Devorah Schoenfeld
In Rashi’s introduction to his commentary on Song of Songs, he states clearly that his goal is to work with the preexisting materials from midrashic literature and weave them together into a coherent story. As he writes:
And I have seen for this book many midrashic interpretations. There are those who explain all of this book in one midrash, and there are those that interpret each verse with a different midrash, those scattered among various midrashim, and there are those that interpret individual texts and do not make the interpretation fit the language of the biblical text and the order of the biblical texts. So I decided to grasp the meaning of the text by setting the explanations in order, and I will make each midrash of our sages fit in its proper place.
Although he states here that his commentary draws on disparate midreshei aggadah, he sets the different interpretations into an order which follows the Targum.[1] The Targum, an interpretive ‘translation’ of Song of Songs into Aramaic, midrashically frames the Song of Songs as entirely about the relationship between God and Israel. It retells the Song of Songs as an account of the history of the Jewish people, from revelation to the present day. So he takes the midrash and fits it to the order of the text, following the Targum. But he also tells a different story:
And this book is based, by Divine inspiration, in the metaphor of a woman bound in living widowhood (2 Samuel 20:3), longing for her husband, leaning on her beloved, remembering the love of her youth for him and admitting her sins. Her beloved is also suffering with her in her pain (Isaiah 63:9), and remembers the love of her youth and the beauty of her beauty, and the rightness of her deeds, that with them he was connected with her in a powerful love, so that she might know that he is not causing her suffering from his heart (Lamentations 3:33) and her exile is not exile (Isaiah 50:1), for she is still his wife and he her husband (inversion of Hosea 2:4), and he will return to her.
Rashi here constructs a love story based on his reading of Song of Songs as a cohesive narrative. He deals with the inconsistencies in the stories and the differences in relationship status by placing the story in the first-person subjective narrative of a woman and by having her account move backwards and forwards in time.[2] In this way, passages in which the lovers appear distant from each other, such as 1:7, where the man and the woman are not together and the woman needs to ask the man where she can find him, can be explained as describing the present reality where the husband and wife are living separately (or, allegorically, where Israel is in exile). Later, in 1:16-1:17 when they are described as living in a home together, that is the wife looking back longingly to the past (or, allegorically, Israel in the newly-built Temple).
Rashi devotes particular attention to 5:2-7, and it seems to have driven how he imagines the story as a whole. He describes it in his comment on 5:3 as “a wife grieving the husband of her youth and searching for him.” He imagines her as living separately from her husband because she is committing adultery and they have separated and she has moved in with someone else, but when he knocks on her door, she cannot help but be moved to seek after him. This is a turning point in their relationship, and although it does not lead to their reunion it makes her want to be with him, and to tell other women about him and about their past, in the hope of finding him.
The story that Rashi tells out of the disparate songs of the Song of Songs is distinctive. While some other exegetes have found a love story between a young man and young woman, Rashi finds a middle-aged (or older) couple, although some of the story is set in the past when they were younger. Unlike many commentators who tell a fairly linear story, Rashi’s story is nonlinear and meandering. Most strikingly, Rashi’s story emphasizes the suffering that the protagonists have undergone, and both of their respective responsibilities for it. Rashi goes far beyond the text of the Song of Songs in imagining the wife as adulterous and the husband as rejecting and yet, despite this, their love for each other as powerful enough to still drive them to hope that one day they will be able to reconcile.
What is most shocking in Rashi’s commentary is the implication, when one looks up the verses that Rashi quotes, that the husband is sometimes cruel as well as rejecting. Rashi quotes a verse in which King David acts as a cruel and rejecting husband and applies these verses to Song of Songs. 2 Samuel 20:3 describes King David keeping women as captive concubines ‘in living widowhood’, that is neither divorcing nor cohabiting with them, after his son Absalom had gone to lie with them as a way to claim power. It is clear that Rashi understands being left as a living widow to be terrible from his comment on Exodus 22:23, where he interprets the biblical statement that those who oppress the widow will be punished by their wives becoming widows by interpreting that their wives will become living widows, who will be married to someone who is not available to cohabit with them.[3] From Rashi’s perspective, David is also in violation of the halakha established later that if a man does not wish to continue to have relations with a wife because she committed adultery, he must divorce her.[4]
The implications of God’s harshness towards Israel become stronger when it becomes clear that Rashi is noticing the parallels between the Song of Songs and Lamentations, in which God’s harsh behavior towards Israel is most strongly felt:
The Lord has acted like a foe,
He has laid waste Israel,
Laid waste all her citadels,
Destroyed her strongholds.
He has increased within Fair Judah
Mourning and moaning. (Lamentations 2:5)
Song of Songs and Lamentations are read on the high point and the low point of the Jewish liturgical year: Passover and Tisha B’Av, respectively.[5] Like Song of Songs, the book of Lamentations is spoken in multiple voices. The book of Lamentations is a collection of poems without a narrative thread, marked by the chapter divisions and by the alphabetic acrostics in the first four chapters. Four of the five chapters are spoken in the third person and describe the suffering of the ‘daughter of Jerusalem’, which stands in for both the city and its people. Her suffering is described graphically, sometimes horrifically, and is left unresolved. Chapter three, in the center of the book, is spoken by a man in the first person about his own suffering. It is three times as long as the other chapters through its structure as a triple rather than a single acrostic. But most significantly, up to about a third of the chapter is hopeful in tone, describing God’s mercy and the man’s belief that God will help him. This element is almost entirely missing in the other chapters aside from the second-to-last line of chapter five.[6]
Song of Songs and Lamentations are thus both books that speak in different voices and do not attempt to reconcile them. Song of Songs describes different kinds of relationships between lovers, Lamentations describes different kinds of relationships between suffering people and God. These two voices are placed at the liturgical high point and low point of the Jewish year: Passover, the day of celebrating God’s redemption, and Tisha B’Av, the day of mourning destruction. There are many other texts that Rashi could have used that promise God’s unequivocal fidelity to Israel in a clear and unambiguous way. The choice to instead pair Song of Songs with Lamentations puts these two multivocal texts in conversation. Just as Rashi constructs a single narrative out of Song of Songs, he also constructs a single story out of Lamentations. It is in fact the same story, as he explains in his interpretation of Lamentations 1:1, “[The city] has become like a widow.” Rashi explains, “But not really a widow; rather, like a woman whose husband went abroad and he intends to return to her.”[7] So Rashi begins his commentaries on Song of Songs and Lamentations by turning them both into the same story: a woman who is abandoned by her husband is missing him and telling stories about him.
The references to Isaiah help bring Song of Songs and Lamentations together. Isaiah 50 and 63 are both part of passages that speak of return after exile, and which draw on marriage imagery to describe what this return from exile will look like. Isaiah 50 describes the relationship between God and Israel as a marriage that can never end in divorce:
Thus said the LORD:
Where is the bill of divorce
Of your mother whom I dismissed? (Isaiah 50:1)
Isaiah 63 is part of a prophecy of consolation that describes God and Israel as a newly married couple:
As a youth espouses a maiden,
Your sons shall espouse you;
And as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride,
So will your God rejoice over you. (Isaiah 62:5)
But it is the references to Hosea at the beginning and the end of the passage that provide the clearest thematic bridge between Song of Songs and Lamentations. The beginning of Hosea 2 describes God (or Hosea) committing sexualized violence against Israel (or Gomer):
Else will I strip her naked
And leave her as on the day she was born:
And I will make her like a wilderness,
Render her like desert land (Hosea 2:5)[8]
This is similar to the description of the sexualized public humiliation of the daughter of Jerusalem in Lamentations:
All who pass your way
Clap their hands at you;
They hiss and wag their head
At Fair Jerusalem:
“Is this the city that was called
Perfect in Beauty,
Joy of All the Earth?”
All your enemies
Jeer at you;
They hiss and gnash their teeth,
And cry: “We’ve ruined her!” (Lamentations 2:15-16)
Hosea chapter 2 ends with a dramatic turn into union between human and Divine, which is compared to a marriage. The imagery towards the end of chapter two includes agriculture and nature imagery, a “covenant with the beasts of the field, the birds of the air and the creeping things of the ground” (Hosea 2:20) and a promise that the earth will “respond with new grain and wine and oil” (Hosea 2:24). The marriage here is also to be more egalitarian, with God promising that Israel will call God by a word for husband that does not connote master, Ba’al, because that word is also a name for the false gods that will be abolished. The difference between the beginning and end of Hosea 2 is so striking that some contemporary scholars have gone so far as to consider them to have been written by different authors.[9] But the difference between the beginning and the end of chapter 2 of Hosea is also the difference between Lamentations and Song of Songs. Hosea provides a narrative key to how to read Lamentations and Song of Songs as a single story.
Rabbinic exegesis of Hosea, which Rashi cites in his commentary, adds layers to the story. Pesachim 87a, cited by Rashi in his comment on Hosea 1:2, reads the prophet Hosea, rather than his wife Gomer, as the one who does wrong in chapter one and two and needs to be led by God to repent:
The Holy One, Blessed be He, said to Hosea: Your sons, the Jewish people, have sinned. Hosea should have said to God in response: But they are Your sons; they are the sons of Your beloved ones, the sons of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Extend Your mercy over them. Not only did he fail to say that, but instead he said before Him: Master of the Universe, the entire world is Yours; since Israel has sinned, exchange them for another nation. The Holy One, Blessed be He, said: What shall I do to this Elder who does not know how to defend Israel? I will say to him: Go and take a prostitute and bear for yourself children of prostitution. And after that I will say to him: Send her away from before you. If he is able to send her away, I will also send away the Jewish people.[10]
God then commands Hosea to divorce Gomer and he refuses, because by this point they are married and he cares for her and they have children together. God’s commands to Hosea are a test, a way of provoking him to realize that jealousy is actually not a particularly strong motivation in practice.
Numbers Rabbah 2:15 goes further by mocking God for succumbing to what appears to be male jealousy in Hosea. It parallels the story of Hosea to the story of the Golden Calf, and imagines Moses saying to God: “This calf can help you! It can send the rain while you send the dew!” When God retorts that the calf is a statue and can’t do anything, Moses asks why it makes God so angry. This is compared to a king who finds his wife kissing a eunuch. His advisor says that she will bear him strong children from this extramarital relationship, and when the king replies that nothing like that can happen, the advisor asks why the king is angry.
Both interpretations, in different ways, subvert the metaphor of Israel as the adulterous wife in Hosea by making it clear that even if the wife is adulterous, the husband has choices as to how to proceed and rejecting her is a choice that can be judged morally wrong or even mocked.
Hosea, for Rashi, provides a few important narrative elements. It adds the adultery of the wife and the subsequent abandonment of the husband, which then leads into explaining Song of Songs 5:2-7 as the woman’s decision to return to the man after living separately from him with another lover.[11] This helps explain why it is a difficult decision for her to get up and open the door for him and why, once she finally does, it is so difficult for her to find him. The physical abuse that she endures by the guardians of the walls is the echo of the violence that she endures when she tries to return to her husband in Hosea’s narrative. The rabbinic interpretations of Hosea add that the man is also not innocent in his decision to abandon her and to leave her as a ‘living widow.’
Rashi’s story takes these elements from Hosea and constructs another story around them. Unlike Hosea’s story, which starts at the beginning of a relationship, Rashi’s story of love and grief in Song of Songs and Lamentations starts in the middle, between a couple that already has a long history together. While Hosea is told from the perspective of a male narrator (which allows the rabbis to introduce the possibility that he may be unreliable), the story behind Song of Songs and Lamentations is, in Rashi’s retelling, spoken by a grieving woman. Changing the perspective of the story changes its meaning. If, for the Targum, the Song of Songs is about God’s ongoing love for Israel, for Rashi the Song of Songs is about Israel’s enduring love for God. Reading the Bible as a narrative whole requires facing the challenge that the God of the Exodus and the God of Lamentations are the same God. Believing in the Bible as a narrative whole requires believing in that God. The Song of Songs, for Rashi, is about the decision to love the God of the entire Bible.
Constructing a coherent narrative about God, Rashi suggests, is not unlike constructing a consistent narrative about any other long, complicated, and somewhat damaged relationship when looking back on it. The wife looks back at her relationship with her husband and thinks about the ways that she has harmed him and the ways that he has harmed her, but also about the ways that they have loved each other. Israel sits in exile and reads the book of Lamentations and the book of Hosea. It thinks about God. It thinks about revelation and about destruction. It hears a knock at the door. What story will it tell?
[1] Although Rashi does not state his reliance on the Targum as clearly as he does his reliance on traditionally composed midrash, he seems to have read the Targum and to be following it closely and even responding to its exegesis. For Rashi’s knowledge of the Targum on Song of Songs see P. Alexander, The Targum, 2003, 45 and Ivan G. Marcus, “The Song of Songs in German Hassidism and the School of Rashi: A Preliminary Consideration,” in The Frank Talmage Memorial Volume 1, ed. Barry Walfish (Haifa: 1994), 182-83.
[2] Baruch Alster, “Human Love and Its Relationship to Spiritual Love in Jewish Exegesis on the Song of Songs” (Hebrew), PhD dissertation, Bar-Ilan University, 2006, 68.
[3] Rashi’s source here is Mekhilta d’Rabbi Yishmael Nezikin 18:22 which also connects widowhood here with living widowhood.
[4] For the requirement to divorce a wife that one is certain is adulterous see Gittin 90a, on which Rashi also wrote a commentary. In the case of King David there is an additional complication that the wife of a king may not remarry, see Sanhedrin 18a, so these women would not have been able to remarry even if divorced.
[5] For a source for liturgical reading of Song of Songs and Lamentations, see Soferim 14:3 (8th cent.).
[6] The difference between chapter three and the other chapters is so striking that when Lamentations is read liturgically in synagogue the third chapter is chanted using a different chant.
[7] Rashi here draws on a similar interpretation in Sanhedrin 104a.
[8] This language has come under a great deal of feminist critique. For a starting point, see Yvonne Sherwood, The Prostitute and the Prophet: Hosea’s Marriage in Literary-Theoretical Perspective. (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996).
[9] For an overview of some of the possibilities for multiple authorship of Hosea 2, see Brad E. Kelle, Hosea 2: Metaphor and Rhetoric in Historical Perspective, (Brill: Leiden, 2005), 8-13.
[10] Pesachim 87a, Steinsaltz trans. There is a parallel in Eliyahu Zuta 9, which also adopts the narrative of Hosea as sinful and repenting.
[11] Rashi on Hosea 1:2 remarks that Gomer will bear children who may or may not be legitimate.
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