Solomon And Solomonic Literature Part 9

Shulamith--

"I am a (mere) crocus of the plain."

Chorus, or perhaps the Lover--

"A lily of the valleys."

Shepherd Lover--

"As a lily among thorns So is my love among the daughters."

Shulamith--

"As the apple tree among forest trees So is my beloved among the sons.

I sat down under his shadow with great delight, And his fruit was sweet to my taste."

Thus we find the damsel anointing the king with her spikenard, but for her the precious fragrance is her shepherd. Against the plaits of gold and studs of silver offered in the palace (i. 2) her lover can only point to his cottage of cedar and fir, and a couch of gra.s.s. She is content to be only a flower of the plain and valley, not for the seraglio. Nevertheless she remains to dance in the palace; a sufficient time there is needed by the poet to ill.u.s.trate the impregnability of true love against all other splendors and attractions, even those of the Flower of Kings. He however puts no constraint on her, one song, thrice repeated, saying to the ladies of the harem--

"I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, By the (free) gazelles, by the hinds in the field, That ye stir not up, nor awaken love, Until it please."

This refrain is repeated the second time just before a picture of Solomon's glory, shaded by a suggestion that all is not brightness even around this Prince of Peace. The ladies of the seraglio are summoned to look out and see the pa.s.sing of the King in state, seated on his palanquin of purple and gold, but escorted by armed men "because of fear in the night." In immediate contrast with that scene, we see Shulamith going off with her humble lover, now his bride, to his field and to her vineyard, and singing a beautiful song of love, strong as death, flame-tipped arrow of a G.o.d, unquenchable, unpurchaseable.

Though according to the revised version of vi. 12 her relatives are princely, and it may be they who invite her to return (vi. 13), she says, "I am my beloved's." With him she will go into the field and lodge in the village (vii. 10, 11). She finds her own little garden and does not envy Solomon.

"Solomon hath a vineyard at Baalhamon; He hath let out the vineyard to keepers; Each for the fruit thereof was to bring a thousand pieces of silver: My vineyard, which is mine, is before me: Thou, O Solomon, shall have the thousand, And those that keep the fruit thereof two hundred."

There was, as we see in Koheleth, a prevailing tradition that Solomon felt the hollowness of his palatial life. "See life with a woman thou lovest." The wife is the fountain:

"Bethink thee of thy fountain In the days of thy youth."

This perhaps gave rise to a theory that the shepherd lover was Solomon himself in disguise, like the G.o.d Krishna among the cow-maidens. It does not appear probable that any thought of that kind was in the writer of this Song. Certainly there appears not to be any purpose of lowering Solomon personally in enthroning Love above him. There is no hint of any religious or moral objection to him, and indeed throughout the work Solomon appears in a favourable light personally,--he is beloved by the daughters of Jerusalem (v. 10)--though his royal estate is, as we have seen, shown in a light not altogether enviable. Threescore mighty men guard him: "every man hath his sword upon his thigh because of fear in the night," and the day of his heart's gladness was the day of his espousals (iii. 8, 11).

It is not improbable that there is an allusion to Solomon's magic seal in the first lines of the hymn to Love (viii. 6). The legend of the Ring must have been long in growing to the form in which it is found in the Talmud, where it is said that Solomon's "fear in the night" arose from his apprehension that the Devil might again get hold of his Ring, with which he (Aschmedai) once wrought much mischief. (Gittin. Vol. 68, col. 1, 2). The hymn strikes me as late Alexandrian:

"Wear me as a seal on thy breast As a seal-ring on thine arm: For love is strong as death, Its pa.s.sion unappeasable as the grave; Its shafts are arrows of fire, The lightnings of a G.o.d. [Jah.]

Many waters cannot quench love, Deluges cannot overwhelm it.

Should a n.o.ble offer all the wealth of his house for love It would be utterly spurned."

Excluding the interrupting verses 8 and 9, the hymn is followed by a song about Solomon's vineyard, preceded by two lines which appear to me to possess a significance overlooked by commentators. Shulamith (evidently) speaks:

"I was a wall, my b.r.e.a.s.t.s like its towers: Thus have I been in his eyes as one finding peace.

Solomon hath a vineyard," etc. [as above.]

The word "peace" is Shalom; it is immediately followed by Shelomoh (Solomon, "peaceful"); and Shulamith (also meaning "peaceful"), thus brings together the fortress of her lover's peace, her own breast, and the fortifications built by the peaceful King (who never attacked but was always prepared for defence). Here surely, at the close of Canticles, is a sort of tableau: Shalom, Shulamith, Shelomoh: Peace, the prince of Peace, the queen of Peace. If this were the only lyric one would surely infer that these were the bride and bridegroom, under the benediction of Peace. It is not improbable that at this climax of the poem Shulamith means that in her lover she has found her Solomon, and he found in her his Solomona,--their reciprocal strongholds of Shalom or Peace.

Of course my interpretations of the Song of Songs are largely conjectural, as all other interpretations necessarily are. The songs are there to be somehow explained, and it is of importance that every unbia.s.sed student of the book should state his conjectures, these being based on the contents of the book, and not on the dogmatic theories which have been projected into it. I have been compelled, under the necessary limitations of an essay like the present, to omit interesting details in the work, but have endeavoured to convey the impression left on my own mind by a totally unprejudiced study. The conviction has grown upon me with every step that, even at the lowest date ever a.s.signed it, the work represents the earliest full expression of romantic love known in any language. It is so entirely free from fabulous, supernatural, or even pious incidents and accents, so human and realistic, that its having escaped the modern playwright can only be attributed to the superst.i.tious encrustations by which its beauty has been concealed for many centuries.

This process of perversion was begun by Jewish Jahvists, but they have been far surpa.s.sed by our A. S. version, whose solemn nonsense at most of the chapter heads in the Bible here reached its climax. It is a remarkable ill.u.s.tration of the depths of fatuity to which clerical minds may be brought by prepossession, that the closing chapter of Canticles, with its beautiful exaltation of romantic love, could be headed: "The love of the Church to Christ. The vehemency of Love. The calling of the Gentiles. The Church Prayeth for Christ's coming." The "Higher Criticism" is now turning the headings into comedy, but they have done--nay, are continuing--their very serious work of misdirection.

It has already been noted that the Jewish doctors exalted Bathsheba, adulteress as she was, into a blessed woman, probably because of the allusion to her in the Song (iii. 2) as having crowned her royal Son, who had become mystical; and it can only be ascribed to Protestantism that, instead of the Queen-Mother Mary, the Church becomes Bathsheba's successor in our version: "The Church glorieth in Christ." And of course the shepherd lover's feeding (his flock) among the lilies becomes "Christ's care of the Church."

But for such fantasies the beautiful Song of Songs might indeed never have been preserved at all, yet is it a scandal that Bibles containing chapter-headings known by all educated Christians to be falsifications, should be circulated in every part of the world, and chiefly among ignorant and easily misled minds. These simple people, reading the anathemas p.r.o.nounced in their Bibles on those who add anything to the book given them as the "Word of G.o.d" (Deuteronomy iv. 2, xii. 32, Proverbs x.x.x. 6, Revelation xxii. 18), cannot imagine that these chapter-headings are not in the original books, but forged. And what can be more brazenly fraudulent than the chapter-heading to one of these very pa.s.sages (Revelation xxii. 18, 19), where nothing is said of the "Word of G.o.d," but over which is printed: "18. Nothing may be added to the word of G.o.d, nor taken therefrom." But even the learned cannot quite escape the effect of these perversions. How far they reach is ill.u.s.trated in the fate of Mary Magdalen, a perfectly innocent woman according to the New Testament, yet by a single chapter-heading in Luke branded for all time as the "sinner" who anointed Jesus,--"Magdalen"

being now in our dictionaries as a repentant prost.i.tute. Yet there are hundreds of additions to the Bible more harmful than this,--additions which, whether honestly made or not originally, are now notoriously fraudulent. It is especially necessary in the interest of the Solomonic and secular literature in the Bible that Truth shall be liberated from the malarious well--Jahvist and ecclesiastical--in which she has long been sunk by mistranslation, interpolation, and chapter-headings. The Christian churches are to be credited with having produced critics brave enough to expose most of these impositions, and it is now the manifest duty of all public teachers and literary leaders to uphold those scholars, to protest against the continuance of the propaganda of pious frauds, and to insist upon the supremacy of truth.

CHAPTER X.

KOHELETH (ECCLESIASTES).

In the Atlantic Monthly for February, 1897, a writer, in giving his personal reminiscences of Tennyson, relates an anecdote concerning the poet and the Rev. F. D. Maurice. Speaking of Ecclesiastes (Koheleth), Tennyson said it was the one book the admission of which into the canon he could not understand, it was so utterly pessimistic--of the earth, earthy. Maurice fired up. "Yes, if you leave out the last two verses. But the conclusion of the whole matter is, 'Fear G.o.d and keep His commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For G.o.d shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil.' So long as you look only down upon earth, all is 'vanity of vanities.' But if you look up there is a G.o.d, the judge of good and evil." Tennyson said he would think over the matter from that point of view.

This amusing incident must have caused a ripple of laughter in scholastic circles, now that the labors of Cheyne, Renan, Dillon, and others, have left little doubt that both of the verses cited by Maurice are later editorial additions. They alone, he admitted, could save the book, and the charm of the incident is that the verses were placed there by ancient Maurices to induce ancient Tennysons to "think over the matter from that point of view." The result was that the previously rejected book was admitted into the canon by precisely the same force which continued its work at Faringford, and continues it to this day. Only one must not suppose that Mr. Maurice was aware of the ungenuineness of the verses. He was an honest gentleman, but so ingeniously mystical that had the two verses not been there he could readily have found others of equally transcendant and holy significance, without even resorting to other pious interpolations in the book.

Tennyson was curiously unconscious of his own pessimism. When any one questioned the belief in a future life in his presence his vehemence without argument betrayed his sub-conscious misgivings, while his indignation ran over all the conditional resentments of Job. I have heard that he said to Tyndall that if he knew there was no future life he would regard the creator of human beings as a demon, and shake his fist in His eternal face. This rage was based in a more profoundly pessimistic view of the present life than anything even in Ecclesiastes,--by which name may be happily distinguished the disordered, perverted, and mistranslated Koheleth.

It appears evident that the sentence which opens Koheleth,--in our Bibles "All is vanity, saith the Preacher; vanity of vanities, all is vanity,"--is as mere a Jahvist chapter-heading as that of our A. S. translators: "The Preacher showeth that all human courses are vain." It is repeated as the second of the eight verses added at the end of the work. Koheleth does not label the whole of things vanity; in a majority of cases the things he calls vain are vain; and some things he finds not vanity,--youth, and wedded love, and work that is congenial.

Renan (Histoire du Peuple d'Israel, Tome 5, p. 158) has shown conclusively, as I think, that the signature on this book, QHLT, is a mere letter-play on the word "Solomon," and the eagerness with which the letters were turned into Koheleth (which really means Preacheress), and to make Solomon's inner spouse a preacher of the vanities of pleasure and the wisdom of fearing G.o.d, is thus naively indicated in the successive names of the book, "Koheleth"

and "Ecclesiastes." We are thus warned by the t.i.tle to pick our way carefully where the Jahvist and the Ecclesiastic have been before us; remembering especially that though piety may induce men to forge things, this is never done lightly. As people now do not commit forgery for a shilling, so neither did those who placed spurious sentences or phrases in nearly every chapter of the Bible do so for anything they did not consider vital to morality or to salvation. In Ecclesiastes we must be especially suspicious of the very serious religious points. Fortunately the style of the book renders it particularly subject to the critical and literary touchstone.

Is it necessary to point out to any man of literary instinct the interpolation bracketed in the following verses? "Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth, and let thy heart gladden thee in the flower of thy age, and walk in the paths of thy heart, and according to the vision of thine eyes [but know thou that for all these things G.o.d will bring thee into judgment], and banish discontent from thy heart, and put away evil from thy flesh; for youth and dawn are fleeting. Remember also thy fountain in the days of thy youth, or ever the evil days come or the years draw nigh in which thou shalt say I have no delight in them."

It is only by removing the bracketed clause that any consistency can be found in the lyric, which Professor Cheyne compares with the following song by the ancient Egyptian harper at the funeral feast of Neferhotap:

"Make a good day, O holy fathers!

Let odors and oils stand before thy nostril; Wreaths and lotus are on the arms and bosom of thy sister Dwelling in thy heart, sitting beside thee.