Finding Beauty in the Bible

While the majority of ancient and medieval commentaries on the Song of Songs apply a strictly allegorical lens to interpretation, that application did not totally do away with an attentiveness to the beauty of the Song as a song. It inspired court poetry, influenced theology, and was put to music in liturgy and chant. Setting aside for the moment the debates about the rigor or value of allegorical readings, it is a method that recognized the Song as a beautiful book and a delight to those who read it. However, this delight in beauty as an interpretive lens disappeared almost entirely in early modern and mid-modern biblical scholarship, with its strong historical-critical frameworks. For example, it is difficult to inquire seriously about the beauty of a text that has been fragmented according to source-hypotheses and divested of any kind of synchronic integrity. And, although “recent Song of Songs scholarship has been increasingly concerned with literary analysis,” as Robert D. Miller II argues in Finding Beauty in the Bible: An Aesthetic Commentary on the Song of Songs, there is an element critically absent in much of these recent “literary” studies of the Song of Songs: aesthetics. The goal of Miller’s book, therefore, “is to make the beauty of the Song of Songs more evident” (1).

Miller avoids making an “aesthetic judgement” and is instead motivated by “a separate assertion that we should rethink the aesthetic and remake aesthetic discourse in how we read literature” (3). In other words, his reading avoids asking totalizing evaluative questions (e.g., “is the song [objectively] beautiful?”) and instead seeks to engage questions that aim at understanding how the Song operates as an aesthetic work. To read the Song of Songs in this light is therefore to read it with a degree of openness and uncertainty. Miller reads the Song in communion with all of its audiences: “both those ‘original’ audiences for whom sex and spirituality may not have been disparate realities—and by the twenty centuries of traditional reading that we arrogantly dismiss as distortion of the text” (13). At the same time he is clear from the outset that “this present study will not follow that hermeneutical route [i.e. of allegory] nor will it engage in theological interpretation of the Song of Songs” (15). Finding Beauty in the Bible limits itself to merely noting “where the Song already adumbrates the supernatural, the sacred, and the soteriological” (15).

Such a decision not to engage in theological interpretation, while perhaps seems insignificant in translation, shapes the whole character of Miller’s work. If there are no real or intended characters, and if the goal of the Song is not meaning but rather something that seeks to “arouse the entire spirit of a reader” (Cary Walsh, Exquisite Desire: Religion, the Erotic, and the Song of Songs, Fortress, 2000, 107; cited by Miller, 14), then the whole structural apparatus of the poem becomes a matter of finding “a convenient division for orally performed poetry, implying no specific format, construction, style, or length” (19). Such an ad hoc division carries with it certain difficulties, the least of which is the collapse of a cohesive poetic order that would allow the poem to be enjoyed wholly and not merely as quilted cantos of a collation.

These structural weaknesses notwithstanding, Miller’s rendering of the Hebrew is masterful and elegant. He captures the undeniably erotic language of the Song of Songs in a way that is both courageous and delicate. For this alone his commentary should be read and studied by all students of the Song of Solomon. Marshalling an array of scholarship from archaeology, sociology, botany, and literature, he accomplishes what scholarship so rarely achieves: allure and enchantment. A significant part of Miller’s mastery of Hebrew is his aesthetic attentiveness to the sound of language. He is careful of the way in which language, particularly poetic language, not only has an applied meaning but also an acoustic sense to it. For instance, when dealing with the intricacies of Song of Songs chapter 1, Miller notes the way “verse 11 renders these images and aromas audible, as nepet titpena siptotayik mimics the dripping oil of balsam, of honey, or of milk” (62). The Song not only has erotic content, it mimics the sounds of lovemaking: heavy breathings, deep sighs, bursts of anguish, exquisite gutturals. For those who would protest against Miller’s theologically agnostic approach to the text, we must remember that, if indeed the Song is theological at all, its theology is inextricably mediated through the embodied experiences of erotic desire.

All of this linguistic brilliance, however, does not save Finding Beauty in the Bible from a critical reductionism which comes fully to light in Miller’s treatment of the final sections of the Song. In sum, he confesses that he cannot make sense of it. Though he wishes that the crescendo of 8:6 was the end of the Song (95), he is stuck with making sense of the rest of the chapter. “So here we are,” he writes with an air of deflation, “the lackluster farrago that ends the otherwise ‘quintessential song,’” which “must have made sense to someone” (100). One wonders if it is precisely his refusal to theologize that delimits his ability to make sense of the conclusion of the song. Even if the male voice of the song is not the Lord, perhaps the concluding words can be made sense of in light of the Lord’s teaching that “unless a tree falls to the ground and dies it will not bear fruit” (John 12:24). Perhaps the song moves from the climax (in all senses of the word) of 8:6 to the more mundane and confusing questions of 8:7-14 exactly because this is the fruit of a love which cannot be beaten by death: it does not burn-out but gives life and love to others.

Mark Brians is the rector of All Saints in urban Honolulu.

Mark Brians

Date Of Review:

May 3, 2024