Just an interesting note/my partial interpretation of the first excerpt that Andrew brought up in class:
When it appears in 3:5, it is preceeded by a passage in which her beloved is not answering her calls and she cannot find him. To me, when she "adjures the daughters of Jerusalem [to] not stir up or awaken love until it is ready" she is scared. She was previously "faint with love" (2:5) but now she is not sure, as he is not there. In Chapter 5, when again she goes searching for her beloved she adjures the daughters once more, but this time she is again "faint with love". It's as if before she was either warning or pleading to not fall in love because she wasn't sure if she was ready, and now she is in love, but is still issuing some type of warning, because his behavior was the same. And then, furthermore, the third time she "adjures" the daughters, she again tells them to not stir up love, possibly recognizing that she now has it, and it was good that she waited until she was ready.
This is a very...not religious...reading of the text, but I thought the contrast of her reactions to 2 similiar situations was worth pointing out.
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
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2 comments:
I had something of the same reaction on this reading.
In particular, I think interpretation may depend upon how we read the section near the end, where it says (paraphrasing), "Let Solomon have his many loves, I prefer to have my one true love." I heard two suggestions in class:
1) This is the male voice, not to be identified with Solomon.
2) This is the female voice, and the male voice is to be identified with Solomon.
On the second interpretation, given that the reader might be expected to know that Solomon had something on the order of a thousand (!) wives and concubines, one might reasonably interpret it as the complaint of a woman who loved Solomon, but was wounded by his not returning the love with equal fidelity or devotion, and hence is warning other women to guard their hearts against similar experiences. (It's worth reading a bit on Solomon -- I think the most relevant passages are around I Kings 10 if I remember correctly. The Tanach does not directly condemn polygamy, but it is worthy of note how much trouble comes from it -- not only Solomon's mistakes, but also the ugly family dynamics one sees in the households of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, where preference for one wife and child over the others leads to some sad events. Indeed, the descendents of Isaac (Jews) and Ishmael (Arabs) are still at odds with one another, four thousand years later!)
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