The Unity of the Song of Songs

Abstract

Scholars seem to be in agreement that the Song of Songs deals with love. Beyond that, there is little consensus. Human love (the moderns), or divine love (the ancients, both of synagogue and church), or both? A collection of several disparate poems, or a few? Poems set within a marriage celebration or without? Poems of the Solomonic period or of various times and places ? The questions can be multiplied, but this article will concentrate on one issue: the unity of the work, as evidenced by the many repetitions within it. The large number of repetitions within eight chapters makes the Song unique within the Hebrew Bible, with the exception of Qohelet. There are several hapax legomena; yet many ordinary words are repeated over and over. Hence the question arises: are the repetitions significant enough to warrant the claim that the Song is, by and large, a unity, and not simply a loose collection or anthology of disparate poems? In other words, one would not expect to find this inner thread of unity (significant repetitions) in poems that are widely presumed to have been written over many years by different hands. What if one should urge that the unity was achieved by an editor who locked together several poems by means of these repetitions? Perhaps an adequate reply is that the original poet would have been as expert at this kind of thing as the (later) editor would have been. The repetitions can be treated under the headings of refrains, themes, and simple repetitions of words and phrases.

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