1 Dr. Lloyd Carr, The Song of Songs, Lecture 3 © 2011 Lloyd Carr and Ted Hildebrandt One of the major problems of the Song of Solomon is trying to figure out exactly how the piece is structured. You have two or three options. Most contemporary commentators hold to the position that what we’ve got here in this book is really just a collection of isolated poems that have been pulled together on the basis of a common theme, that is, love poetry; but that there’s no real unity or cohesiveness in the units. They’re scattered over a wide variety of individuals, individual writers, authors, different times and places; but that somewhere along the line they were collated, brought together, and organized into the form that we now have them. That’s a fairly common point-of-view, and there’s some ground for it in the parallels, for instance, in the Egyptian love poetry, where we have a number of collections gathered together, and then the collections are gathered together. For instance, in the Egyptian material there’s the Chester Beatty songs which have an internal cohesiveness. Then there’s the series of seven which alternate between the man and the woman speaking back and forth. There’s the series of other songs that are similar to that, that have been collected and then the collections have been brought together. I want to come back to that in a few minutes because there’s an interesting little piece in the middle of that collection which some have picked up as an interpretive point in the Song of Songs that has something to do with death and funeral arrangements, as is quite common in Egypt, but we’ll come back to that in a couple of minutes. The idea here is that these various poems from different places and different times are brought together because they had this common theme of the “love relationship.” That’s a very interesting perspective, but to me it has a major problem to it. One of the things that shows up in the poem very clearly is that there are a large number of very precise repetitions of verses, of words and ideas, that give the indication, to me at least, that this piece is very carefully structured, it2 isn’t just a haphazard collection, and I want to look at that in some detail in a moment or two. A second problem dealing with the interpretation of the song, or the structure of the song is: Is it or is it not unity? Second, if it’s unity, if it’s one piece from one author or from one particular period, does it have any kind of sequential order in it? In other words, does it go from start to finish? But, as we said earlier on in this discussion, one of the things about the song is that it doesn’t work as a drama because there’s no cohesiveness to it in the sense that it starts, moves to a series of plot events, and comes to a conclusion. The Song as we have it is kind of circular. You start in one place, you go around and around and around, and you come out in the same place. There doesn’t seem to be any progression. Now, that has some implications for the interpretation of the song, and again we’ll look at this in a little more detail later on, but at this stage it would suffice to say that if this is a sequential series of things, that the events are moving from beginning to some sort of conclusion on to the end, it poses some major problems with the content of the song. This is a series of love poems, either arranged or by one author, and the events in the story as it unfolds seem to be out of sequence in what we would consider a normal relationship. The relationship between the man and the woman here is very obviously sexual, and there’s fairly clear indication that right from the beginning, this is what’s on the mind of this young couple, and that’s hardly the thing you’d want to say, that the biblical record approves of a premarital sexual relationship. The situation here is, well if this is sequential, that is a hard argument not to have to make. The third difficulty here, or the third approach, is to look at this book, this collection of poems as a particular form that will help us get around the ethical and moral problems if we take it as a sequential thing, and also respond, I think, fairly strongly to the idea that this is simply a haphazard collection of materials. That has to do with the way the song is put together.3 I mentioned earlier that one of the ways that we could look at this is what’s called the “chiastic structure.” The word comes to us from the Greek letter “chi”, which is a letter that looks like a capital “X” in the English alphabet. The letter is used to describe this form, which is cross shaped. As I described earlier, an example of that would be where you’ve got an A section and a B section in the first half of a verse, or book or whatever, and in the second half of the verse, you reverse the B section and the A section. So the two outside ends are on this part of the “X”, and the to inside parts are on that part of the “X”. This is a fairly common structure in biblical material. We talked about it before, and we have a good example of it in many of the Psalms and in other places, sometimes in chapters, and in the case of the Song of Solomon, we’ve got, I think, a good case that can be made for the whole book being arranged in the chiastic form. Now, I said earlier on that there are a total of 117 verses in this Song, counting the introduction, the title in 1:1. That probably is a later addition. So, the text itself is a total of 116 verses plus the title. It’s very interesting that the center point of the book, which happens to begin in verse 16 of chapter 4, and conclude at the end of chapter 5 verse 1, a two-verse sequence in the middle, that the rest of the verses, the other 114 in the Song, are divided exactly in half, before and after those two verses. You say, “Well, so what? You put two in the middle, you’ve obviously got half on the other side.” But there’s more to it than that. Because verses 16 of chapter 4 and verse 1 of chapter 5 are the pivot in this song, around which everything else resolves, revolves. We’ll take a little time, and look at some of the precise details on this, but what we’ve got is a series of steps leading up to 4:16 and 5:1, and then from 5:2 onto the end of the book in chapter 8, those steps unwind in the reverse order, and we’ve got a lot of very detailed vocabulary, a lot of