Shir HaShirim Rabbah Defends Israel Against Three Accusers

Most people read the Song of Songs as a love poem. The rabbis who built Midrash Rabbah read it as a courtroom transcript. Every line is God answering somebody who thinks Israel does not deserve what God keeps giving them.

Three accusers come at the freed slaves in Shir HaShirim Rabbah, compiled in Palestine somewhere between the sixth and eighth centuries. The angels. The nations. And, hovering behind both, the suspicion that Israel was just too damaged to be worth the trouble. The midrash takes them on one at a time. The reply is always the same verse, read a different way.

The angels who could not wait

The Israelites crossed the sea and the ministering angels did not pause for breath. Rabbi Shimon imagines them crowding the throne. Give them the Torah, they said. Now.

Shir HaShirim Rabbah 5:2 tells the story God told back. Picture a prince who has just survived a brutal illness, the kind that strips a child down to bone and shadow. He is upright again. He can walk. The royal tutor shows up at the palace gate and says, send him to the academy at once. The king looks at him like he has lost his mind. My son has not gotten his color back yet, the king says. Three months of good food. Three months of being held. Then we talk about books.

That, said Rabbi Shimon, is what God said to the angels. My children are still marked from the mortar and the bricks. You want me to hand them six hundred and thirteen commandments before they remember how to be people. Let them have spring water. Let them have manna. Let them have quail. Then, in the third month, as Exodus 19:1 records, then I will give them the Torah.

The angels wanted speed. God wanted recovery. The Torah arrived late on purpose.

The locked garden and the nations

A second accusation came from below, not above. The nations of the world looked at Israel walking out of Egypt and said the obvious cruel thing. Two hundred and ten years under Egyptian masters. You expect us to believe none of those women were touched.

Shir HaShirim Rabbah 1:2 stages God's answer as a king with two daughters whose reputations are under attack. Each daughter produces her husband's seal and signet. The king sees the seals. The case collapses. Then the midrash reads Song of Songs 4:12 over the whole scene. A locked garden is my sister, my bride. A locked fountainhead, a sealed spring.

Rabbi Pinchas pushes harder. He says God stationed an angel inside every Israelite pregnancy in Egypt with one job. Make sure the baby comes out looking like its father. So Reuben's descendants looked like Reuben. You could line them up against the men whose names they carried and see the resemblance.

Rabbi Huna, quoting bar Kappara, names four things that kept Israel themselves through the bondage. They did not change their names. They did not change their language. They did not slander each other. They were not steeped in licentiousness. The merit of Sarah guarded the women, said Rabbi Abba bar Kahana. The merit of Joseph, who walked out of Potiphar's wife's bedroom with his coat in her hand, guarded the men.

The nations heard slaves. The midrash heard a locked garden.

The bride whose eyes told the truth

The third defense is the strangest of the three. It comes in Shir HaShirim Rabbah 4:1, a reading of the line, behind your braid.

Rabbi Levi says any bride whose eyes are ugly, her whole body needs examination. A bride whose eyes are beautiful, you do not need to check the rest. The eyes are the audit. Look there and you know.

Then he flips the image onto the Temple itself. The braid behind the bride is the Great Sanhedrin, the high court that sat behind the sanctuary. From the outside it looked tucked away, secondary, a thing pushed to the back. Rabbi Levi calls it an ornament of the Temple. Rabbi Abbahu adds that even though the chamber looked cramped, it felt spacious inside, the way a packed colloquium in Tzippori can feel roomy when the arguments get good.

The defense here is subtler than the first two. The angels could be answered with patience. The nations could be answered with seals. But this one says, you have been looking at Israel the wrong way the whole time. You measured by what you could see from the front. The honor was always in the back. The braid. The court. The hidden thing that holds the visible thing together.

What the song actually does

Hair like a flock of goats streaming down from Mount Gilad. Teeth like ordered ewes coming up from bathing. The Torah in our hands reads those lines as a man praising his beloved. Rabbi Levi reads streaming, shegaleshu, and hears the splitting of the sea. He reads the orderly teeth, ketzuvot, as the defined plunder of Egypt and of the sea, locked into the count.

The angels wanted a clean Israel, ready for Torah on day one. The nations wanted a defiled Israel, easy to dismiss. The midrash gave them a third Israel, still bruised, still in recovery, still hidden behind a braid, and worth every minute of the wait.

The defense never stopped being needed

Read the three passages together and a posture emerges. Shir HaShirim Rabbah is not commentary. It is advocacy. The rabbis writing in late antique Palestine, under the rule of empires that called their ancestors filthy and their God absurd, picked up the most erotic book in the Hebrew Bible and turned it into a brief.

The brief was simple. We were enslaved. We were not destroyed. We came out of Egypt with our names, our language, our marriages, and our faces intact. The angels can wait. The nations can stare. God, the midrash insists, has already seen the seal.