The Book of Delight and Other Papers by Israel Abrahams

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The moral of which seems to be that, though marriages are made in Heaven,
love must be made on earth.

HEBREW LOVE SONGS

Palestine is still the land of song. There the peasant sings Arabic ditties
in the field when he sows and reaps, in the desert when he tends his flock,
at the oasis when the caravan rests for the night, and when camels are
remounted next morning. The maiden's fresh voice keeps droning rhythm with
her hands and feet as she carries water from the well or wood from the
scanty forest, when she milks the goats, and when she bakes the bread.

The burden of a large portion of these songs is love. The love motive is
most prominent musically during the long week of wedding festivities, but
it is by no means limited to these occasions. The songs often contain an
element of quaint, even arch, repartee, in which the girl usually has the
better of the argument. Certainly the songs are sometimes gross, but only
in the sense that they are vividly natural. With no delicacy of expression,
they are seldom intrinsically coarse. The troubadours of Europe trilled
more daintily of love, but there was at times an illicit note in their
lays. Eastern love songs never attain the ideal purity of Dante, but they
hardly ever sink to the level of Ovid.

But why begin an account of Hebrew love songs by citing extant Palestinian
examples in Arabic? Because there is an undeniable, if remote, relationship
between some of the latter and the Biblical Song of Songs. In that
marvellous poem, outspoken praise of earthly beauty, frank enumeration of
the physical charms of the lovers, thorough unreserve of imagery, are
conspicuous enough. Just these features, as Wetzstein showed, are
reproduced, in a debased, yet recognizable, likeness, by the modern Syrian
_wasf_--a lyric description of the bodily perfections and adornments of a
newly-wed pair. The Song of Songs, or Canticles, it is true, is hardly a
marriage ode or drama; its theme is betrothed faith rather than marital
affection. Still, if we choose to regard the Song of Songs as poetry merely
of the _wasf_ type, the Hebrew is not only far older than any extant Arabic
instance, but it transcends the _wasf_ type as a work of inspired genius
transcends conventional exercises in verse-making. There are superficial
similarities between the _wasf_ and Canticles, but there is no spiritual
kinship. The _wasf_ is to the Song as Lovelace is to Shakespeare, nay, the
distance is even greater. The difference is not only of degree, it is
essential. The one touches the surface of love, the other sounds its
depths. The Song of Songs immeasurably surpasses the _wasf_ even as poetry.
It has been well said by Dr. Harper (author of the best English edition of
Canticles), that, viewed simply as poetry, the Song of Songs belongs to the
loveliest masterpieces of art. "If, as Milton said, 'poetry should be
simple, sensuous, passionate,' then here we have poetry of singular beauty
and power. Such unaffected delight in all things fair as we find here is
rare in any literature, and is especially remarkable in ancient Hebrew
literature. The beauty of the world and of the creatures in it has been so
deeply and warmly felt, that even to-day the ancient poet's emotion of joy
in them thrills through the reader."

It is superfluous to justify this eulogy by quotation. It is impossible
also, unless the quotation extend to the whole book. Yet one scene shall be
cited, the exquisite, lyrical dialogue of spring, beginning with the tenth
verse of the second chapter. It is a dialogue, though the whole is reported
by one speaker, the Shulammite maid. Her shepherd lover calls to her as she
stands hidden behind a lattice, in the palace in Lebanon, whither she has
been decoyed, or persuaded to go, by the "ladies of Jerusalem."

_The shepherd lover calls_
Rise up, my love,
My fair one, come away!
For, lo, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone,
The flowers appear on the earth:
The birds' singing time is here,
And the voice of the turtle-dove is heard in our land.
The fig-tree ripens red her winter fruit,
And blossoming vines give forth fragrance.
Rise up, my love,
My fair one, come away!

Shulammith makes no answer, though she feels that the shepherd is conscious
of her presence. She is, as it were, in an unapproachable steep, such as
the wild dove selects for her shy nest. So he goes on:

O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock,
In the covert of the steep!
Let me see thy face,
Let me hear thy voice,
For sweet is thy voice, and thy face comely!

She remains tantalizingly invisible, but becomes audible. She sings a
snatch from a vineyard-watcher's song, hinting, perhaps, at the need in
which her person (her "vineyard" as she elsewhere calls it) stands of
protection against royal foxes, small and large.

_Shulammith sings_
Take us the foxes,
The little foxes,
That spoil the vineyards:
For our vines are in blossom!

Then, in loving rapture,

_Shulammith speaks in an aside_
My beloved is mine, and I am his:
He feedeth his flock among the lilies!

But she cannot refuse her lover one glance at herself, even though she
appear only to warn him of his danger, to urge him to leave her and return
when the day is over.

_Shulammith entreatingly to her lover_
Until the evening breeze blows,
And the shadows disappear (at sunset),
Turn, my beloved!
Be thou as a young hart
Upon the cleft-riven hills!

This is but one of the many dainty love idylls of this divine poem. Or,
again, "could the curious helplessness of the dreamer in a dream and the
yearning of a maiden's affection be more exquisitely expressed than in the
lines beginning, I was asleep, but my heart waked"? But, indeed, as the
critic I am quoting continues, "the felicities of expression and the happy
imaginings of the poem are endless. The spring of nature and of love has
been caught and fixed in its many exquisite lines, as only Shakespeare
elsewhere has done it; and, understood as we think it must be understood,
it has that ethical background of sacrifice and self-forgetting which all
love must have to be thoroughly worthy."

It is this ethical, or, as I prefer to term it, spiritual, background that
discriminates the Song of Songs on the one hand from the Idylls of
Theocritus, and, on the other, from the Syrian popular ditties. Some
moderns, notably Budde, hold that the Book of Canticles is merely a
collection of popular songs used at Syrian weddings, in which the bride
figures as queen and her mate as king, just as Budde (wrongly) conceives
them to figure in the Biblical Song. Budde suggests that there were "guilds
of professional singers at weddings, and that we have in the Song of Songs
simply the repertoire of some ancient guild-brother, who, in order to
assist his memory, wrote down at random all the songs he could remember, or
those he thought the best."

But this theory has been generally rejected as unsatisfying. The book,
despite its obscurities, is clearly a unity. It is no haphazard collection
of love songs. There is a sustained dramatic action leading up to a noble
climax. Some passages almost defy the attempt to fit them into a coherent
plot, but most moderns detect the following story in Canticles: A beautiful
maid of Shulem (perhaps another form of Shunem), beloved by a shepherd
swain, is the only daughter of well-off but rustic parents. She is treated
harshly by her brothers, who set her to watch the vineyards, and this
exposure to the sun somewhat mars her beauty. Straying in the gardens, she
is on a day in spring surprised by Solomon and his train, who are on a
royal progress to the north. She is taken to the palace in the capital, and
later to a royal abode in Lebanon. There the "ladies of Jerusalem" seek to
win her affections for the king, who himself pays her his court. But she
resists all blandishments, and remains faithful to her country lover.
Surrendering graciously to her strenuous resistance, Solomon permits her to
return unharmed to her mountain home. Her lover meets her, and as she draws
near her native village, the maid, leaning on the shepherd's arm, breaks
forth into the glorious panegyric of love, which, even if it stood alone,
would make the poem deathless. But it does not stand alone. It is in every
sense a climax to what has gone before. And what a climax! It is a
vindication of true love, which weighs no allurements of wealth and
position against itself; a love of free inclination, yet altogether removed
from license. Nor is it an expression of that lower love which may prevail
in a polygamous state of society, when love is dissipated among many. We
have here the love of one for one, an exclusive and absorbing devotion. For
though the Bible never prohibited polygamy, the Jews had become monogamous
from the Babylonian Exile at latest. The splendid praise of the virtuous
woman at the end of the Book of Proverbs gives a picture, not only of
monogamous home-life, but of woman's influence at its highest. The virtuous
woman of Proverbs is wife and mother, deft guide of the home, open-handed
dispenser of charity, with the law of kindness on her tongue; but her
activity also extends to the world outside the home, to the mart, to the
business of life. Where, in olden literature, are woman's activities wider
or more manifold, her powers more fully developed? Now, the Song of Songs
is the lyric companion to this prose picture. The whole Song works up
towards the description of love in the last chapter--towards the
culmination of the thought and feeling of the whole series of episodes. The
Shulammite speaks:

Set me as a seal upon thy heart,
As a seal upon thine arm:
For love is strong as death,
Jealousy is cruel as the grave:
The flashes thereof are flashes of fire,
A very flame of God!
Many waters cannot quench love,
Neither can the floods drown it:
If a man would give the substance of his house for love,
He would be utterly contemned.

The vindication of the Hebrew song from degradation to the level of the
Syrian _wasf_ is easy enough. But some may feel that there is more
plausibility in the case that has been set up for the connection between
Canticles and another type of love song, the Idylls of Theocritus, the
Sicilian poet whose Greek compositions gave lyric distinction to the
Ptolemaic court at Alexandria, about the middle of the third century B.C.E.
It is remarkable how reluctant some writers are to admit originality in
ideas. Such writers seem to recognize no possibility other than supposing
Theocritus to have copied Canticles, or Canticles Theocritus. It does not
occur to them that both may be original, independent expressions of similar
emotions. Least original among ideas is this denial of originality in
ideas. Criticism has often stultified itself under the obsession that
everything is borrowed. On this theory there can never have been an
original note. The poet, we are told, is born, not made; but poetry,
apparently, is always made, never born.

The truth rather is that as human nature is everywhere similar, there must
necessarily be some similarity in its literary expression. This is
emphatically the case with the expression given to the emotional side of
human nature. The love of man for maid, rising everywhere from the same
spring, must find lyric outlets that look a good deal alike. The family
resemblance between the love poems of various peoples is due to the
elemental kinship of the love. Every true lover is original, yet most true
lovers, including those who have no familiarity with poetical literature,
fall instinctively on the same terms of endearment. Differences only make
themselves felt in the spiritual attitudes of various ages and races
towards love. Theocritus has been compared to Canticles, by some on the
ground of certain Orientalisms of his thought and phrases, as in his Praise
of Ptolemy. But his love poems bear no trace of Orientalism in feeling, as
Canticles shows no trace of Hellenism in its conception of love. The
similarities are human, the differences racial.

Direct literary imitation of love lyrics certainly does occur. Virgil
imitated Theocritus, and the freshness of the Greek Idyll became the
convention of the Roman Eclogue. When such conscious imitation takes place,
it is perfectly obvious. There is no mistaking the affectation of an urban
lyrist, whose lovers masquerade as shepherds in the court of Louis XIV.

Theocritus seems to have had earlier Greek models, but few readers of his
Idylls can question his originality, and fewer still will agree with
Mahaffy in denying the naturalness of his goatherds and fishermen, in a
word, his genuineness. Mahaffy wavers between two statements, that the
Idylls are an affectation for Alexandria, and sincere for Sicily. The two
statements are by no means contradictory. Much the same thing is true of
Canticles, the Biblical Song of Songs. It is unreasonable for anyone who
has seen or read about a Palestinian spring, with its unique beauty of
flower and bird and blossom, to imagine that the author of Canticles needed
or used second-hand sources of inspiration, however little his drama may
have accorded with the life of Jerusalem in the Hellenistic period. And as
the natural scenic background in each case is native, so is the treatment
of the love theme; in both it is passionate, but in the one it is nothing
else, in the other it is also spiritual. In both, the whole is artistic,
but not artificial. As regards the originality of the love-interest in
Canticles, it must suffice to say that there was always a strong romantic
strain in the Jewish character.

Canticles is perhaps (by no means certainly) post-Exilic and not far
removed in date from the age of Theocritus. Still, a post-Exilic Hebrew
poet had no more reason to go abroad for a romantic plot than Hosea, or the
author of Ruth, or the writer of the royal Epithalamium (Psalm xlv), an
almost certainly pre-Exilic composition. This Psalm has been well termed a
"prelude to the Song of Songs," for in a real sense Canticles is
anticipated and even necessitated by it. In Ruth we have a romance of the
golden corn-field, and the author chooses the unsophisticated days of the
Judges as the setting of his tale. In Canticles we have a contrasted
picture between the simplicity of shepherd-life and the urban
voluptuousness which was soon to attain its climax in the court of the
Ptolemies. So the poet chose the luxurious reign of Solomon as the
background for his exquisite "melodrama." Both Ruth and Canticles are
home-products, and ancient Greek literature has no real parallel to either.

Yet, despite the fact that the Hebrew Bible is permeated through and
through, in its history, its psalmody, and its prophetic oratory, with
images drawn from love, especially in rustic guise, so competent a critic
as Graetz conceived that the pastoral background of the love-story of
Canticles must have been artificial. While most of those who have accepted
the theory of imitation-they cannot have reread the Idylls and the Song as
wholes to persist in such a theory-have contended that Theocritus borrowed
from Canticles, Graetz is convinced that the Hebrew poet must have known
and imitated the Greek idyllist. The hero and heroine of the Song, he
thinks, are not real shepherds; they are bucolic dilettanti, their
shepherd-rôle is not serious. Whence, then, this superficial pastoral
_mise-en-scène?_ This critic, be it observed, places Canticles in the
Ptolemaic age.

"In the then Judean world," writes Graetz, "in the post-Exilic period,
pastoral life was in no way so distinguished as to serve as a poetic
foil. On the contrary, the shepherd was held in contempt. Agriculture was
so predominant that large herds were considered a detriment; they spoiled
the grain. Shepherds, too, were esteemed robbers, in that they allowed
their cattle to graze on the lands of others. In Judea itself, in the
post-Exilic period, there were few pasture-grounds for such nomads. Hence
the song transfers the goats to Gilead, where there still existed
grazing-places. In the Judean world the poet could find nothing to
suggest the idealization of the shepherd. As he, nevertheless, represents
the simple life, as opposed to courtly extravagance, through the figures
of shepherds, he must have worked from a foreign model. But Theocritus
was the first perfect pastoral poet. Through his influence shepherd songs
became a favorite _genre_. He had no lack of imitators. Theocritus had
full reason to contrast court and rustic life and idealize the latter,
for in his native Sicily there were still shepherds in primitive
simplicity. Under his influence and that of his followers, it became the
fashion to represent the simple life in pastoral guise. The poet of
Canticles--who wrote for cultured circles--was forced to make use of the
convention. But, as though to excuse himself for taking a Judean shepherd
as a representative of the higher virtues, he made his shepherd one who
feeds among the lilies. It is not the rude neat-herds of Gilead or the
Judean desert that hold such noble dialogues, but shepherds of delicate
refinement. In a word, the whole eclogic character of Canticles appears
to be copied from the Theocritan model,"

This contention would be conclusive, if it were based on demonstrable
facts. But what is the evidence for it? Graetz offers none in his brilliant
Commentary on Canticles. In proof of his startling view that, throughout
post-Exilic times, the shepherd vocation was held in low repute among
Israelites, he merely refers to an article in his _Monatsschrift_ (1870, p.
483). When one turns to that, one finds that it concerns a far later
period, the second Christian century, when the shepherd vocation had fallen
to the grade of a small and disreputable trade. The vocation was then no
longer a necessary corollary of the sacrificial needs of the Temple. While
the altar of Jerusalem required its holocausts, the breeders of the animals
would hardly have been treated as pariahs. In the century immediately
following the destruction of the Temple, the shepherd began to fall in
moral esteem, and in the next century he was included among the criminal
categories. No doubt, too, as the tender of flocks was often an Arab
raider, the shepherd had become a dishonest poacher on other men's
preserves. The attitude towards him was, further, an outcome of the
deepening antagonism between the schoolmen and the peasantry. But even then
it was by no means invariable. One of the most famous of Rabbis, Akiba, who
died a martyr in 135 C.E., was not only a shepherd, but he was also the
hero of the most romantic of Rabbinic love episodes.

At the very time when Graetz thinks that agriculture had superseded
pastoral pursuits in general esteem, the Book of Ecclesiasticus was
written. On the one side, Sirach, the author of this Apocryphal work, does
not hesitate (ch. xxiv) to compare his beloved Wisdom to a garden, in the
same rustic images that we find in Canticles; and, on the other side, he
reveals none of that elevated appreciation of agriculture which Graetz
would have us expect. Sirach (xxxvii. 25) asks sarcastically:

How shall he become wise that holdeth the plough,
That glorieth in the shaft of the goad:
That driveth oxen, and is occupied with their labors,
And whose talk is of bullocks?

Here it is the farmer that is despised, not a word is hinted against the
shepherd. Sirach also has little fondness for commerce, and he denies the
possibility of wisdom to the artisan and craftsman, "in whose ear is ever
the noise of the hammer" (_ib_. v. 28). Sirach, indeed, is not attacking
these occupations; he regards them all as a necessary evil, "without these
cannot a city be inhabited" (v. 32). Our Jerusalem _savant_, as Dr.
Schechter well terms him, of the third or fourth century B.C.E.; is
merely illustrating his thesis, that

The wisdom of the scribe cometh by opportunity of leisure;
And he that hath little business shall become wise,

or, as he puts it otherwise, sought for in the council of the people, and
chosen to sit in the seat of the judge. This view finds its analogue in a
famous saying of the later Jewish sage Hillel, "Not everyone who increaseth
business attains wisdom" (_Aboth_, ii. 5).

Undeniably, the shepherd lost in dignity in the periods of Jewish
prosperity and settled city life. But, as George Adam Smith points out
accurately, the prevailing character of Judea is naturally pastoral, with
husbandry only incidental. "Judea, indeed, offers as good ground as there
is in all the East for observing the grandeur of the shepherd's
character,"--his devotion, his tenderness, his opportunity of leisurely
communion with nature.

The same characterization must have held in ancient times. And, after all,
as Graetz himself admits, the poet of Canticles locates his shepherd in
Gilead, the wild jasmine and other flowers of whose pastures (the "lilies"
of the Song) still excite the admiration of travellers. Laurence Oliphant
is lost in delight over the "anemones, cyclamens, asphodels, iris," which
burst on his view as he rode "knee-deep through the long, rich, sweet
grass, abundantly studded with noble oak and terebinth trees," and all this
in Gilead. When, then, the Hebrew poet placed his shepherd and his flocks
among the lilies, he was not trying to conciliate the courtly aristocrats
of Jerusalem, or reconcile them to his Theocritan conventions; he was
simply drawing his picture from life.

And as to the poetical idealization of the shepherd, how could a Hebrew
poet fail to idealize him, under the ever-present charm of his traditional
lore, of Jacob the shepherd-patriarch, Moses the shepherd-lawgiver, David
the shepherd-king, and Amos the shepherd-prophet? So God becomes the
Shepherd of Israel, not only explicitly in the early twenty-third Psalm,
but implicitly also, in the late 119th. The same idealization is found
everywhere in the Rabbinic literature as well as in the New Testament.
Moses is the hero of the beautiful Midrashic parable of the straying lamb,
which he seeks in the desert, and bears in his bosom (_Exodus Rabba_, ii).
There is, on the other hand, something topsy-turvy in Graetz's suggestion,
that a Hebrew poet would go abroad for a conventional idealization of the
shepherd character, just when, on his theory, pastoral conditions were
scorned and lightly esteemed at home.

It was unnecessary, then, and inappropriate for the author of Canticles to
go to Theocritus for the pastoral characters of his poem. But did he borrow
its form and structure from the Greek? Nothing seems less akin than the
slight dramatic interest of the idylls and the strong, if obscure, dramatic
plot of Canticles. Budde has failed altogether to convince readers of the
Song that no consistent story runs through it. It is, as has been said
above, incredible that we should have before us nothing more than the
disconnected ditties of a Syrian wedding-minstrel. Graetz knew nothing of
the repertoire theory that has been based on Wetzstein's discoveries of
modern Syrian marriage songs and dances. Graetz believed, as most still do,
that Canticles is a whole, not an aggregation of parts; yet he held that,
not only the _dramatis personae_, but the very structure of the Hebrew poem
must be traced to Theocritus. He appeals, in particular, to the second
Idyll of the Greek poet, wherein the lady casts her magic spells in the
vain hope of recovering the allegiance of her butterfly admirer. Obviously,
there is no kinship between the facile Sirnaitha of the Idyll and the
difficult Shulammith of Canticles: one the seeker, the other the sought;
between the sensuous, unrestrained passion of the former and the
self-sacrificing, continent affection of the latter. The nobler conceptions
of love derive from the Judean maiden, not from the Greek paramour. But,
argues Graetz with extraordinary ingenuity, Simaitha, recounting her
unfortunate love-affair, introduces, as Shulammith does, dialogues between
herself and her absent lover; she repeats what he said to her, and she to
him; her monologue is no more a soliloquy than are the monologues of
Shulammith, for both have an audience: here Thestylis, there the chorus of
women. Simaitha's second refrain, as she bewails her love, after casting
the ingredients into the bowl, turning the magic wheel to draw home to her
the man she loves, runs thus:

Bethink thee, mistress Moon, whence came my love!

Graetz compares this to Shulammith's refrain in Canticles:

I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem,
By the roes,
And by the hinds of the field,
That ye stir not up
Nor awaken love,
Until it please!

But in meaning the refrains have an absolutely opposite sense, and, more
than that, they have an absolutely opposite function. In the Idyll the
refrain is an accompaniment, in the Song it is an intermezzo. It occurs
three times (ii. 7; iii. 5; and viii. 4), and like other repeated refrains
in the Song concludes a scene, marks a transition in the situation. In
Theocritus refrains are links, in the Song they are breaks in the chain.

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