August 30: Gender-bending in the Song of Songs

In the film The Wedding Crashers, Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson play two young men who pretend to be guests at weddings in order to attend the lavish receptions. In one scene the two characters, seated in church just before the Bible reading at a wedding, place a bet on whether the text will be from Song of Songs or I Corinthians 13. Vince Vaughn makes the losing bet on Song of Songs, grumbling as the reader begins, “Love is patient, love is kind . . .”

This scene indicates the extent to which the Song of Songs has become a familiar fixture in American culture. The verses from this week’s lectionary reading, 2:8-13 may be familiar to those of us who have been on the wedding circuit this summer. The Song was also a source of inspiration for Chagall, who created paintings intended as its illustrations:

8 Listen! My lover!
Look! Here he comes,
leaping across the mountains,
bounding over the hills.
9 My lover is like a gazelle or a young stag.
Look! There he stands behind our wall,
gazing through the windows,
peering through the lattice.
10 My lover spoke and said to me,
"Arise, my darling,
my beautiful one, and come with me.
11 See! The winter is past;
the rains are over and gone.
12 Flowers appear on the earth;
the season of singing has come,
the cooing of doves
is heard in our land.
13 The fig tree forms its early fruit;
the blossoming vines spread their fragrance.
Arise, come, my darling;
my beautiful one, come with me.



The authorship of the Song of Songs is unknown. Although Solomon is referenced in the text, words which may have a Greek, Persian, or Arabic origin have caused scholars to date the Song to the post-exilic period (NOAB, 959). In her essay “Ten Things Every Feminist Should Know about the Song of Songs,” appearing in The Song of Songs: a Feminist Companion to the Bible,” Cheryl Exum begins by acknowledging the extent to which this book is beloved by feminist theologians. She writes:

“At first glance, the Song of Songs seems to be a woman’s text: it boldly celebrates female desire, and the behavior of the woman . . . does not conform to the social norms we can construct from the rest of the Bible. A woman initiates sexual encounters; a woman roams the streets looking for her lover; a woman speaks openly about her desire; there is no indication that the couple or couples we meet in the Song are married, yet they are clearly lovers, at least on the level of double entendre.”

Alicia Ostriker is a Jewish feminist theologian who finds positive meaning in the Song. In her own essay, “A Holy of Holies,” she approaches the Song as both a love poem and an allegory of God’s love for Israel: “It is no accident that every mystical tradition on earth speaks of God as the beloved . . . If elsewhere we must divide the ‘sacred’ and the ‘secular,’ that division is annihilated in the Song.”

Ostriker goes on to characterize the Song as a “countertext” within the biblical canon. By this term, she means a text that does not portray and affirm hierarchical relationships between God and humans on the one hand, and men and women, on the other that are found in other books of the Bible. She writes that the song “. . . offers and extraordinarily egalitarian image of mutual love and desire” that can lead the reader to “the possibility of a mutually delighting love-relationship with God, which is not contingent on obedience or subordination” (Ostriker, 37).

She calls attention to how the speaker invites her lover, not to her father’s house, but to her mother’s house, in 3:4 and 8:2; the images imply the mother may have taught her daughter about sexuality. Ostriker also reads the refrain line to the Daughters of Jerusalem not to “awaken love until it is ready” as an image of romantic love in opposition to marriage arranged by parents for reasons of economics or social standing—or a relationship in which one partner is dominant (Ostriker, 46).

Exum and Ostriker both focus on the passage 5:2-8, in which the female speaker seeks her beloved and is beaten:

I sought him, but did not find him;
I called him, but he gave no answer.
Making their rounds in the city
the sentinels found me;
they beat me, they wounded me,
they took away my mantle,
those sentinels of the walls.
I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem,
if you find my beloved,
tell him this:
I am faint with love.

Ostriker reads this passage as a plea for greater inclusion for women within their religious tradition. Coming from a tradition of theology in which women’s religious experience is emphasized, Ostriker connects this passage to ostracizing of women in modern times. She gives examples of how women are not always allowed to act as equal participants in worship: “Women who dare to pray aloud at the Kotel (the Western or ‘Wailing’ Wall at Jerusalem) have been spat on, cursed, called whore. . . . Although nothing in halakhah (rabbinic law) actually forbids these women’s activity, the Supreme Court of Israel pronounces that ‘custom’ should be observed” (Ostriker, 53).

Cheryl Exum reads the Song as certainly gender-bending, but not necessarily as the strong image of gender equality with regard to love, sex, and the body that Ostriker does. In her essay, she begins by stating that the Song does not purport to describe an actual woman—it is a series of love poems and an artistic creation. She goes through possible scenarios of authorship, including David Cline’s suggestion that the Song is a male fantasy: a male writer creating his ideal dream woman (Exum, 28).

Expressing surprise that a culture with strict regulations concerning female sexuality (insofar as early Biblical texts indicate) would produce the Song, Exum then describes how a poet might create an imaginative vision of what life might be like outside social norms. She highlight explicit gender-bending in the Song’s imagery: the woman is often described using military imagery such as warrior shields, a defensive wall, towers, while the man’s body is compared to ivory, sapphires, and alabaster. Exum quotes Daphne Merkin: “Any putatively male love object described with . . . such a decidedly female sense of adornment presents ripe territory for study” (Exum, 30).

Exum focuses on currents that run counter to the image of egalitarian passion. She points out the elusiveness of the male lover who bounds over hills, but comes and goes—in the beating scene, the woman is searching for her lover who knocks on her door but then abruptly leaves. She questions, “Does his freedom of movement reflect a social reality that she has internalized, since that is how she thinks of him?” (Exum, 30). Responding to theologians who read the beating scene as a figment of the woman’s dream, Exum wonders whether the poet wants to depict a woman with a sense of threat, if this is what she dreams about. Her final conclusion affirms the Song’s complex portrait of desire:

“Our protagonist is assertive, determined, and, not least important, vulnerable. This combination makes her an irresistible subject for further feminist investigation. Feminist readers of this Best of Songs might to well to say to the ancient authors and traditionalists who preserved it for us, ‘Thanks for your text, and I’ll decide how to read it.’” (Exum, 35).

Other lectionary readings for this week include Psalm 45: 1-2, 6-9; James 1:17-27; Mark 7: 1-8, 14-15, 21-23.

--Elizabeth Fels

Source: Brenner, Athalya, and Fontaine, Carole R., eds. The Song of Songs: a Feminist Companion to the Bible. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000.

Chagall photo credits here and here.