Come,
my beloved
let
us go out into the fields
and
lie all night among the flowering henna.
Let's
go early to the vineyards
to
see if the vine has budded,
if
the blossoms have opened
and
the pomegranate is in flower
There
I will give you my love
—Song
of Songs 7: 12-14
In
1995, Ariel and Chana Bloch published a lyrical new translation
of the Song of Songs, laying bare its lightly veiled sensuality.
The young unnamed lovers in this biblical poem fondle each
other's metaphors and play with each other's similes, but
surprisingly, they are not married. As the translators point
out, "She and her lover meet secretly in the countryside at
night and part at daybreak, so it is clear that they are not
married."
As
a schoolboy, I was taught that premarital sex is a mortal sin
roughly equivalent to murder. The girl next door gave me reason
to doubt this, and I began to wonder, Why would God—who
invented sex and said “Go forth and multiply”—Why would He
condemn pubescent teens simply for following their God-given
nature?
What
did Jesus say about premarital sex? Jesus loved children. What
was his advice to those imperiled souls on the treacherous path
of puberty? What was his reading of the Song of Songs? We do not
know. Strange that no one preserved his teachings on this grave
matter, given all the young souls hanging in the balance. Are
the Song’s young lovers doomed?
For
hundreds of years people mistakenly believed that the Song of
Songs was composed by King Solomon, whose reign was in the 10th
century BCE. Modern scholars generally agree that linguistic and
historical analysis point to a much later composition during the
post-Exilic Persian period or early Hellenistic period between
the 5th and 3rd centuries BCE. According to the translators:
The
most reliable criterion for dating the Song would be language.
After the Babylonian Exile in the 6th century BCE, Hebrew
gradually came to be replaced by Aramaic as the major language
of communication in Palestine. Hence the Aramaic portions in the
late Old Testament books of Ezrah and Daniel, and the traces of
Aramaic even in the Greek New Testament. Historically the
language of the Song represents a transitional stage between
classical Biblical Hebrew and the Hebrew of the Mishnah, a
collection of oral law edited around 200CE, which likewise shows
the imprint of Aramaic.
All
these factors, taken together—the Aramaic influence, the
similarity to Mishnaic Hebrew, the influence of the spoken
idiom, the foreign loan words—suggest that the Song was
written down in post-Exilic times, most likely in the
Hellenistic period, around the 3rd century BCE.
Oral
Transmission
Before
it was written down, however, elements of the Song sprouted and
grew in a dynamic oral tradition, rooted in ancient Sumeria.
Some of those roots are still audible:
If
only you were a brother
who
nursed at my mother's breast
I
would kiss you in the streets
and
no one would scorn me.
8:1
I
would bring you to the house of my mother
and
she would teach me.
I
would give you spiced wine to drink,
my
pomegranate wine.
8:2
His
left hand beneath my head,
his
right arm holding me close.
8:3
Verse
8:3 is an echo of the Sumerian Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi
describing the hieros gamos, the Sacred Marriage :
Your
right hand you have placed on my vulva,
your
left stroked my head.
The
Sacred Marriage, was an act of sympathetic magic in which two
earthly representatives or embodiments of the god and goddess
engaged in ritual sex to help with the cyclical regeneration of
life. The juxtaposition of the right hand—associated with
strength and assertiveness, with the weaker left hand—associated
with tenderness and affection, suggests that her lover is both
strong and gentle, therefore likely to be a good lover and a
good father; also a good shepherd and a good provider.
The
seasonal union of god and goddess was believed to ensure
fertility and prosperity for the land and its people. This rite
of spring was commonly performed by the king of a Sumerian
city-state and the high priestess of Inanna, the Sumerian
goddess of fertility.
The
Hebrew goddess of fertility was Asherah.
Springtime
Springtime
corresponds to puberty. The Song's Juliet feels the sexual
transformations in her body and, as if by sympathetic magic,
correlates them metaphorically with the budding, blossoming life
around her. She wants to sneak out under the stars with her
boyfriend and see if the pomegranate is in flower. The
pomegranate with its red juice and many seeds was a primary
symbol of uterine fertility.
Come,
my beloved
let
us go out into the fields
and
lie all night among the flowering henna.
Let's
go early to the vineyards
to
see if the vine has budded,
if
the blossoms have opened
and
the pomegranate is in flower
There
I will give you my love
The
reader is invited to guess the meaning of “opening blossoms”
and “budding vines,” proximate to the flowering pomegranate
with its red juice and many seeds.
In
their commentary, Ariel and Chana seem to be of two minds on the
significance of fertility in the Song of Songs. In one context,
they rhapsodize about the two lovers meeting in “an idealized
landscape of fertility and abundance.” Elsewhere, they say
that “fertility… is of no concern in the Song”
The
Song of Songs is a poem about the sexual awakening of a young
woman and her lover. In a series of subtly articulated scenes,
the two meet in an idealized landscape of fertility and
abundance... a kind of Eden... where they discover the pleasures
of love.
Some
of the images and motifs in the ancient Mesopotamian poems,
detached from their original ritual context, may indeed have
left their traces on the Song; an example of such an image is
"Your right hand you have placed on my vulva, / your left
stroked my head." But fertility, the central concern of the
cultic rite, is of no concern in the Song. And, since the
prophets emphatically denounced the fertility rites of their
neighbors, it is unlikely that the Song would have found its way
into the canon if it had anything to do with the copulation of
the gods; human kisses were problem enough for the rabbis.
On
the other hand,
it’s
possible that the Song “found its way into the canon”
precisely because "anything to do with the copulation of
the gods" was screened out by the Rabbis, just as Yahwist
historians screened out favorable stories of the Hebrew goddess
in their post-Exilic redactions of Hebrew history. If it weren’t
for the passages denouncing Asherah in the Bible, we would know
of her only from sources outside the Bible.
By
contrast, Solomon and his many wives and paramours were big fans
of Asherah. Her statues stood in many a local sanctuary, and
Solomon introduced her worship into his temple, in the capital
city of Jerusalem. Thousands of figurines have been unearthed in
the Levant bearing her likeness, and giving evidence of the
people’s love for her and their prayers to her for healthy
children. If there was an early version of the Song known to
Solomon, it would have been significantly different from the
version we have. Chances are good, that in Solomon's time, love
songs had lots of nice things to say about the Hebrew fertility
goddess, whose great blessing was a healthy baby.
In
his book The Hebrew Goddess, Raphael Patai says the
Hebrew goddess was a "central feature" of popular
Hebrew religion in the polytheistic, pre-monarchic period of
Hebrew history. "There can be no doubt about the
psychological importance that the belief in, and service of,
Asherah had for the Hebrews." In the origin stories of the
remote past, Asherah was one of the friendly extraterrestrial
Sky People who benefited humankind with knowledge of gardening,
farming and medicine. Whereas Yahweh was a war lord, obsessed
with the acquisition of power and territory, Asherah was a
mother/goddess, giver of fertility and the greatest of all
blessings: children. According to Patai, "The Hebrew
people, by and large, clung to her for six centuries, from the
days of the conquest of Canaan down to the Babylonian Exile, in
spite of the increasing vigor of Yahwist monotheism." In
the Old Testament, this fidelity to Asherah is denounced as
infidelity to Yawheh.
In
the Canaanite religion, Asherah was the consort of the god El,
who, like Yahweh, Jesus, and the Song's unnamed Romeo, was
sometimes characterized as a shepherd. Later on, through a
syncretic process, El and Yahweh were conflated, and Asherah
became Yahweh's consort. Iconography found at Kuntillet Ajrud
refers to "Yahweh of Samaria and his Asherah," and
"Yahweh of Teman and his Asherah."
However,
Yahwist monotheists and henotheists denounced this syncretism as
idolatry. In the 6th-2nd centuries BCE,
Yahwist historians nearly wrote Asherah out of history, blaming
their Babylonian captivity on polytheism and idolatry, and
calling out Solomon in particular. In Solomon's time, Yahwist
prophets were already pressing for the sole worship of Yahweh,
and Yahweh was a jealous god:
I
am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of
Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
Thou
shalt have no other gods before me.
Thou
shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of
any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth
beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
Thou
shalt not bow thyself down to them, nor serve them: for I the
Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the
fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation
of them that hate me.
—Exodus
20
In
the Rules for War (Deuteronomy 20), Yahweh tells the
Hebrews that it is gravely offensive to intermarry with women
from nearby conquered cities. These women might turn a warrior's
heart from Yahweh to Asherah; which was exactly Solomon's
predicament, surrounded as he was by innumerable fans of the
fertility goddess.
Threescore
are the queens,
fourscore
the king's women,
and
maidens, maidens without number.
6:8
Because
of this danger of being seduced away by Asherah’s devotees,
Moses had instructed the Hebrew warriors on how to treat the
women from nearby conquered cities. Unlike the women from
distant cities, they were not to be taken as sex slaves.
Instead, they were to be slaughtered, along with the men and the
children:
You
must not spare the life of any living thing... so that they may
not teach you to do all the detestable things which they do to
honor their gods.
—Deuteronomy
20:18
So,
to avoid learning to do detestable things, the Hebrew warriors
learned to do detestable things. Without mercy, sparing no one,
they slaughtered women and sacrificed children on the alters of
war. Zealous followers of Yahweh persecuted Asherah's devotees,
destroying her sacred groves in the high places, and smashing
the standing stones that commemorated her visitations with their
ancestors. This conflict intensified after Solomon's reign,
under the leadership of Kings Hezekiah and Josiah.
[King
Hezekiah] removed the high places, smashed the sacred stones and
cut down the Asherah poles. He broke into pieces the bronze
snake Moses had made. —2 Kings 18:4
High
Places
High
places in the hills and mountains are the natural habitat of
gods and goddesses. From the heights they can survey the grand
panorama of life on Earth spread out at their feet. There, in
the high places, the Song's Romeo refers to his Juliet for the
first time as his bride, urging her to come away from the danger
that is lurking there:
Oh
come with me, my bride,
come
down with me from Lebanon.
Look
down from the peak of Amana,
look
down from Senir and Hermon,
from
the mountains of the leopards,
the
lion's dens
4:8
A
fresh running stream traces their path from that panoramic vista
in the mountains to a secret garden in the valley, bridging the
gap between Heaven and Earth. The stream brings life-giving
water from the Sky God, and surges like a fountain in the
Earth's fertile recesses. As they make love, she is both the
woman in the garden and the garden itself, an embodiment of the
goddess. As the poet praises her beauty, he speaks to the Earth
herself, to the Wellspring of Life; magically blending boy,
girl, and garden:
An
enclosed garden is my sister, my bride
a hidden well,
a
sealed spring
4:12
Your
branches are an orchard of pomegranate trees
heavy
with fruit,
flowering
henna and spikenard,
4:13
spikenard
and saffron, cane and cinnamon,
with
every tree of frankincense,
myrrh
and aloes,
all
the rare spices.
4:14
You
are a fountain in the garden,
a
well of living waters
that
stream from Lebanon.
4:15
This
last verse is a bit ambiguous. Who is speaking? Is Juliet a
fountain because of her power to give birth, or is it Romeo's
fountain that is surging in Juliet's garden? Or is it both? The
ambiguity is kind of delicious.
Ejaculations!
5:1
The
consummation of the Song's Sacred Marriage is made explicit in
verse 5:1. In the dreamlike imagery of the Song, the young man
sometimes shape-shifts into a gazelle or a wild stag. One might
imagine him as such in this scene, with the keen senses an
animal, drawn by a fragrant breeze:
Awake,
north wind! O south wind, come,
breathe
upon my garden,
let
its spices stream out.
Let
my lover come into his garden
and
taste its delicious fruit.
4:16
I
have come into my garden,
my
sister, my bride
I
have gathered my myrrh and my spices,
I
have eaten from the honeycomb,
I
have drunk the milk and the wine.
5:1
According
to the translators, this passage employs the Hebrew "perfect"
verb:
The
most typical role of the Hebrew perfect verb, especially in the
Song, is to denote a narrative past and a completed action. In
this case, the perfect implies consummation. In other words,
this erotic encounter is real (not merely wished for, as some
commentators would have us believe).
Au
revoir
The
Song ends with the young woman urging her lover to run away. Why
would she do that if they were married in any conventional
sense? Instead, they seem to be twin spirits, quantum entangled
lovers, as if they had started life together, nursing at the
breasts of the mother/goddess. It seems that her wish for a
brother has been realized.
Christians
speak of being a brother in Christ. Is she his sister in
Asherah?
I
have come into my garden,
my
sister, my bride
I
have gathered my myrrh and my spices,
Ariel
and Chana point out that "The Song thus ends with the motif
of the lovers parting at dawn, as in the aubade of later
traditions. An ending that looks forward in anticipation to
another meeting:”
Hurry,
my love!
Run
away my gazelle,
my
wild stag
on
the hills of cinnamon.
8:14
In
their commentary, the Blochs contend that this final verse is
frequently mistranslated:
Coming
at the end of the Song, this request by the Shulamite—"Run
away"—has caused difficulties for many translators, who
prefer to read "flee with me," or "flee to me,"
or "come into the open," or the like. All these
readings are unacceptable, since barah can only mean "to
flee away from" someone, or something; nor is there any
textual support for the suggestion that she asks him to run away
with her. Rather, this final exchange between the two
lovers, verses 8:13 and 14, evokes a familiar setting: the young
man asking the Shulamite to let him hear her voice, as in 2:14:
My
dove in the clefts of the rock,
in
the shadow of the cliff,
let
me see you— all of you!
Let
me hear your voice,
your
delicious song.
I
love to look at you.
and
she urging him to run away before sunrise so that he will not be
caught, as in 2:17 (where sob "to turn" is
likewise meant in the sense of "to turn away from the
speaker"):
Before
day breathes,
Before
the shadows of night are gone,
run
away, my love!
Be
like a gazelle, a wild stag
on
the jagged mountains.
The
Song thus ends with the motif of the lovers parting at dawn, as
in the aubade of later traditions. An ending that looks forward
in anticipation to another meeting.
So
from beginning to end, the lovers remain unmarried in the
conventional sense, and their erotic encounters are real “not
merely wished for, as some commentators would have us believe.”
What
would Jesus say? What did he teach about premarital sex? Did he
brandish the threat of hellfire? Did he counsel abstinence? Or
did he point out that girls and boys can please each other
without risking pregnancy, and thereby put off parenthood until
they are ready for such a demanding responsibility?
More
to the point, what is Almighty God's judgement upon pubescent
teens who commit the mortal sin of premarital sex? Are they
doomed to burn in hell for all eternity? If God is Yahweh, and
if Yahweh is God, then the answer is probably yes.
As
we've seen, Yahweh has a history of violence. He's got priors.
At his command, armies slaughtered women and sacrificed children
on the alters of war. Plus, fire was one of Yahweh’s signature
MOs. Take for example that time back in Numbers 21:6, when he
burned little Hebrew children to death with fiery serpents
because they were hungry and begged for food.
God
sent fiery serpents among the people; their bite brought death
to many in Israel.—Numbers 21:6
Historian
Paul Wallis tells the story:
There
is a moment when the people of Israel are starving in the
desert, and so they come to Moses and they say please can you
get Yahweh to provide us with some food? And instead of
providing them with food, he sends serpents, fiery serpents, to
go in and attack the people.
Jesus
alludes to this story in Matthew 7:9-11 and Luke 11:11-13.
There's
a moment when Jesus says, "Which of you fathers, if your
child asked you for food, would give him a snake? If your
children asked you for bread, would you give them serpents? Now,
if you who are evil know how to give good gifts to your
children, how much more will your father in heaven give good
gifts to those who ask?
Clearly,
Jesus is distancing himself from Yahweh in this passage, making
a sharp distinction between the Lord of the Serpents and our
Father in Heaven. Yahweh bears little resemblance to a loving
father. To Asherah and her followers, he’s more like a
jealous, abusive husband. By his own admission, Yahweh is a
jealous god, deeply troubled by the popularity of his rivals;
and he covets their land. How is it that the Creator of the
Universe and everything in it needs to acquire more land by way
of war? How can it be that the Source of Love fears the loss of
love?
According
to Jesus' disciple Paul, love does not envy:
Love
is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast,
it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is
not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record
of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices
with the truth. It always protects, always trusts,
always hopes, always perseveres. —1 Corinthians 13:4-8
I
think we can safely add: that a loving father does not burn
children to death with fiery serpents for the sin of being
hungry; nor is he likely to toss teens into an everlasting lake
of fire for the sin of discovering sex. Anyone with a lick of
common sense should be able to see that these punishments are
wildly out of proportion to their supposed crimes; and therefore
offensive to the sense of justice and fair play that God has
written in the human heart. The fiery serpent story raises the
question: Is Yahweh really God? If, as Paul said, “God is that
in which we live, move, and have our being,” then who was
Yahweh?
Who
Was Yahweh?
In
the ancient origin stories, Yahweh was one of many Elohim.
According to Mauro Biglino, expert in ancient languages, the
word "Elohim" is mistakenly translated as “God” in
the Bible, but the word is plural, and the Hebrew root means
"powerful ones."
Who
were the powerful ones?
The
origin stories in Genesis are shortened versions of much older
stories from Sumeria. The unredacted Sumerian stories state
plainly that the powerful ones were visitors from the stars, the
Sky People. Yahweh, like Asherah, was one of these powerful
extraterrestrials, and Jesus knew the difference. When Jesus
spoke of his Father in Heaven, he was not speaking of Yahweh.
Throughout the New Testament, he never mentions the name Yahweh.
As his disciple Paul elucidated: Our Father in Heaven is the
Creator of the Universe and everything in it; the Source of
Life, Consciousness, and Love; that in which we all live, move,
and have our being...
More
about the Sky People with Paul Wallis.
Paul
tells the story of Jesus, Yaweh, and the Fiery Serpents:
https://youtu.be/pjiK9912z3U?t=1302
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