech with a few images. First she says her beloved grazes in the gardens. Then she says he picks at the lilies. Next she takes one image from each and combines them: he grazes in the lilies. Here too blending the images creates a feeling of immediacy, sensuality, and fluidity — the dynamic feel of touching, moving, and so on.
OK, this talk made me real thirsty. I downed all that drink and we’re way past last call. Let’s pack it up, and next time I’ll fill you in on the speech between the two lovers, at 6:4–7:11, which will close the case. Get ready and stuff that wallet of yours with bills. You don’t know what that means? You’re older than I am!! (So much for the generation of “smart” things…🙄) Just make sure your digital payment app won’t bounce.
A note I scribbled down you may want to look at
line 3 (5:10) דָּגוּל מֵרְבָבָה “eye-catching over ten-thousand” — root d-g-l = “to see”; stem G (Qal) passive participle “(a thing) visible, seen, looked at, a spectacle, spectacular”; namely, either (a) in a mob of 10,000 he is still visible, he stands out, or (b) he is more impressive than a gathering of 10,000, like an army or the stars — both meanings are things he says about her (6:8–10)
Sleuths referred to above you might want to look into
Fiona Black, The Artifice of Love : Grotesque Bodies and the Song of Songs (Bloomsbury, 2009)
Elaine James, Landscapes of the Song of Songs: Poetry and Place (Oxford Univ. Press, 2017)