No part of the Bible has called forth a greater diversity of opinions than the Song of Solomon, and that for two reasons. In the first place, the book holds so unique a position in the Old Testament, that the general analogy of Hebrew literature is a very inadequate key to the verbal difficulties, the artistic structure, and the general conception and purpose of the poem. In point of language it is most nearly akin to parts of the Bible which, like the song of Deborah, belong to Northern Israel, agreeing with these not only in individual traits but in the general characteristic that the departures from ordinary Hebrew are almost always in the direction of Aramaic. Many forms unique in Biblical Hebrew are at once explained by the Aramaic dialects, but not a few are still obscure. The philological difficulties of the book are, however, less fundamental than those which lie in the unique character of the Song of Solomon in point of artistic form, and in the whole atmosphere of thought and feeling in which it moves. Even in these respects it is not absolutely isolated. Parallels to the peculiar imagery may be found in the book of Hosea, in a few passages of the earlier chapters of Proverbs, and above all in the 45th Psalm; but such links of union to the general mass of the Old Testa inent literature are too slight to be of material assistance in the solution of the literary problem of the book. Here, again, as in the lexical difficulties already referred to, wé are tempted or compelled to argue from the distant and insecure analogy of other Eastern literatures, or are thrown back upon traditions of uncertain origin and ambiguous authority.

The power of tradition has been the second great source of confusion of opinion about the Song of Solomon. To tradition we owe the title, which apparently indicates Solomon as the author and not merely as the subject of the book. The authority of titles in the Old Testament (see Bible) is often questionable, and in the present case it is certain on linguistic grounds that the title is not from the hand that wrote the poem; while to admit that it gives a correct account of the authorship is to cut away at one stroke all the most certain threads of connection between the book and our historical knowledge of the Old Testament people and literature. We have already noted that, when judged by comparison with other parts of the Bible and by its Aramaic texture, the dialect points to a northern origin of the poem. It is to Northern Israel, moreover, that the whole local colouring and scenery belong; so that even those commentators who still make Solomon the hero and author of the book are compelled to represent him as laying aside his kingly pomp to wander with a peasant girl through the gardens and forests of Galilee. The untenableness of this last attempt to rescue the authority of the title will appear as we proceed.

To tradition, again, we owe the still powerful prejudice in favour of an allegorical interpretation, that is, of the view that from verse to verse the Song sets forth the history of a spiritual and not merely of an earthly love. To apply such an exegesis to Canticles is to violate one of the first principles of reasonable interpretation. True allegories are never without internal marks of their allegorical design. The language of symbol is not so perfect that a long chain of spiritual ideas can be developed without the use of a single spiritual word or phrase; and even were this possible it would be false art in the allegorist to hide away his sacred thoughts behind a screen of sensuous and erotic imagery, so complete and beautiful in itself as to give no suggestion that it is only the vehicle of a deeper sense. Apart from tradition no one, in the present state of exegesis, would dream of allegorizing poetry which in its natural sense is so full of purpose and meaning, so apt in sentiment, and so perfect in imagery as the lyrics of Canticles. We are not at liberty to seek for allegory except where the natural sense is incomplete. This is not the case in the Song of Solomon. On the contrary, every form of the allegorical interpretation which has been devised carries its own condemnation in the fact that it takes away from the artistic unity of the poem and breaks natural sequences of thought. The allegorical interpretation of the Song of Solomon had its rise in the very same conditions which forced a deeper sense, now universally discarded, upon so many other parts of scripture. Yet strangely enough there is no evidence that the Jews of Alexandria extended to the book their favourite methods of interpretation. The arguments which have been adduced to prove .that the LXX. translation implies an allegorical exegesis are inadequate; and Philo does not mention the book at all. Nor is there any allusion to Canticles in the New Testament. The first trace of an allegorical view identifying Israel with the spouse appears to be in the Fourth Book of Ezra, near the close of the 1st Christian century (v. 24, 26; vii. 26). Up to this time the canonicity of the Canticles was not unquestioned; and the final decision as to the sanctity of the book, so energetically carried through by R. Akiba, when he declared that “the whole world is not worth the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel; for all the scriptures (or Hagiographa) are holy, but the Canticles most holy,” must be understood as being at the same time a victory of the allegorical interpretation over the last remains of a view which regarded the poem as simply erotic.

The form in which the allegorical theory became fixed in the synagogue is contained in the Midrash Chazita and in the Targum, which is a commentary rather than a translation. The spouse is Israel, her royal lover the divine king, and the poem is explained as tracing the great events of the people’s history from the Exodus to the Messianic glory and final restoration.

The authority of Origen, who, according to Jerome, surpassed himself in his commentary of ten volumes on this book, established the allegorical theory in the Christian church in the two main forms in which it has since prevailed. The bridegroom is Christ, the bride either the church or the believing soul. The latter conception is, of course, that which lends itself most readily to purposes of mystical edification, and which has made Canticles the manual in all ages of a wide-spread type of religious contemplation. But the other view, which identifies the bride with the church, must be regarded as the standard of orthodox exegesis. Of course the allegorical principle admitted of very various modifications, and readily adapted itself to new religious developments, such as the rise of Mariolatry. Within the limits of the orthodox traditions the allegory took various colours, according as its mystical or its prophetical aspect was insisted on. Among mediaeval commentators of the former class S. Bernard holds a pre-éminent place; while the second class is represented by Nicolaus de Lyra who, himself a converted Jew, modified the Jewish interpretation so as to find in the book an account of the processus ecclesiae under the Old and New Testaments. The prophetic exegesis reached its culminating point in the post-Reformation period, when Cocceius found in the Canticles a complete conspectus of church history. But the relaxation of traditional authority opened the door to still stranger vagaries of interpretation. Luther was tempted to understand the book of the political relations of Solomon and his people. Others detected the loves of Solomon and Wisdom—a view which found a supporter in Rosenmüller even in the present century; alchemists thought of Solomon’s researches in their art; and Puffendorf, by the aid of Egyptian hieroglyphics, referred the whole to the grave of Christ.

The history of the literal interpretation begins with the great “commentator” of the Syrian Church, Theodorus of Mopsuestia (died 429), who condemned equally the attempt to find in the book a prophecy of the blessings given to the church, and the idea even at that time expressed in some quarters that the book is immoral. Theodorus regarded the Canticles as a poem written by Solomon in answer to the complaints of his people about his Egyptian marriage; and this was one of the heresies charged upon him after his death, which led to his condemnation at the second council of Constantinople (553 a.d.) A literal interpretation was not again attempted till in 1514 Chateillon (Castellio or Castalion) lost his regency at Geneva for proposing to expel the book from the canon as impure. Grotius (Annot. in V. T., 1644) took up a more moderate position. Without denying the possibility of a secondary reference designed by Solomon to give his poem a more permanent value, he regards the Canticles as primarily an όαροστνς (conjugal prattle) between Solomon and Pharaoh’s daughter. The distinction of a primary and secondary sense gradually became current not only among the Remonstrants, but in England (Lightfoot, Lowth) and even in Catholic circles (Bossuet, 1693). In the actual understanding of the book in its literal sense no great progress was made. Solomon was still viewed as the author, and for the most part the idea that the poem is a dramatic epithalamium was borrowed from Origen and the allegorists, and applied to the marriage of Pharaoh's daughter. To reconcile this idea with the fact that the Song is full of peasant life, a most artificial style of composition had to be assumed. In Bossuet’s once celebrated theory, to which Lowth also inclined, the epithalamium is made to extend over seven days, and each morning the bridegroom, who is fictitiously represented as a shepherd, rises early to pursue his rustic toil, leaving his bride alone till the evening. The seventh day is the Sabbath, when the bride and bridegroom appear together (ch. viii.). From Grotius to Lowth the idea of a typical reference designed by Solomon himself appears as a mere excrescence on the natural interpretation, but as an excrescence which could not be removed without perilling the place of Canticles in the canon, which, indeed, was again assailed by Whiston in 1723. But in his notes on Lowth’s lectures, J. D. Michaelis, who regarded the poem as a description of the enduring happiness of true wedded love long after marriage, proposed to drop the allegory altogether, and to rest the canonicity of the book, as of those parts of Proverbs which treat of conjugal affection, on the moral picture it presents (1758). The hints which Michaelis offered for the interpretation of the book on this principle showed a singular want of delicacy; but the moralizing rationalism of the period was not to be shocked by any impropriety which was atoned for by the “important moral tendency” of the book as a whole; and the principle laid down by the critic of Göttingen was carried out in a variety of hypotheses, each, as Herder complained, more improper than the other. A real step, however, was made in 1771 by J. T. Jacobi, who distinguished the husband of the Shulamite from Solomon, and representing the latter as a baffled tempter, prepared the way for the theory now most current among critics.

Then came Herder’s exquisite little treatise on Solomon's Songs of Love, the Oldest and Sweetest of the East (1778). Herder possessed that delicacy of taste and sympathetic poetical genius which the school of Michaelis altogether lacked. Delighting in the Canticles as the transparently natural expression of innocent and tender love, he was indignant at an exegesis which, in a supposed apologetical interest, was content to establish a didactic object for the book by the aid of hypotheses which sullied the purity and profaned the sanctity of the utterances of genuine human affection. If the songs of Canticles were allowed to speak for themselves, they would need no theory to explain their meaning, no apology to justify their morality, no fiction of a typical or didactic purpose to commend them as pure, lovely, and worthy of a place in a holy book. Is not true love itself holy l for love is. the fountain of all man’s bliss, and all love, like goodness and truth, is at root one. Herder justifies these views in a sort of aesthetical commentary, which triumphantly vindicates the naive innocence and genuine delicacy of the love which the book displays. But his sympathy with the sentiment of the Canticles was truer than his eye for details; and the idea that the poem is simply a sequence of independent songs without inner unity, grouped so as to display various phases and stages of love in a natural order, culminating in the placid joys of wedded life, was in some respects a retrograde step.

Since Herder there has been no attempt of any intrinsic value to rehabilitate the allegorical theory, or the theory of a second sense consciously followed by the author. Even those commentators who, like Delitzsch (1851 and 1875) or his followers Zöckler (1868) and Kingsbury (in the Speaker’s Commentary, 1873), assume that Canticles owes its place in the canon to the typical importance of Solomon in the history of salvation do not venture to make this idea an element in the exegesis.

In determining the literal sense recent scholars have followed three main courses. The theory of Herder, which refuses to acknowledge any continuity in the book, was accepted by Eichhorn on the part of scholars, and with some hesitation by Goethe on the part of the poets. Commentaries based on this view are those of Döpke (1829), Magnus (1842), Noyes (1846); and it has also enjoyed the critical authority of De Wette and Diestel. A second view which is at present dominant recognizes in the poem a more or less pronounced dramatic character, and following Jacobi distinguishes the shepherd, the true love of the Shulamite, from King Solomon, who is made to play an ignominious part. Propounded in last century by Stäudlin (1792) and Ammon (1795), this view was energetically carried out by Umbreit (1820), and above all by Ewald, whose acuteness gave the theory a new development, while his commanding influence among Hebrew scholars acquired for it general recognition. Ewald assumed a very simple dramatic structure, and did not in his first publication (1826) venture to suppose that the poem had ever been acted on a stage. His less cautious followers have been generally tempted to dispose of difficulties by introducing more complicated action and additional interlocutors (so, for example, Hitzig, 1855; Ginsburg, 1857; Renan, 1860); while Böttcher (1850) did his best to reduce the dramatic exposition to absurdity by introducing the complexities and stage effects of a modern operetta into a drama of the 10th century before Christ. The third view is that of Delitzsoh and his followers, who also plead for a dramatic form—though without supposing that the piece was ever acted—but adhere to the traditional notion that Solomon is the author, who celebrates his love to a peasant maiden, whom he made his wife, and in whose company the proud monarch learned to appreciate the sweetness of a true affection and a simple rustic life.

In comparing these various views with what is found in the book itself, the unity of the poem has first to be considered. A certain external unity, not merely in the general tone and colour of the language and in the repetition of similar sentences by way of refrain, but also in the order of the matter, is not denied by the followers of Herder, who, however, maintain that the constituent lyrics were originally distinct poems, and that they owe all appearance of continuity to the arrangement and interpolations of an editor. The correctness of this view would be positively demonstrated if its adherents were able, without arbitrary treatment of the text, to digest the Canticles into a series of lyrics, each complete in itself and independent of the rest. But no commentator has hitherto done this in a satisfactory way, and the most ingenious attempts—especially that of Magnus—involve the assumption that the editor often displaced part of a song, sacrificing the unity of the original lyrics to an artificial composition of the whole. It is plain that, if assumptions of this kind are to be made at all, they may also be used in favour of a theory of original unity, marred by subsequent misconception.

Have, then, the supporters of the continuity of the poem come nearer to a positive proof of their positioni Our starting-point, in looking at this question, is the fact that the composition takes for the most part the form of dialogue. Even if the book is to be broken up into distinct lyrics, it must be granted that several of these pieces have an amoebean structure. Is it possible to show that throughout the book the same persons reappear in these lyrical dialogues? And, again, since the scene of the dialogue certainly varies in different parts of the book between the city of Jerusalem and the open country of Northern Israel, is it possible to find in the poem itself a thread of narrative sufficient to account for the change of place? The centre of attraction is throughout a female figure, and the unity of this figure is the chief test of the unity of the book. . In the long canto, i. 1-ii. 7, the heroine appears in a royal palace (i. 4) among the daughters of Jerusalem, who are thus presumably ladies of the court of Zion. At i. 9, an additional interlocutor is introduced, who is plainly a king, and apparently Solomon (i. 9, 12). He has just risen from table, and praises the charms of the heroine with the air of a judge of beauty, but without warmth. He addresses her simply as “my friend” (not as English version, “my love ”). The heroine on the contrary is passionately in love, but nothing can be plainer than that the object of her affection is not the king. She is not at home in the palace, for she explains (i. 6) that she has spent her life as a peasant girl in the care of vineyards. Her beloved, whom she knows not where to find (i. 7), but who lies constantly on her heart and is cherished in her bosom like a spray of the sweet henna flowers which Oriental ladies delight to wear (i. 13, 14), is like herself a peasant—a shepherd lad (i. 7) —with whom she was wont to sit in the fresh greenwood under the mighty boughs of the cedars (i. 16, 17). Even before the king’s entrance the ladies of the court are impatient at so silly an affection, and advise her, “if she is really so witless,” to begone and rejoin her plebeian lover (i. 8). The idea that from i. 12 onwards the heroine exchanges compliments with the king is inconsistent with what precedes, and psychologically impossible in view of ii. 5, 6, where her self-control, strung to the highest pitch as she meets the compliments of the king with reminiscences of her absent lover, breaks down in a fit of half delirious sickness. The only words directed to the king are those of i. 12, which, if past tenses are substituted for the presents of the English version, contain a pointed rebuff. Finally, ii. 7 is, on the plainest translation, a charge not to arouse love till it please. The moral of the scene is the spontaneity of true affection.

Nothing can be plainer than that the motive of this piece is dramatical and not lyrical. If is a complete scene, but not a complete poem, and if it is not a fragment, we must expect to find the denouement at the close of the book. Now, at viii. 5, a female figure advances leaning upon her beloved, with whom she claims inseparable union, —“for love is strong...

But though the work be certainly an allegorical representation, many learned men, in an unrestrained eagerness to explain the song, even in its minutest and most obscure particulars, have too far indulged their imaginations; and, by endeavouring too nicely to reconcile the literal with the spiritual sense, have been led beyond the boundaries which a reverence for the sacred Scriptures should ever prescribe. The ideas which the sacred writers furnish concerning the mystical relation between Christ and his church, though well accommodated to our apprehensions by the allusion of a marriage union, are too general to illustrate every particular contained in this poem, which may be supposed to have been intentionally decorated with some ornaments appropriate to the literal construction. When the general analogy is obvious, we are not always to expect minute resemblance, and should not be too curious in seeking for obscure and recondite allusions. Solomon, in the glow of an inspired fancy, and unsuspicious of misconception or deliberate perversion, describes God and his church, with their respective attributes and graces, under colourings familiar and agreeable to mankind, and exhibits their ardent affection under the authorized figures of earthly love. No similitude, indeed, could be chosen so elegant and apposite for the illustration of this intimate and spiritual alliance, as a marriage union, if considered in the chaste simplicity of its first institution, or under the interesting circumstances with which it was established among the Jews.

This poem may be considered, as to its form, as a dramatic poem of the pastoral kind. There is a succession of time, and a change of place, to different parts of the palace and royal gardens. The persons introduced as speakers, are the bridegroom and bride, and their respective attendants. The interchange of dialogue is carried on in a wild and digressive manner; but the speeches are adapted to the persons with appropriate elegance. The companions of the bride compose a kind of chorus, which seems to bear some resemblance to that afterward adopted in the Grecian tragedy. Solomon and his queen assume the pastoral simplicity of style, which is favourable to the communication of their sentiments. The poem abounds throughout with beauties, and presents every where a delightful and romantic display of nature, painted at its most interesting season, and described with every ornament that an inventive fancy could furnish. It is justly entitled Song of Songs, or most excellent song, as being superior to any that an uninspired writer could have produced, and tending, if properly understood, to purify the mind, and to elevate the affections from earthly to heavenly things.