I
find it truly exciting that the only time a woman describes herself
in the Bible she describes herself as “black and beautiful.”¹
The joy comes from both a woman describing herself as beautiful –
which I find incredibly subversive on its own – and the fantastic
inversion of our messed up culture that she is dark-skinned AND
beautiful.  It is a lovely match for Black History Month.  And then,
on top of all that, Song of Songs is a book of erotic poetry in the
Bible!   Its very existence flies in the face of the ridiculous
Christian prudishness that has done such great harm for so many
centuries.

Thus,
I’ve been really excited to preach this sermon for weeks.  However, a
few problems have emerged. Song of Songs has humbled my prowess as a
scholar.   I’ve done some my most significant Biblical study on Song
of Songs.  Yet, when I came to the important questions related to
preaching this text I found that I had NO possible way to discover
their answers.  What I would really like to know is (1) how radical
it was for a woman to say “I am beautiful” in that time and place
and (2) how radical it was for a woman to express sexual desire in
that time and place.  There are a few impediments to knowing.  First
of all, the black and beautiful woman is the only woman in the whole
Bible describing herself AND the only woman in the Bible naming her
sexual desire, which means that there is no one to compare her to.  

Secondly,
there are the incredible complications of the text itself.  This book
is very, very difficult to make assertions about.  To begin with, you
may know it as Song of Songs or Song of Solomon because its OPENING
LINE is difficult to translate and no one is sure which one is more
accurate.  That’s only the beginning of the complications.  There is
also the issue of determining when it was written, and time ranges
are especially wide on this.  Scholars claim anything from 960 to 200
BCE.  That’s 760 years of difference.  It is possible that the ways
that women’s voices were heard, the expectations of beauty, the
sexual norms of the day, and how much humility a woman was expected
to express might well have varied wildly over 760 years.  For
instance, it might be worth considering that many of those things
have drastically changed since 1257, and even since 1957.

This level of unknowing makes it
hard to determine anything about how subversive this woman’s words
and actions really were.  I think that there have been cultures in
world history where it would not have been particularly radical for a
woman to claim her own beauty nor her own sexual desire.   As a
whole, Judaism has been more sex-positive than Christianity,
including in having an understanding that part of the role of the
Sabbath was for love-making.  That may suggest that ancient Judaism
may also have been more openminded than (say) medieval Christianity
and that, in particular, a woman’s expression of sexual desire would
not have been all that surprising.

On
the contrary, though, if this were so normal we might expect to hear
it in other parts of the Bible.  Also, we do know a lot about
patriarchal cultures and we know ancient Israel was one of those for
all of those 760 years.  In those cultures, women’s voices aren’t
often heard, nor free.  Finally, if a woman expressing her desire
were so normal, it would be reasonable to expect that interpreters
through the ages might have commonly interpreted the text literally
and not allegorically, and that’s FAR from true.  Most historical
interpretations of this book have been allegorical and or
metaphorical, taking the male character as God or Christ and the
female as the church, Israel, or Israelites.  

It
is only relatively recently that this erotic text has been
interpreted as being primarily about eroticism.  In the nineteenth
century, a German scholar named Johann
Gottfried Heder
analyzed the Song and
found it to be, “a collection of pleasingly erotic love-poetry.”²
 Further research in the early twentieth century connected the Song
to similar Egyptian and Canaanite poetry.  In 1990, Roland Murphy (an
American Catholic scholar who taught Biblical Studies at Duke) wrote,
“Any broad agreement among contemporary critical scholars that the
literal text of the Song marvelously portrays the passions and
yearnings of human lovers is a recent phenomenon.”³

Roland Murphy himself says it is notable that Song of Songs is not
only about sex, but it’s erotic and nonjudgmental about sex. (You
might be amazed to note that the text does not say that the lovers
are married, and in fact rather suggests that they aren’t!)

I
suspect that interpretations of the book Song
of Songs
are more reflective of the culture reading the text than they are of
the book itself!  Since we don’t know how it was understood in its
first few centuries, so we lack the capacity to know how radical it
was then!  It is POSSIBLE that the original meanings of the book were
lost along the way to allegory and metaphor.  Additionally, the book
Song of Songs is exceptionally difficult to interpret.  

“The
vocabulary of the Song of Songs is also unusual in the proportion of
words unique or rare elsewhere in Scripture… In the brief span of a
little more than a hundred verses there are almost fifty hapax rarely
found elsewhere in Scripture.”⁴
(A hapax is a word found only once in Scripture, making them harder
to translate.) Many commentators identify frequent double entendre
within the Hebrew as well, making it very difficult to render in
English.  Furthermore, the love poetry of other parts of the Near
East and the mythology of the Near East offer deepened understandings
of many parts of the text.  All of this serves to allow interpreters
and commentators a lot of leeway in their claims, and adds to the
variety of understandings of the text.

If
the text is a drama, the number of speakers in the Song of Songs is
debated. Claims range from man and woman; man, woman, and lecher;
even to man, women, and some eight other characters plus choruses.
Others claim it isn’t even a drama.  It is clear the Song of Songs is
written in poetic language as opposed to prose. It is also clear that
the poetry speaks about love.  However, claims have been made that it
is constituted by as many as 30 separate poems, yet editorial work
allows for the poems to form an ambiguously meaningful whole.  The
Song is not the only love poetry from the Ancient Near East, although
it does have unique elements. Murphy explains,

“As our earlier survey of
Egyptian and Sumerian sources indicated, there is no reason to doubt
that the biblical Song is indebted, at least indirectly, to older
traditions of Near Eastern love poetry.  Nor need one quarrel with
the likelihood that some of these antecedent traditions had
specifically sacral significance or that they otherwise witness to
the reciprocity of imagery depicting divine and human love.”⁵

Thus,
although the Song of Songs is very distinctive in the Bible, it does
fit somewhat into the genre of Ancient Love poetry.

You
may wonder why I’ve had to spend SO MUCH time explaining all of this
to you, especially given that I think you are very intelligent people
with a strong grasp on the Bible and history.  In the suggested
readings of the church, the three year cycle of “lectionary”
readings, only 6 verses of the book Song of Songs show up.  Then,
they’re most often skipped over by clergy who find it easier to
preach on the Gospel (or any other part of the Bible) than on the
Song, despite the fact that they’re among the mildest verses one
could pick from the text!  So, I don’t think most people, including
those who have been attending church regularly for their whole lives,
have had much exposure to this book and I’ve had to start with the
basics.

All
of this brings me back to the beginning: there is very little that
can be said for certain about the Song of Songs and that makes it
very hard to make firm claims about it.  I would really LIKE to say
that it was radical and subversive to have a heroine who speaks of
herself as beautiful, because it would be in our culture and I think
that’s a a great thing to strive for, but I’m not CERTAIN that it
really was radical then.  Perhaps in the time of the writing the
culture she lived in was so body-positive that most people thought
they were beautiful??  Isn’t that nice to ponder? Similarly I think
it is radical that she named her own desire, but I don’t KNOW.

The
projection onto this book of the Bible is non-trivial.  I’ve found
that most commentators speaking of the line “I am black and
beautiful” find it necessary to explain how such a line is
possible.  They seem to forget that Western Culture’s obsession with
light skin is relatively new and thus doesn’t appropriately fit into
Biblical history.  Many, many commentators believe that the black and
beautiful woman is apologetic about her skin tone. Renita Weems, a
womanist theologian and author of the Song of Songs section of the
New Interpreter’s Bible, responds to those assumptions with 3 pieces
of context:

“(1) The word ‘black’ appears
five times in the emphatic position suggesting that the woman’s tone
is confident and her posture assertive – not apologetic. (2)
Throughout the poem the woman’s physical beauty is both praised and
celebrated, not only by her lover but also by the maidens of the
city, which means that others regard her as indisputably attractive.
(3) Although the Song of Songs and Lamentations (and other portions
of Scripture) suggest that a ruddy complexion was prized in men, the
same does not automatically apply to women, since women were commonly
judged by a different standard of beauty.”⁶

If
you are like me, you might appreciate knowing that “ruddy” means
“having a healthy reddish color.”  Since the text does not say
who her parents or clan are, Weems points out “We are left to take
heart in her bold act of self-assertion and description: She speaks
up for herself; she is the object of her own gaze; she is, by her own
estimation, black and
beautiful.”⁷
For many cultures in many places and in many times, such a statement
is radical in its positivity and self-affirmation.  I wish there were
more space made for people to make such comments in our time, space,
and culture now.

Instead,
we live in a society in which women are barraged with messages about
how inadequate their bodies are in order for corporations and their
shareholders to profit off of those feelings of inadequacy.  In
everything from the immediately obvious clothes, shoes, make up, and
diet industries to the also insidious tanning salons, self-help
books, beauty magazines, and even the wedding industry; wealth is
extracted from women by making them  feel inadequate and not
beautiful enough.  In
such a society, it
seems truly subversive to LIKE yourself.  

Throughout
the Song of Songs, both lovers celebrate each other.  The woman’s
capacity to find herself beautiful and her capacity to celebrate her
lover’s beauty are correlated.  Instead of struggling under a pile of
self-hatred, she was able to live freely in love.  Her ability to
like and love herself enabled her to live and love another, and I
choose to believe also enabled each of them to expand their circles
of love into the world.  Consumer culture teaches us to find
ourselves INADEQUATE, but
this ancient, dark-skinned, beautiful woman teaches us to savor the
goodness of life.  In
the use of her voice, in the way she describes herself, and even in
her willingness to name her own desire, she offers us an alternative
way of life.  She offers us the freedom to ENJOY rather than wallow
in life.  May we follow in her lead, each of us as we are able, and
find the freedom of God in beauty itself (even our own!)  Amen

1 Renita J. Weems “The Song of Songs: Introduction, Commentary and Reflections” as found in the New Interpreter’s Bible Vol V (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997), 383.

2
Roland
Murphy, The
Song of Songs: A Commentary on the Book of Canticles or The Song of
Songs
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990) 39  .

3
Murphy,
40.

4
Marvin A. Pope “Song of Songs” in The Anchor
Yale Bible Commentaries (Doubleday: New York, etc, 1995), 34.

5
Murphy,
97.

6 Weems, 382-383.

7 Weems,
383.

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

February 26, 2017