Commentary: On the Song of Songs

The Song of Songs proved profoundly interesting to both Jews and Christians, who each read it as an allegory about the loving relationship of God with their own believers, sometimes understood as the community as a whole (Israel, the Church), and sometimes as the individual Jew or Christian. Rashi, who generally focused on the literal, plain meaning (peshat) of the biblical text, here reworks the traditional allegorical interpretation (found in the Targum, midrash, and many piyyutim) to read the Song of Songs as the story of Israel in exile. Israel is symbolized by the female lover, who appears as an abandoned wife, yearning for her husband; she waits for him faithfully, and he will eventually return to her. Casting the story this way upheld God’s ongoing commitment to the Jewish people.

Introduction

One thing has God spoken; two have we heard (Ps 62:12). One scriptural verse yields many meanings, and the end of the matter is that no scriptural verse ever escapes the hold of its sense. And even though the prophets spoke their words in allegory דוגמא,¹ one must reconcile the allegory according to its characteristics and its order, just as the verses of Scripture are ordered one after the other. I have seen for this book [Song of Songs] many homiletical midrashim, for some of which the entire book is arranged in one midrash, whereas others are scattered in many books of midrash, on individual verses. But these are not reconciled according to the language of Scripture or the order of the verses. I have intended to capture the sense of the scriptural verses, to reconcile their explanations according to the order. And as for the midrashim—the rabbis have fixed them, each midrash in its place.

I say that Solomon saw, through the agency of the Holy Spirit, that in the future [the Israelites] would be exiled in exile following exile, destruction following destruction; and would mourn in this exile over their former glory; and would remember the first love when they were treasured above all peoples; and would say: I will go and return to my first husband, for it was better for me then than now (Hos 2:9); and would call to mind God’s loving acts, and their betrayal with which they betrayed [God], and the bounties that He said He would give them in the End of Days.

And he [Solomon] established this book through the agency of the Holy Spirit in the language of a woman bound in living widowhood, yearning for her husband, longing for her beloved, calling to mind the love of her youth for him. Even so her beloved is troubled by her trouble, and makes mention of the loving acts of her youth, and the splendor of her beauty, and the fitness of her actions wherein he was attracted to her in a fierce love;² and he informs her that it is not His intention that she be afflicted, nor is there a true separation between them,³ for she is yet his wife and he her husband.⁴