The Speaker of The Song of Songs
This presentation draws on the literary theorists Barbara Herrnstein Smith and Benjamin Harshav to delineate forms of textual continuity and coherence in The Song of Songs. It makes the case that The Song comprises a single poem with a single speaker — not an edited collection, nor a composed series, but a single composition. The recurrence of themes, motifs, characters, and style give it consistency, but it is its speaker, its voicing, that gives The Song continuity and its coherence. The voice is that of a young woman in a reverie of desire that, like an extended musical composition of multiple movements, cycles through rolling sets of scenes, settings, themes, characters, motifs, and images, exploring along the way varied scenarios and moods all associated with the riches and dangers, the exploits, of love. Marked patterning demarcates seven such sequences, of uneven length and varying complexity. The speaker styles herself a shulamit, the counterpart of her princely shlomo; together the two are a pair of charmed and matching lovers in the throes of mutual discovery. This view of The Song prompts a series of questions: (1) where exactly the work’s heading was intended to end and the speaker to begin, (2) what the heading meant to signal about the work’s quality and meaning; (3) what, together, the heading and the composition can indicate about the relationship between author and character; and (4) what the work can indicate about the nature of poetry as an imagining of the inner lives of the other, even of the other-gendered.
Simeon Chavel studies the literature of the Hebrew Bible, the religion of ancient Israel and Judea, and their relationship. His approach combines theory of literature, theory of religion, the ancient historical and social context, and early Jewish interpretation. His book Oracular Law and Priestly Historiography in the Torah (Mohr Siebeck 2014) analyzesthe combination of law and narrative in The Priestly History (a Pentateuchal source) through a distinct set of four “oracular novellas.” A book nearing completion, God in the Eyes of Israel: A History of the Religious Imagination in Ancient Israel & Judea, traces interest in text as an agent of religious experience that draws on and reconfigures the lived spheres of family, region, royalty, and nationhood, through the Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, Persian, and Hellenistic periods. Another getting underway, The Voice of Biblical Composition and the Composition of Biblical Voice, will describe how the framing voice of a literary work determines its genre, coherence, and meaning, and can be used to assess the compositional integrity or composite nature of works in the Hebrew Bible.