Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/46

36 if not due to corruption of the text, is probably a mere artifice to express the identity of the speaker in the two passages, the tone in which the king now addresses the Shulamite is quite changed. She is not only beautiful but terrible, her eyes trouble him, and he cannot endure their gaze. She is unique among women, the choice and only one of her mother. In this change of language Ewald and others recognize only a greater intensity of sensuous admiration, and accordingly assume that the king continues, in vii. 1-9, to describe the charms of the maiden, and to express his sensual desires in the shameless language of a voluptuary. But how can the king hold such language to a woman whose eyes he is afraid to face, and whom he addresses in chapter vi. with unmistakably respectful admiration 1 Moreover, the figure described in chapter vii. appears to be displayed in the dance ; and, like the daughter of Herodias in the gospels, she is a lady of princely lineage. Again, if the last words of the king are a fresh attack expressed in language which under the circumstances is positively brutal, the maiden s immediate outburst of joyful hope (vii. 10) is singularly out of place, and the turning- point of the story is left an absolute blank. The unity of action can only be maintained by ignoring vii. 1-9, and taking the words of Solomon in chapter vi. in their obvious sense as implying that the king at length recognizes in the maiden qualities of soul unknown in the harem, a character which compels respect, as well as a beauty that inflames desire. The change of feeling which was wrought in the daughters of Jerusalem in the previous scene now extends to Solomon himself, and thus the glad utterances of vii. 10, seq., have a sufficient motive, and the denouement is no longer violent and unprepared. It is remarkable that the only passage which can hardly be freed from a charge of sensuality .hangs so entirely loose from the proper action of the poem. Some critics (especially Hitzig) have seen similar phenomena in other parts of the book, and have thought themselves able to show that a sort of by- play exhibiting the sensual love of the harem runs through the whole action of the piece. The various hypotheses by which this idea has been carried out are all far too arbitrary to carry conviction, and an unprejudiced analysis justifies the persuasion that the dramatic structure of the book is of the very simplest kind, hardly rising above amoebean lyric, and affording no room for elaborate by -play or other complications. The nodus of the action is fully given in chapter i., the final issue in chapter viii. The solution lies entirely in the character and constancy of the heroine, v/hich prevail, in the simplest possible way, first over the ladies of the court and then over the king. There is nothing extravagant in the progress of the action ; for though the king has never before conceived the idea that any woman could refuse a place in his harem, his admiration does not reach the pitch of passion, and his sen- suousness nowhere degenerates into grossness, except in the imagination of commentators, who have been apt to detect a double entendre in every passage they did not understand. A more legitimate explanation of difficulties seems, at least in some cases, to lie in the state of the text. When even Ewald finds a voluptuous idea in iv. 6, it ought to be observed that the words in question, which seriously inter rupt the sense, were no part of the original LXX., or of the text of Theodotion, but were subsequently added from the version of A.quila, which substantially represents the Mas- soretic text. Yet the false reading has established itself so firmly in MSS. of the LXX. that our knowledge of the interpolation is almost accidental, and we have no certainty that other interpolations of the same kind have not been made without our knowledge. In these circumstances the argument drawn from the versions for the purity of the Hebrew text has no great value. On the other hand the a priori probability of interpolations and corruptions is very great in a poem like Canticles, passages from which were used among the Jews as amatory songs at least till the close of the 1st Christian century. Of course the supremacy of the allegorical exegesis fixed the text, but naturally tended to fix it in its longest and presumably most interpolated form. Thus it is not inconceivable thut the sensual passage in chapter vii., which, if genuine, can only be an interlude of some unexplained kind, is nothing more than the insertion of an early reader a propos of the mention of the dance of Mahanaim. Whatever difficulties still remain in the Canticles, it is at least no arbitrary construction which has convinced the majority of critics that an internal dramatic unity runs through the book, and that Solomon is not the true love of the Shulamite. The assertion of Delitzsch that the shepherd is a mere imaginary Doppelgdnycr of Solomon is even more violent than the opposite attempt of Gra tz to eliminate the king altogether and reduce the dramatic action to a narrative of idyllic love told by the Shulamite (Das Salomonische Hohelicd, Vienna, 1871). And it is a special merit of the current theory that it at once places the authorship and purpose of the book in a strong his torical light. A poem in the northern dialect, with a northern heroine and scenery, contrasting the pure sim plicity of Galilee with the corrupt splendour of the court of Solomon, is clearly the embodiment of one phase of the feeling which separated the ten tribes from the house of David. The kingdom of Solomon was an innovation on old traditions partly for good and partly for evil. But novelties of progress and novelties of corruption were alike distasteful to the north, which had long been proud of its loyalty to the principles of the good old times. The conservative revolution of Jeroboam was in great measure the work of the prophets, and must therefore have carried with it the religious and moral convictions of the people. An important element in these convictions, which still claims our fullest sympathy, is powerfully set forth in the Canticles, and the deletion of the book from the canon, providentially averted by the allegorical theory, would leave us without a most necessary complement to the Judean view of the conduct of the ten tribes which we get in the historical books. Written in a spirit of protest against the court of Zion, and probably based on recollection of an actual occurrence, the poem cannot be dated long after the death of Solomon. The mention of Tirzah in vi. 4 points to the brief period when that city was the capital of the dynasty of Baasha, for Tirzah seems never to have recovered the siege and conflagration in which Zimri perished. Thus the book must have been written about the middle of the 10th century B.C. The attempt of Gra tz to bring down the date to the Grecian period (about 230 B.C.) is ingenious but nothing more.

1em (Author:William Robertson Smith) 