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Introduction to the Old Testament

J >> John Edgar McFadyen >> Introduction to the Old Testament





SONG OF SONGS


The contents of this book justify the description of it in the
title, i. 1, as the "loveliest song"--for that is the meaning of the
Hebrew idiom "song of songs." It abounds in poetical gems of the
purest ray. It breathes the bracing air of the hill country, and the
passionate love of man for woman and woman for man. It is a
revelation of the keen Hebrew delight in nature, in her vineyards
and pastures, flowers and fruit trees, in her doves and deer and
sheep and goats. It is a song tremulous from beginning to end with
the passion of love; and this love it depicts in terms never coarse,
but often frankly sensuous--so frankly sensuous that in the first
century its place in the canon was earnestly contested by Jewish
scholars. That place was practically settled in 90 A.D. by the Synod
of Jamnia, which settled other similar questions; and about 120 A.D.
we find a distinguished rabbi maintaining that "the whole world does
not outweigh the day when the Song of Songs was given to Israel;
while all the _Writings_ are holy, the song is holiest of all."
This extravagant language suggests that the canonicity of the song
had been strenuously contested; and it may have been a latent sense
of the secular origin of the song that led to the prescription that
a Jew must not read it till he was thirty years of age. Its place in
the canon was no doubt secured for it by two considerations, (i) its
reputed Solomonic authorship, (ii) its allegorical interpretation.

The reception of the book in the Canon led, as Siegfried has said,
to the most monstrous creations in the history of interpretation. If
it be by Solomon, and therefore a holy book, it must be a
celebration of divine love, not of human. So it was argued; and the
theme of the book was regarded as the love of Jehovah for Israel.
Christian interpreters, following this hint of their Jewish
predecessors, applied it to the love of Christ for His church or for
the individual soul. The allegorical view of the poem has many
parallels in the mystic poetry of the East, and it even finds a
slender support in Hosea's comparison of the relation of Jehovah to
Israel as a marriage relationship; but taking into account the
general nature of the poem, and the tendencies of the Hebrew mind,
it may be fairly said that the allegorical interpretation is
altogether impossible. Any love poem would be equally capable of
such an interpretation.

Another view, first hinted at in a phrase of Origen, is that the
book is a drama, a view which has held the field--not without
challenge--for over a century. There is much in the language of the
song to suggest this: it is obvious, e.g., that there is occasional
dialogue, i. 15, 16, ii. 2, 3, but the actual story of the drama was
very far from clear. The older view was that it was a story of
Solomon's love for a peasant girl, and of his redemption from his
impure loves by his affection for her. But as in viii. 11 f. and
elsewhere, Solomon is spoken of by way of contrast, room must be
made for a third person, the shepherd lover of the peasant maid;
and, with much variety of detail, the supporters of the dramatic
theory now adhere in general to the view that the poem celebrates
the fidelity of a peasant maid who had been captured and brought to
Solomon's harem, but who steadily resisted his blandishments and was
finally restored to her shepherd lover. The book becomes thus not a
triumph of love over lust, but of love over temptation. The story is
very pretty; but the objections to it and to the dramatic view of
the book are all but insuperable. It must be confessed that, to
arrive at such a story at all, a good deal has to be read between
the lines, and interpreters usually find what they bring; but the
most fatal objection to it is that the text in vi. 12, on which the
whole story turns--the maiden's surprise in the orchard by the
retinue of the king--is so disjointed and obscure that the attempt
to translate it has been abandoned by many competent scholars.

Apart from that, the story can hardly be said to be probable. "She,
my dove, is but one," vi. 9, would sound almost comical upon the
lips of one who possessed the harem of vi. 8. But in any case, it is
almost inconceivable that Solomon would have taken a refusal from a
peasant girl: Oriental kings were not so scrupulous. Again, it is
very hard to detect any progress on the dramatic view of the book.
Ch. viii. with its innocent expression of an early love, follows ch.
vii., which is sensuous to the last degree. Further, in the absence
of stage directions, every commentator divides the verses among the
characters in a way of his own: the opening words of the song, i.
2_a_, may be interpreted in three or four different ways, and
equal possibilities of interpretation abound throughout the song. Of
course the difficulties are not quite so great in the Hebrew as in
the English (e.g. i. 15 must be spoken by the bridegroom and i. 16
by the bride), but they are great enough. Again, how are we to
conceive of so short a play--ll6 lines--being divided into acts and
scenes? for the scenes are continually changing, and the longest
would not last more than two minutes. It would not be fair to lay
too much stress upon the fact that there is no other illustration of
a purely Semitic drama; that would be to argue that, if a thing did
not happen twice, it did not happen once. Nevertheless, coupled with
the untold difficulties and confusions that arise from regarding the
song as a drama, the absence of a Semitic parallel is significant.

The true view of this perplexing book appears to be that it is, as
Herder called it, "a string of pearls"--an anthology of love or
wedding songs sung during the festivities of the "king's week," as
the first week after the wedding is called in Syria. Very great
probability has been added to this view by the observations of
Syrian customs made by Wetzstein in his famous essay on "The Syrian
Threshing-board," and first thoroughly applied by Budde to the
interpretation of the Song. Syrian weddings, we are told, usually
took place in March, ii. 11ff. The threshing-floor is set on a sort
of platform on the threshing-board covered with carpets and pillows;
and upon this throne, the "king and queen," i.e. the bride and
bridegroom, are seated, while the guests honour them with song, game
and dance. This lasts for seven days (cf. Gen. xxix. 27; Jud. xiv.
12); and the theory is that in the Song of Songs we have specimens
of the songs sung on such an occasion. In particular, it is
practically certain that vi. 13-vii. 9 is the song which
accompanied the "sword-dance" (as the last words of vi. 13 should
probably be translated) performed by the bride on the eve of her
wedding day. This would explain the looseness of the arrangement, no
special attempt being made to unify the songs, though it may be
conceded that the noble eulogy of love in viii. 6, 7, as it is the
finest utterance in the book, was probably intended as a sort of
climax.

The king, then, is not Solomon, but the peasant bridegroom, who
enjoys the regal dignity, and even the name of Israel's most
splendid monarch, iii. 7, 9, for the space of a week. Ch. iii. 11,
with its reference to the bridegroom's crown (cf. Isa. lxi. 10), is
all but conclusive proof that the hero is not king Solomon, but
another sort of bridegroom. His bride, perhaps a plain country girl,
counts for the week as the maid of Shulem, vi. 13, i.e. Abishag,
once the fairest maid in Israel (vi. 1, I Kings i. 3). So throughout
the "king's week" everything is transfigured and takes on the
colours of royal magnificence: the threshing-board becomes a
palanquin, and the rustic bodyguard appear as a band of valiant
warriors, iii. 7, 8. There is a charming naivete, and indeed
something much profounder, in this temporary transformation of those
humble rustic lives. We are involuntarily reminded of scenes in _A
Midsummer Night's Dream_. This view of the book has commended
itself to scholars like Nõldeke, who formerly championed the
dramatic theory, though two of the latest writers[1] have argued
skilfully against it.
[Footnote 1: Harper, in the Cambridge Bible "Song of Songs," and
Rothstein, in Hastings' _Dictionary of the Bible_.]

The following may be taken as an approximate division of the songs,
though some of the longer sections might easily be regarded as a
combination of two or three songs. The bride praises the bridegroom,
modestly depreciates her own beauty, and asks where her bridegroom is
to be found, i. 2-8. Each sings the other's praises: the happiness of
the bride, i. 9-ii. 7. A spring wooing, ii. 8-17. The bride's dream,
iii. 1-5. The bridegroom's procession, iii. 6-11. The charms of the
bride, iv. 1-v. 1. The beauty of the bridegroom, v. 2-vi. 3. Praise of
the bride, vi. 4-12. Praise of the bride as she dances the sword-dance,
vii. 1-10. The bride's longing, vii. 11-viii. 4. The incomparable power
of love, viii. 5-7. The bride's proud reply to her brothers, viii. 8-10.
The two vineyards, viii. 11, 12. Conclusion, viii. 13, 14.

The immortal verses in praise of love, viii. 6, 7, show that, in
spite of its often sensuous expression, the love here celebrated is
not only pure but exclusive; and the book, which once was regarded
as a satire on the court of Solomon, would in any case make in
favour of monogamic sentiment, and tend to ennoble ideals in a
country where marriage was simply regarded as a contract.

The mention of Israel's ancient capital Tirzah in vi. 4 (if the text
be correct) as a parallel to Jerusalem, would alone be enough to
bring the date below Solomon's time (cf. 1 Kings xiv. 17, xvi. 23).
But it is no doubt much later. The Persian word _pardes_ in iv.
13 appears to imply the Persian period, and is used elsewhere only
in post-exilic books (Neh. ii. 8; Eccles. ii. 5). Indeed the word
_appirion_ in iii. 9 appears to be the Hebraized form of a
Greek word _phoreion_, and if so would almost necessarily imply
the Greek period, though the Hebrews may have been acquainted with
Greek words, through the Greek settlements in Egypt, as early as the
sixth century B.C. Many of the words and constructions, however, are
demonstrably late and Aramaic; and the linguistic evidence alone
(unless we assume an earlier book to have been worked over in later
times) would put the Song hardly earlier than the fourth century
B.C. Yet the fact that though a secular writing, it is in Hebrew and
not Aramaic, which was rapidly gaining ground, shows that it can
hardly be brought down much later. On the whole, probably it is to
be placed somewhere between 400 and 300; and its sunny vivacity thus
becomes a welcome foil to the austerity of the post-exilic age. If
this argument is sound, it follows that the book cannot have been by
Solomon. The superscription, i. 1, was no doubt added by a later
hand on the basis of the many references to Solomon in the book,
iii. 7-11, viii. 11 f, and of the statement in 1 Kings iv. 32 that
he was the author of 1,005 songs.

Where the songs were composed we cannot tell. The scenes they
reflect so vividly are rather those of Israel than of Judah, but the
repeated allusions to the daughters of Jerusalem would be most
naturally explained if the songs came from Jerusalem or its
neighbourhood. With this agree the references to Engedi, Heshbon,
Kedar, while the northern places mentioned, Lebanon, Hermon, Gilead,
Damascus, are such as would be familiar, at any rate, by reputation,
to a Judean.




RUTH


Goethe has characterized the book of Ruth as the loveliest little
idyll that tradition has transmitted to us. Whatever be its didactic
purpose--and some would prefer to think that it had little or none-it
is, at any rate, a wonderful prose poem, sweet, artless, and persuasive,
touched with the quaintness of an older world and fresh with the scent
of the harvest fields. The love--stronger than country--of Ruth for
Naomi, the gracious figure of Boaz as he moves about the fields with a
word of blessing for the reapers, the innocent scheming of Naomi to
secure him as a husband for Ruth--these and a score of similar touches
establish the book for ever in the heart of all who love nobility and
romance.

The inimitable grace and tenderness of the story are dissipated in a
summary, but the main facts are these. A man of Bethlehem, with his
wife Naomi and two sons, is driven by stress of famine to Moab,
where the sons marry women of the land. In course of time, father
and sons die, and Naomi resolves to return home. Ruth, one of her
daughters-in-law, accompanies her, in spite of Naomi's earnest
entreaty that she should remain in her own land. In Bethlehem, Ruth
receives peculiar kindness from Boaz, a wealthy landowner, who
happens to be a kinsman of Naomi; and Naomi, with a woman's happy
instinct, devises a plan for bringing Boaz to declare himself a
champion and lover of Ruth. The plan is successful. A kinsman nearer
than Boaz refuses to claim his rights by marrying her, and the way
is left open for Boaz. He accordingly marries Ruth, who thus becomes
the ancestress of the great King David.

Why was this story told? The question of its object is to some
extent bound up with the question of date; and for several reasons,
this appears to be late. (1) In the Greek, Latin and modern Bibles,
Ruth is placed after Judges; in the Hebrew Bible it is placed
towards the end, among the _Writings_, i.e. the last division,
in which, speaking generally, only late books appear. Had the book
been pre-exilic, it is natural to suppose that it would have been
placed after Judges in the second division. Some indeed maintain
that this is its original position; but it is easier to account for
its transference from the third division to the second, as a foil to
the war-like episodes of the judges, than for its transference from
the second to the third. (2) The argument from language is perhaps
not absolutely decisive, but, on the whole, it is scarcely
compatible with an early date. Some words are pure Aramaic, and some
of the Hebrew usages do not appear in early literature, e.g.,
"fall," in the sense of "fall out, issue, happen," iii. 18. (3) The
opening words--"In the days when the judges judged," i. 1--suggest
not only that those days are past, but that they are regarded as a
definite period falling within an historical scheme. The book must
be, at any rate, as late as David--for it describes Ruth as his
ancestress, iv. l7--and probably much later, as the implication is
that it is a great thing to be the ancestress of David. The
reverence of a later age for the great king shines through the
simple genealogical notice with which the story concludes.[1] (4)
Further, the old custom of throwing away the shoe as a symbol of the
abandonment of one's claim to property, a custom familiar in the
seventh century B.C. (Deut. xxv. 9f.) is in iv. 7 regarded as
obsolete, belonging to the "former time." The cumulative effect of
these indications is strongly to suggest a post-exilic date. Not
perhaps, however, a very late one: a book as late as the Maccabean
period would hardly have reflected so kindly a feeling towards the
foreigner (cf. Esther).
[Footnote 1: Probably iv. 18-22 is a later addition, but that does
not affect the general argument (cf. _v_.17).]

The story probably rests upon a basis of fact. David's conduct in
putting his parents under the protection of the king of Moab (I Sam.
xxii. 3, 4) would find its simplest explanation, if he had been
connected in some way with Moab, as the book of Ruth represents him
to have been; whereas a later age would hardly have dared to invent
a Moabite ancestress for him, had there been no tradition to that
effect.

The object of the book has been supposed by some to be to commend
the so-called levirate marriage. This is improbable: not so much
because the marriage was not strictly levirate, since neither Boaz
nor the kinsman was the brother-in-law of Ruth--it would be fair
enough to regard this as a legitimate extension of the principle of
levirate marriage, whose object was to perpetuate the dead man's
name--but rather because this is a comparatively subordinate element
in the story.

The true explanation is no doubt to be sought in the fact that Ruth
the Moabitess is counted worthy to be an ancestress of David; and,
if the book be post-exilic, its religious significance is at once
apparent. It was in all probability the dignified answer of a man of
prophetic instincts to the rigorous measures of Ezra, which demanded
the divorce of all foreign women (Ezra ix. x, cf. Neh. xiii. 23ff.);
for it can hardly be doubted that there is a delicate polemic in the
repeated designation of Ruth as _the Moabitess_, i. 22, ii. 2,
6, 21, iv. 5, 10--she even calls herself the "stranger," ii. 10. It
would be pleasant to think that the writer had himself married one
of these foreign women. In any case, he champions their cause not
only with generosity but with insight; for he knows that some of
them have faith enough to adopt Israel's God as their God, i. 16,
and that even a Moabitess may be an Israelite indeed. Ezra's severe
legislation was inspired by the worthy desire to preserve Israel's
religion from the peril of contagion: the author of Ruth gently
teaches that the foreign woman is not an inevitable peril, she may
be loyal to Israel and faithful to Israel's God. The writer dares to
represent the Moabitess as eating with the Jews, ii. l4--winning by
her ability, resource and affection, the regard of all, and counted
by God worthy to be the mother of Israel's greatest king. The
generous type of religion represented by the book of Ruth is a much
needed and very attractive complement to the stern legalism of Ezra.




LAMENTATIONS


The book familiarly known as the Lamentations consists of four
elegies[1] (i., ii., iii., iv.) and a prayer (v.). The general theme
of the elegies is the sorrow and desolation created by the
destruction of Jerusalem[2] in 586 B.C.: the last poem (v.) is a
prayer for deliverance from the long continued distress. The elegies
are all alphabetic, and like most alphabetic poems (cf. Ps. cxix.)
are marked by little continuity of thought. The first poem is a
lament over Jerusalem, bereft, by the siege, of her glory and her
sanctuary, i. 1-11, though the bitter and comfortless doom which she
bewails in i. 12-22, is regarded as the divine penalty for her sin,
i. 5, 8. Similarly in ii. 1-10 her sorrow and suffering are admitted
to be a divine judgment. Her shame and distress are inconsolable,
ii. 11-17, and she appeals to her God to look upon her in her agony,
ii. 18-22. The third poem, probably the latest in the book,
represents the city, after a bitter lament, iii. 1-21, as being
inspired, by the thought of the love of God, to submission and hope,
iii. 22-36. A prayer of penitence and confession, iii. 37-54, is
followed by a petition for vengeance upon the adversaries, iii. 55-66.
The fourth poem, like the second, offers a very vivid picture of the
sorrows and horrors of the siege: it laments, in detail, the fate of
the people, iv. 1-6, the princes, iv. 7-11, the priests and the prophets,
iv. 12-16, and the king, iv. 17-20, and ends with a prophecy of doom
upon the Edomites, iv. 21, 22, who behaved so cruelly after the siege
(Ps, cxxxvii. 7). In the last poem the city, after piteously lamenting
her manifold sorrows, v. 1-18, beseeches the everlasting God for
deliverance therefrom, v. 19-22.
[Footnote 1: In the Hebrew elegiac metre, as in the Greek and Latin,
the second line is shorter than the first--usually three beats
followed by two.]
[Footnote 2: An unconvincing attempt has been made to refer the last
two chapters to the Maccabean age--about 170 B.C.]

A very old and by no means unreasonable tradition assigns the
authorship of the book to Jeremiah. In the Greek version it is
introduced by the words--which appear to go back to a Hebrew
original--"And it came to pass, after Israel had been led captive
and Jerusalem made desolate, that Jeremiah sat down weeping, and
lifted up this lament over Jerusalem and said." This view of the
authorship is as old as the Chronicler, who in 2 Chronicles xxxv. 25
seems to refer the book to Jeremiah, probably regarding iv. 20,
which refers to Zedekiah, as an allusion to Josiah. Chs. ii. and iv.
especially are so graphic that they must have been written by an
eye-witness who had seen the temple desecrated and who had himself
tasted the horrors of a siege, in which the mothers had eaten their
own children for very hunger. The passionate love, too, for the
people, which breathes through the elegies might well be Jeremiah's;
and the ascription of the calamity to the sin of the people, i. 5,
8, is in the spirit of the prophet.

Nevertheless, it is not certain, or even very probable, that
Jeremiah is the author. Unlike the Greek and the English Bible, the
Hebrew Bible does not place the Lamentations immediately after
Jeremiah but in the third division, among the _Writings_, so
that there is really no initial presumption in favour of the
Jeremianic authorship. Again, Jeremiah could hardly have said that
"the prophets find no vision from Jehovah," ii. 8, nor described the
vacillating Zedekiah as "the breath of our nostrils," iv. 20, nor
attributed the national calamities to the sins of _the
fathers_, v. 7 Other features in the situation presupposed by ch.
v. appear to imply a time later than Jeremiah's, v. 18,20, and it is
very unlikely that one who was so sorely smitten as Jeremiah by the
inconsolable sorrow of Jerusalem would have expressed his grief in
alphabetic elegies: men do not write acrostics when their hearts are
breaking. When we add to this that chs. ii. and iv. which stand
nearest to the calamity appear to betray dependence on Ezekiel (ii.
14, iv. 20, Ezek. xxii. 28, xix, 24, etc.) there is little
probability that the poems are by Jeremiah.

It is not even certain that they are all from the same hand, as,
unless we transpose two verses, the alphabetic order of the first
poem differs from that of the other three, and the number of
elegiacs--three--in each verse of the first two poems, differs from
the number--one--in the third, and two in the fourth. In the third
poem each letter has three verses to itself; in the other three
poems, only one.

Ch. iii. with its highly artificial structure and its tendency to
sink into the gnomic style, iii. 26ff., is probably remotest of all
from the calamity.[1] Considering the general hopelessness of the
outlook, chs. ii. and iv. at any rate, which are apparently the
earliest, were probably composed before the pardon of Jehoiachin in
561 B.C. (2 Kings xxv. 27) when new possibilities began to dawn for
the exiles. 580-570 may be accepted as a probable date. The calamity
is near enough to be powerfully felt, yet remote enough to be an
object of poetic contemplation. The other poems are no doubt later:
ch. v. may as well express the sorrow of the returned exiles as the
sorrow of the exile itself. More than this we cannot say.
[Footnote 1: The intensely personal words at the beginning of ch.
iii. are, no doubt, to be interpreted collectively. The "man who has
seen affliction" is not Jeremiah, but the community, Cf. _v_.
14, "I am become the laughing stock of all nations" (emended text).
Cf. also _v_. 45.]

The older parts of the book, whether written in Egypt, Babylon, or
more probably in Judah, are of great historic value, as offering
minute and practically contemporary evidence for the siege of
Jerusalem (cf. ii. 9-12) and as reflecting the hopelessness which
followed it. Yet the hopelessness is by no means unrelieved. Besides
the prayer to God who abideth for ever, v. 19, is the general
teaching that good may be won from calamity, in. 24-27, and, above
all, the beautiful utterance that "the love of Jehovah never
ceases[1] and His pity never fails," iii. 22.
[Footnote 1: Grammar and parallelism alike suggest the emendation on
which the above translation rests.]




ECCLESIASTES


It is not surprising that the book of Ecclesiastes had a struggle to
maintain its place in the canon, and it was probably only its
reputed Solomonic authorship and the last two verses of the book
that permanently secured its position at the synod of Jamnia in 90
A.D. The Jewish scholars of the first century A.D. were struck by
the manner in which it contradicted itself: e.g., "I praised the
dead more than the living," iv. 2, "A living dog is better than a
dead lion," ix. 4; but they were still more distressed by the spirit
of scepticism and "heresy" which pervaded the book (cf. xi. 9 with
Num. xv. 39).

In spite of the opening verse, it is very plain that Solomon could
not have been the author of the book. Not only in i. 12 is his reign
represented as over--I _was_ king--though Solomon was on the
throne till his death, but in i. 16, ii. 7, 9, he is contrasted with
all--apparently all the kings--that were before him in Jerusalem,
though his own father was the founder of the dynasty. There is no
probability that Solomon would have so scathingly assailed the
administration of justice for which he himself was responsible, as
is done in iii. 16, iv. i, v. 8. The sigh in xii. 12 over the
multiplicity of books is thoroughly inappropriate to the age of
Solomon.

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