Abstract
A reading of the Song which does not include a note on its traditional mystical interpretation would not be complete. And so, in this chapter, I suggest an alternative mystical reading of our Song. While traditional mystical readings have interpreted our Song as playing out the deeper drama of a romance between God (the man) and his people (the woman), I suggest in this chapter that God is better embodied by the woman of our Song than by the man. Doing this, however, reveals a whole new facet of the persona of God. No more endowed with the traditional male traits of aggressivity, power and control, we meet, through the traits of this African woman, a passionate, reckless, yet shy God.
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Notes
- 1.
Or what Rabbi Akiba has called “the sod meaning of the text, in which he saw the profoundest mystery revealed to humanity or the Holy of Holies of Scripture” (André Lacocque, Romance she Wrote [Salem, OR: Trinity Press International, 1998], 10).
- 2.
Cf. Chana Bloch who observes that “for twenty centuries, the Song was almost universally read as a religious or historical allegory.” She then mentions a number of commentators such as Rabbi Akiba, Ibn Ezra and Origen as examples of this kind of allegorical reading, adding that these “found support in the Old Testament metaphor of God’s marriage to Israel” (“In the Garden of Delights,” in The Song of Songs: The World’s First Great Love Poem, edited by Chana Bloch and Ariel Bloch [New York: The Modern Library, 2006], 30).
- 3.
As such, a lot of wisdom might be gathered as to the nature of the human-divine relationship just from reading our Song in this new, exquisite light. This has been the work of philosophers such as Franz Rosenzweig who, in his Star of Redemption, gives one of the most revealing interpretations on the nature of faith based on our Song. His whole chapter on “Revelation” would merit a close reading, but suffice it to say here that he gives a beautiful interpretation of the woman’s quiet trust and affirmation—“my beloved is mine and I am his”—as depicting the faith that is required of humanity if it is to gain access to divine light. Rosenzweig goes on to say that this faith has such potency that without it there would be no divine light or presence at all. The believer’s faith is thus what makes the difference between the divine presence and absence in this world.
- 4.
Bloch also mentions the mystical interpretation in her introduction to her new translation of the Song of Songs: “The Song fared better at the hands of the mystics, Jewish and Christian, who honored its literal meaning as symbolic of the human longing for union with God. The Zohar (a mystical commentary of the Pentateuch written in the late thirteenth century) speculated about intercourse between the male and female aspects of God, believing that this could actually be influenced by the way in which human sexual relations were conducted; for this exalted purpose, the Cabbalists were encouraged to have intercourse with their wives on Sabbath eve. Christian mystics like Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth century, or St. Teresa of Avila and the poet St. John of the Cross in the sixteenth century, contemplating the love of God and the soul, found in the Song a source of inspiration for their ecstatic spirituality. St. Bernard, who wrote 86 sermons on the first two chapters of the Song set the tone: ‘O strong and burning love, O love urgent and impetuous, which does not allow me to think of anything but you … You laugh at all considerations of fitness, reason, modesty and prudence, and tread them underfoot.’ The mystics read the Song allegorically, to be sure, but they remained true to its intensity and passion, its emotional power” (Chana Bloch, The Song of Songs: The World’s First Great Love Poem, 32).
- 5.
This idea of God being represented as a woman is not at all an idea foreign to the Biblical narrative, as is observed by Marvin Pope who, quoting Phyllis Trible, observes that “in the interest of disavowing sexism in translation for the Biblical faith, Trible stresses both the asexual and effeminate traits of God … [often depicted as a] midwife, seamstress, housekeeper, nurse, mother … As creator and Lord of both sexes, Yahweh embraces and transcends both sexes” (Marvin Pope, “The Song of Songs and Women’s Liberation: An Outsider’s Critique,” in The Song of Songs: A Feminist Companion to the Bible, 1st series, edited by Athalya Brenner [Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993], 122).
- 6.
This centrality of the woman has also been observed by Chana Bloch: “Indeed she [the woman] often seems more than his equal. Most of the lines are hers, including the first word in the poem and the last. As a rule she is the more forceful of the two. … She isn’t shy about pursuing her lover: She goes out into the streets of Jerusalem at night to search for him—bold and unusual behavior for an unmarried woman … she is the one who takes the initiative in their lovemaking” (Bloch, Song of Songs: The World’s First Great Love Poem, 4).
- 7.
According to Alicia Ostriker, “the woman speaks more lines of the dialogue including the opening and final ones. She is as well more aggressive, more introspective and more philosophical than her lover. Hers is the quest for the beloved in the city streets, hers the adjuration to the daughters of Jerusalem not to awaken love until it is ripe … hers the pronouncement that love is as fierce as death and that the attempt to purchase it should be despised” (Alicia Ostriker. “A Holy of Holies: The Song of Songs as Countertext.” In The Song of Songs: A Feminist Companion to the Bible, 2nd series, edited by Athalya Brenner and Carole Fontaine [Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000], 45).
- 8.
Isaiah 2:13.
- 9.
Jeremiah 2:31.
- 10.
Hoseah 2:14.
- 11.
Hoseah 11:3–4.
- 12.
Deut. 32:18, Isaiah 42:14.
- 13.
Isaiah 66:13, Psalm 131.
- 14.
Although I have been sorely tempted to proceed in my descriptions of God using feminine pronouns (she, her), I finally opted—for the sake of readers for whom such a shift might be too abrupt—for keeping the traditional masculine pronouns even as I develop the idea of a feminine God.
- 15.
For more on this, see Phyllis Trible’s beautiful essay “Love’s Lyrics Redeemed” where she shows parallels between the story of a love gone awry in the garden of Eden as depicted in Genesis 2–3 and our Song: “Clearly Genesis 2–3 offers no return to the garden of creation. And yet, as scripture interpreting scripture, it provides my clue for entering another garden of Eros, the Song of Songs. Through expansions, omissions and reversals, this poetry recovers the love that is bone of bone and flesh of flesh. In other words the Song of Songs redeems a love story gone awry” (in God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality [Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1978], 144).
- 16.
André Neher, L’essence du prophétisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955), 252 [My translation].
- 17.
Hoseah 2:3.
- 18.
Hoseah 2:6–7.
- 19.
Amos 4:9–10.
- 20.
André Lacocque also observes the coarseness of prophetic texts when referring to the woman: “The prophet’s metaphorical expression insisted not only on the staunch fidelity of the male God, it also denounced the stubborn whoring of the female partner and also the degrading chastisement to which she would be submitted. At some point, the imagery becomes highly disparaging. With good conscience and total self-complacency, the husband strips his wife naked, exposes her pudenda for all to watch, beats her, humiliates her, exposes her to every outrage … there is not much progress towards gender equality” (André Lacocque, Romance She Wrote, 34).
- 21.
And indeed, commentators have seen in the Song of Songs a corrective of the often derogatory view of women in the prophets. Thus, according to Carol Fontaine, “the Song is a Biblical corrective to the patriarchal denigration of women, their bodies, their capacities and their loves … The Song lives alongside the books of the prophets, offering a reminder of other Biblical perspectives on human love—ones that do not equate it with moral corruption inevitably associated with women” (Carol Fontaine, “Song? Songs? Whose Song? Reflections of a Radical Reader,” in Scrolls of Love: Ruth and the Song of Songs, edited by Lesleigh Cushing Strahlberg and Peter S. Hawkins [New York: Fordham University Press, 2006], 296).
- 22.
Hoseah 2:6.
- 23.
Hoseah 2:3.
- 24.
Hoseah 2:11–13.
- 25.
This connection between the woman in the Song and the Kabbalah is not as far-fetched as it might seem when one realizes how much influence the former has had on the latter. According to Arthur Green, “one might say that it [the Zohar] was written under the spell of the Song of Songs, for the canticle is quoted and commented upon with great frequency within its pages and is present everywhere in allusion and echo” (Arthur Green, “Intradivine Romance: The Song of Songs in the Zohar,” in Scrolls of Love: Ruth and the Song of Songs, 215).
- 26.
In fact, according to Arthur Green, the kabbalist saw himself as a “devotee of the Shekhinah … [whose] primary function was to rouse the Shekhinah into a state of love” (Arthur Green, Scrolls of Love: Ruth and the Song of Songs, 218). Thus, the kabbalist has a concept of God as a woman that it is his duty to arouse through righteous and holy works.
- 27.
Catherine Chalier, Traité des larmes (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003), 27 [My translation].
- 28.
For more on this comparison between God and the feminine Shekhinah presence see Chalier’s Traité des larmes, 27. In this beautiful essay, Chalier shows how “for the Kabbalists, in his proximity to humans, God sympathizes with them, is affected by their actions and feels emotions and passions. Such is, they observe, his feminine aspect to which, borrowing from a Talmudic tradition, they give the name of Shekhinah . This introduction of emotions in the divine life is decisive for the present reflection, since in this perspective, one must not think anymore of the Biblical anthropomorphisms attributing to God sadness or joy, anger or compassion, worry for the humble or concern for those who are succumbing under the yoke, as a language destined for those whose intelligence remains a prisoner of the affects and who cannot understand that God might be a stranger to what they are feeling. The divinity, according to the Kabbalists, is not beyond passion, she sympathizes with the creatures, suffers and rejoices with them” (Chalier , Traité des larmes, 27). [My translation].
- 29.
Abraham Heschel. God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955), 136.
- 30.
Martin Buber, The Way of Man (New York: Citadel Press Books, 2006), 5.
- 31.
Philippians 2:6–8.
- 32.
See here Rumi’s beautiful rendition of this concept in his poem “A King Dressed as a Servant,” in Bridge to the Soul, translated by Coleman Barks (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2007), 36–37.
- 33.
This image came to me, ironically, while sitting in a synagogue listening to a sermon on Leviticus 16:23 where the priest is ordered, upon leaving the holy of holies to “take off the linen garments he put on before he entered the Most Holy Place, and he is to leave them there.” There is a powerful contrast between this need to keep the garments of the priest holy and separate from the sin of the people and Jesus’ garments being worn outside in the street to be touched by the sick and emitting healing power (Luke 8:43–48).
- 34.
Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 34.
- 35.
André Neher, L’essence du prophétisme, 268. [My translation].
- 36.
Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (New York: Harper Perennial, 1964), 265.
- 37.
This is also Ricoeur’s understanding of love: “Eros is not institutional. It is an offense to reduce it to a contract or to a conjugal duty … Eros’ law—which is not law anymore—is the reciprocity of the gift. It is thus infrajuridical, parajuridical, suprajuridical. It belongs to the nature of its demonism to threaten the institution—any institution, including marriage” (“Sexualité, ma merveille, l’errance, l’énigme,” in Histoire et Vérité [Paris: Seuil, 1955] 198–209).
- 38.
Matthew 16:25.
- 39.
Rumi. Bridge to the Soul, 44.
- 40.
Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 268.
- 41.
André Lacocque makes a similar observation regarding the Shulamite’s unconventional virtue in contrasting her with Gomer in the book of Hosea: “Defiantly, the Shulamite gives the appearance of being a loose woman, but she upsets all the conventions. Her love, in contradistinction to Gomer’s is true; rather than being a source of shame it is gloriously proclaimed … The Shulamite is untroubled by the perception that she has strayed. Over against the prophetic censure that she critiques throughout the Song, she proudly trumpets her own sexuality. Her vineyard is her own; it is under no one else’s control, especially not the guardians of public morality” (André Lacocque, “I am Black and Beautiful,” in Scrolls of Love: Ruth and the Song of Songs, 170).
- 42.
Schellenberg’s attitude toward this contradiction between divine love and divine distance has been to conclude that God does not exist. In his pioneering book The Hiddenness Argument, he asks: “Why we may ask would God be hidden from us? Surely a morally perfect being—good, just and loving—would show himself more clearly. Hence the weakness of our evidence for God is not a sign that God is hidden; it is a revelation that God does not exist” (J. L. Schellenberg, The Hiddenness Argument: Philosophy’s New Challenge to Belief in God [Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press], 2).
- 43.
Emmanuel Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), 70.
- 44.
Ibid.
- 45.
Ibid.
- 46.
Martin Buber, I and Thou (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 55.
- 47.
Luce Irigaray, To Be Two (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2001), 18.
- 48.
Ibid., 19.
- 49.
Ibid., 57.
- 50.
Hoseah 2:14–15.
- 51.
The Book of Job, translated by Stephen Mitchell (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), 88.
- 52.
Cf. Stephen Mitchell’s beautiful translation of Job, The Book of Job, 88.
- 53.
Luce Irigaray, Sharing the World (New York: Continuum, 2008), 18.
- 54.
Ibid.
- 55.
Simone Weil, Waiting for God (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 126.
- 56.
Ibid., 128.
- 57.
Luce Irigaray, Sharing the World, 58.
- 58.
Daniel 12:12.
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Doukhan, A. (2019). Is God a Woman?. In: Womanist Wisdom in the Song of Songs. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30052-4_8
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