last remains of a view which regarded the poem as simply
erotic.[1]The form in which the allegorical theory became fixed iu the synagogue is contained in the Midrash Chazita and in the Targum, which is a commentary rather than a translation. The spouse is Israel, her royal lover the divine king, and the poem is explained as tracing the great events of the people s history from the Exodus to the Messianic glory and final restoration.[2]
The authority of Origen, who, according to Jerome, surpassed himself in his commentary of ten volumes on this book, established the allegorical theory in the Christian church in the two main forms in which it has since prevailed. The bridegroom is Christ, the bride either the church or the believing soul The latter con ception is, of course, that which lends itself most readily to purposes of mystical edification, and which has made Canticles the manual in all ages of a wide-spread type of religious contemplation. But the other view, which identifies the bride with the church, must be regarded as the standard of orthodox exegesis. Of course the alle gorical principle admitted of very various modifications, and readily adapted itself to new religious developments, such as the rise of Mariolatry. Within the limits of the orthodox traditions the allegory took various colours, accord ing as its mystical or its prophetical aspect was insisted on. Among mediaeval commentators of the former class S. Bernard holds a pre-eminent place ; while the second class is represented by Xicolaus de Lyra who, himself a converted Jew, modified the Jewish interpretation so as to find in the book an account of the i^rocessus ecclesice under the Old and New Testaments. The prophetic exegesis reached its culminating point in the post-Refor mation period, when Cocceius found in the Canticles a complete conspectus of church history. But the relaxa tion of traditional authority opened the door to still stranger vagaries of interpretation. Luther was tempted to understand the book of the political relations of Solomon and his people. Others detected the loves of Solomon and Wisdom a view which found a supporter in Rosenmiiller even in the present century; alchemists thought of Solomon s researches in their art; and Puffen- dorf, by the aid of Egyptian hieroglyphics, referred the whole to the grave of Christ.
The history of the literal interpretation begins with the great * commentator" of the Syrian Church, Theodoras of Mopsuestia (died 429), who condemned equally the at tempt to find in the book a prophecy of the blessings given to the church, and the idea even at that time expressed in some quarters that the book is immoral. Theodorus regarded the Canticles as a poem written by Solomon in answer to the complaints of his people about his Egyptian marriage ; and this was one of the heresies charged upon him after his death, which led to his condemnation at the second council of Constantinople (553 A.D.) A literal interpretation was not again attempted till in 1544 Chateillon (Castellio or Castalion) lost his regency at Geneva for proposing to expel the book from the canon as impure. Grotius (Annot. in V. T., 1644) took up a more moderate position. Without denying the possibility of a secondary reference designed by Solomon to give his poem, a more permanent value, he regards the Canticles as primarily an oapio-rvs (conjugal prattle) between Solomon and Pharaoh s daughter. The distinction of a primary and secondary sense gradually became current not only among the Remonstrants, but in England (Lightfoot, Lowth) and even in Catholic circles (Bossuet, 1GU3). In the actual understanding of the book in its literal sense no great progress was made. Solomon was still viewed as the author, and for the most part the idea that the poem is a dramatic epithalamium was borrowed from Origen and the allegorists, and applied to the marriage of Pharaoh s, daughter. To reconcile this idea with the fact that the Song is full of peasant life, a most artificial style of composition had to be assumed. In Bossuet s once celebrated theory, to which Lowth also inclined, the epithalamium is made to extend over seven days, and each morning the bridegroom, who is fictitiously represented as a shepherd, rises early to pursue his rustic toil, leaving his bride alone till the evening. The seventh day is the Sabbath, when the bride and bridegroom appear together (ch. viii.). From Grotius to Lowth the idea of a typical reference designed by Solomon himself appears as a mere excrescence on the natural interpretation, but as an excrescence which could not be removed without perilling the place of Canticles in the canon, which, indeed, was again assailed by Whiston in 1723. But in his notes on Lowth s lectures, J. D. Michaelis, who regarded the poem as a description of the enduring happiness of true wedded love long after marriage, proposed to drop the allegory altogether, and to rest the canonicity of the book, as of those parts of Proverbs which treat of conjugal affection, on the moral picture it presents (1758). The hints which Michaelis offered for the interpretation of the book on this principle showed a singular want of delicacy ; but the moralizing rationalism of the period was not to be shocked by any impropriety which was atoned for by the " important moral tendency " of the book as a whole ; and the principle laid down by the critic of Gottingen was carried out in a variety of hypotheses, each, as Herder com plained, more improper than the other. A real step, however, was made in 1771 by J. T. Jacobi, who distin guished the husband of the Shulamite from Solomon, and representing the latter as a baffled tempter, prepared the way for the theory now most current among critics.
Then came Herder s exquisite little treatise on Solomon s Songs of Love, the Oldest and Sweetest of the East (1778). Herder possessed that delicacy of taste and sympathetic poetical genius which the school of Michaelis altogether lacked. Delighting iu the Canticles as the transparently natural expression of innocent and tender love, he was indignant at an exegesis which, in a supposed apologetical interest, was content to establish a didactic object for the book by the aid of hypotheses which sullied the purity and profaned the sanctity of the utterances of genuine human affection. If the songs of Canticles were allowed to speak for themselves, they would need no theory to explain their meaning, no apology to justify their morality, no fiction of a typical or didactic purpose to commend them as pure, lovely, and worthy of a place in a holy book. Is not true love itself holy 1 for love is. the fountain of all man s bliss, and all love, like goodness and truth, is at root one. Herder justifies these views in a sort of aesthetical commentary, which triumphantly vindicates the naive innocence and genuine delicacy of the love which the book displays. But his sympathy with the sentiment of the Canticles was truer than his eye for details ; and the idea that the poem is simply a sequence of independent songs without inner unity, grouped so as to display various phases and stages of love in a natural order, culminating in the placid joys of wedded life, was in some respects a retrograde step.
- ↑ The chief passages of Jewish writings referring to this dispute are Mishna. Jadaim iii. 5 and Tor>ifta Sanhedrin xii. For other passages see Gratz s Commentary, p. 115, and in control of his criticism the introduction to the commentary of Delitzsch.
- ↑ The text of the Targum in the Polyglotts and in Buxtorf s Rabbinic Bible is not complete. The complete text is given in the Venice editions, and in Lagarde s Hosjioyrapha Chaldaice, Lipsiae, 1873. The Polyglotts add a Latin version.
