The Love Poem the Rabbis Read as a War Diary

The Tents That Held Treasure

The bride in the poem speaks first about her skin. I am black, she says, but comely, like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon. Kedar was a desert clan whose tents were famous for being ugly. Sun-scorched goatskin blackened by smoke and years of hard use, the tents of people who owned nothing a traveler would want to steal. An embarrassment from the outside.

The rabbis asked the question no one else thought to ask: what was inside those tents?

Their answer was gems and fine cloth and riches piled in the corners that the exterior gave no hint of. The scholar who looks unimpressive, they said. The awkward man in the threadbare coat who carries the Mishnah in his memory and the Talmud in his chest and the aggadah piled up in all the corners of his mind. The bride who looks like nothing from the road and holds the entire tradition inside.

Israel, the rabbis read, is the bride saying this about herself. The nations see Kedar's tent. They ride past. They do not stop. They cannot smell the balsam through the goatskin. But the bride is telling the bridegroom, and the bridegroom already knows what is inside.

The Dark Skin and Where It Came From

The poem says the sun has darkened the bride. Do not stare at me because I am dark, she says, because the sun has looked upon me. My mother's sons were angry with me; they made me keeper of the vineyards, but my own vineyard I have not kept.

The tradition cracked this line open and found slavery inside it. The mother's angry sons who sent her to the vineyards were the overseers who sent Israel to the brickyards. The sun that darkened the bride was the Egyptian sun, beating down on the backs of people building cities they would never live in. The vineyard she had not kept was the Sabbath, the commandments, the practice she had no space to observe under Pharaoh's quotas.

But the tradition was not reading this as accusation. The bride is explaining her appearance to the bridegroom, and the bridegroom is not withdrawing. He is calling her from Lebanon. He is calling her down from the mountains. The condition the nations see as disqualifying, the darkness, the labor, the neglected vineyard, the bridegroom reads as the biography of his beloved, the record of what she endured before he could reach her.

The Wars Hiding in the Love Song

Lebanon, in the geography of Song of Songs, sat at the edge of the promised land. The tradition read Lebanon as the Temple. Come from Lebanon, my bride, the bridegroom calls. The verse that sounds like a lover calling his beloved down from the mountain was, in the rabbinic reading, the voice of God calling Israel back from exile. Come from Lebanon: come back from the places the enemy carried you. Come from the head of Amana, from the top of Senir and Hermon.

The rabbis named the enemies. They mapped the geography of exile onto the geography of the poem. Each mountain in the poem was a nation that had held Israel or threatened it, and the bridegroom calling was the voice that would not stop calling even through the lion dens and the leopard hills. The poem's most erotic landscape was also a military map, and the homecoming it described was also a redemption.

Moses at the Center

The tradition placed Moses at the center of this reading. The verse about the bridegroom coming with a roe or a young hart, leaping on the mountains, was in the larger tradition about God coming to redeem Israel, but the tradition also read Moses in the image: the leader who ran ahead of the people into the wilderness, who stood between them and the sea, who stood between them and the fire at Sinai, who stood between them and God's anger after the calf. The young hart running.

The tradition that read Song of Songs as a love story between God and Israel could not read it without including the man who ran between them. The poem's bridegroom was not a metaphor that excluded history. It was a metaphor that included everyone who had ever stood in the middle and held the relationship together when it was about to break.