The Mandrakes, the Prison, and the Throne

A Princess in the Dust

The verse is strange even before anyone touches it. Song of Songs 6:12: I did not know; my soul placed me upon the chariots of my noble people. Who does not know how they ended up in a chariot?

Rabbi Hiyya told a story about a king's daughter gleaning in the fields. She is bent over, picking up what the harvesters have dropped, the way poverty allowed. The king rides past and recognizes his child in the dirt. He sends a chariot. One moment she is in the dust. The next moment her friends are staring at her on royal cushions and asking what happened. She cannot tell them. I did not know, she says. My soul put me here.

The Names Inside the Verse

The rabbis who compiled this reading then named the people who actually lived inside that verse. Joseph, stripped of his coat and thrown in a pit by his brothers, pulled up and sold to a caravan, bought in Egypt and thrown in prison, pulled up again and placed before Pharaoh on a morning when the king needed his dreams explained. I did not know. My soul placed me.

Leah, overlooked by the husband who loved her sister, bargaining with Rachel for a handful of mandrakes her son had found, which was the only currency she had left in her own marriage. I did not know.

David, the shepherd boy anointed with oil before anyone had made him king, standing in Saul's court playing music for a tormented man, ducking a spear the same man threw at his head.

Jealousy Cruel as the Grave

The verse from Song of Songs 8:6 put it plainly: love is as strong as death, jealousy as fierce as the grave. The rabbis heard that line and thought immediately of the people in their tradition who had been knifed by jealousy from someone who also loved them.

Joseph's brothers loved him and threw him in a pit in the same morning. Saul loved David enough to give him his daughter, and then threw a spear at him, and then hunted him across the wilderness of Judah for years, not because David had done anything wrong but because the love had soured into something the grave could use. Jealousy of that kind, the tradition said, is not a character flaw. It is a gravitational force. It pulls the person who feels it toward destruction as reliably as death pulls a body into the ground.

The Song of Songs named that force in the context of love because you only feel the jealousy that strong when the original attachment was that strong. Saul's jealousy of David was the shadow of what he had felt when he heard the boy play the harp and the terror lifted from his mind. Leah's ache for Reuben's mandrakes was the shadow of a longing for her husband's eyes to rest on her the way they rested on her sister. The roots and the spear and the pit were all the same thing.

The Throne at the End of the Story

The tradition did not leave the people it named in those dark moments. It followed them. Joseph moved from the pit to the prison to the second chariot in Egypt. Leah, who bargained for roots and was overlooked, became the mother of half the tribes of Israel and was buried beside Jacob in the cave of Machpelah. David, the man Saul spent years trying to kill, outlasted his hunter and built the kingdom whose center was Jerusalem.

The Song of Songs held all of this, the tradition argued, because it was a map of the full shape of love in the Hebrew Bible, which meant it had to include the pits and the prisons and the jealousy and the mandrakes alongside the vineyards and the perfume. Love in the Torah does not live only in the moments of reunion. It lives most visibly in the moments before, in the pit, in the prison, in the instant before the chariot arrives and the soul is placed somewhere it did not know it was going.