Song for Creation

Song of Songs 2:8-13 (NRSV) 8 The voice of my beloved! Look, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills. 9 My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag. Look, there he stands behind our wall, gazing in at the windows, looking through the lattice. 10 My beloved speaks and says to me: “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away, 11 for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. 12 The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land. 13 The fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines are in blossom; they give forth fragrance. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away. Picture "Song of Songs IV" by Marc Chagall I remember being a young girl confused and perplexed by my encounters with the Bible. The violence in Joshua was off putting and Paul seemed to ramble on about seemingly-irrelevant things like circumcision. Yet, the Song of Songs was one of the few places I felt safe to go. Love was inescapable in the Song of Songs, and it was a taste of divine love which I was craving most. I was also drawn to the overabundance of creation present in the text, since nature always felt more like a sanctuary to me than a church building. While I was still unsure about the contents of the Song, I felt as though it captured some sort of beautiful, real dance of tension and intimacy, and was always an invitation to get lost in wonder. It was about two human lovers, but it was also about God, whether the divine was in the foreground or background. As an adult who now studies theology, I have found the text to be even more sacred and freeing. Desire finds its telos in relationships and creation which are preserved, honored, and celebrated. ​The Song of Songs has a long interpretive history in Judaism and Christianity. Rabbi Akiva said “For all the world is not worth the day when the Song of Songs was given to Israel. For all the Writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies!” Origen famously allegorized the Song, Bernard of Clairvaux wrote 86 sermons on it while only getting to chapter three. In modernity, the Song was studied in its ancient Near Eastern context and its origins were traced back to fertility rites rejoicing in the sacred marriage of the Canaanite divine couple Ishtar and Tammuz. The Song has a rich depth and history, and continues to be full of inspiration and exhortation, especially for us in the climate crisis today. This poem, as Robert Atler has noted, moves rapidly, without concern for unity, superimposing one image onto another and generating double entendres for us to marvel at. While the primary speaker, the Shulamite woman, speaks of her lover, the Shepherd/King, the object of her love is blurred with the overflowing abundance of creation. There is no separating the beloved from the Earth. This is important since Dr. Phyllis Trible considers the Song a depatriarchalized text which uplifts a “garden of eros,” where the configurations of gender that were established with the expulsion from the Garden of Eden are undone. She observes how the tragedy in Genesis is that the woman’s desire becomes dominion, but in the Song, male power vanishes and his desire becomes her delight. Reversal also takes place as eroticism embraces the threat of death, that not even the primeval waters of chaos can destroy. Even the animals serve Eros in the poem as the context for the joy of human sexuality rather than the tension, and there is profuse imagery which recalls the stream that watered the Earth before creation as food and water enhance life. The Shulamite ultimately becomes a “second Eve” who takes part in creating a redeeming garden of love. It invites the question, how do we become a second Eve and offer companionship to creation? The lovers treat one another and the entire land with tenderness and respect. If this is a picture of redemption, of restoration, then a harmonious creation is at the center of it along with an egalitarian relationship between the sexes. It is a testament to the intersectional work of gender and environmental justice. ​ It invites the question, how do we become a second Eve and offer companionship to creation? The lovers treat one another and the entire land with tenderness and respect. If this is a picture of redemption, of restoration, then a harmonious creation is at the center of it along with an egalitarian relationship between the sexes. Picture Franz Rosenzweig has noted that the word “I” occurs this frequently in no other part of the Bible, yet, there is no “I”, no identity for the Shulamite woman, that is not wrapped up in creation. For example, she identifies herself with the vineyard while the lover is its keeper. Their self-disclosures offer a depiction of a fulfilled humanity and invite readers into this union with creation. It is disconcerting then to think about if the “I” is embedded in creation, what parts of ourselves do we lose with the increased loss of biodiversity as a result of human exploitation and global warming? Our awareness of ourselves and of God is all interdependent on creation; a loss of one plant or animal species means a loss for our language and connection to something which captures the divine. In this week’s lectionary text, the Shulamite woman hears and sees the voice of her Beloved leaping down the mountain and the Beloved in return invites her to engage all her senses, to arise and come away. How can we hear the voice of the Beloved if we have left the land barren, if there is no opportunity for singing? The call to “arise” remains. It must be one of action for us today, to go to work on such an inclusive and redeeming vision of our world. While the lovers do not explicitly mention God, their loving actions are worship in the context of grace. If we follow in their footsteps, then the Lord might look through the lattice in delight instead of sorrow, as we enjoy an enduring intimacy of plenty with each other and all of God’s creation. ​ Resources Books: Trible, Phyllis. God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986. ​Pardes, Ilana. Song of Songs: A Biography. Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019.