From the essay "The Religious Suppression of Eros" by Robert Francoeur in the collection The Erotic Impulse edited by David Steinberg (Tarcher/Putnam, 1992)

* * *
Some twenty-five hundred years ago, after the Jews returned home from the Babylonian exile, an unknown, inspired romantic wove together several lovers' songs from their betrothal celebrations. As she swirls around in her lover's arms, the bride sings:

Come! Be swift, my lover!
Be like a gazelle or a wild young stag!
Come! Play on my mountains of myrrh!
The fountain in my garden is a spring of running water, flowing down
from Lebanon.
Arise, north wind!
O south wind, come!
Blow upon my garden, let its alluring perfumes pour forth.
Then will my lover come to his garden and enjoy its choice fruits.

Mesmerized by her dark eyes and sensuous beauty, not at all embarrassed by her provocative and public invitation, the groom responds in kind:

How beautiful you are, my dearest! O how beautiful!
Your eyes are like doves behind your veil.
Your hair is like a flock of goats streaming down Mount Gilead.
Your teeth are like a flock of ewes ready to be shorn, Like freshly washed
sheep that are big with twins, none of them thin or barren . . .
The cheeks behind your veil are like a pomegranate sliced open in two.
Your neck is like King David's tower . . .
Your breasts like two fawns, young twins of a mother dear . . .
How beautiful are your breasts, my sister, my bride! . . .Your
perfumes are more fragrant than any spices!
Your lips drip honey, my bride,
Words drop from your mouth like syrup from the honeycomb.
You flourish like an orchard of rare fruits,
Like an orchard of pomegranates.
You are a pleasure ground filled with flowers . . .
You are an enclosed garden, my sister, my bride,
A garden close-locked, with a secret fountain.

     The poet titled his collection of sensuous verses Shir ha-Shirim, "the loveliest of songs," and dedicated this Song of Songs to King Solomon, the legendary lover of three hundred wives and six hundred concubines. Rabbinical interpretations sometimes gave the song symbolic meanings, relating it to the gift of the Torah and the building of the Temple. But they never replaced the song's literal message of human love and passion with metaphors.
     Christians, on the other hand, have long been embarrassed by this love song of hungry passion and desire. Theologians warned it was dangerous, even wicked to take the song literally. Bizarre metaphors replaced vivid sensuality with an asexual, spiritualized, cerebral love of God in which the Christian soul sucks nourishment from Christ's two breasts, the Old and New Testament. St. Jerome interpreted it as a poem praising virgins who mortify their flesh. Before he castrated himself to become a eunuch for the Kingdom of Heaven, Origen warned Christians that "everyone who is not yet rid of the vexations of flesh and blood and has not ceased to feel the passion of his bodily nature should refrain completely from reading this book."
     The history of Jewish and Christian responses to the Song of Songs is a microcosm of the evolution of Western culture from a sex-affirming Hebraic perspective to a sex-negative Christian one, ill-at-ease with eroticism, sensuality, passion and pleasure.

back to participants

back to the voicebox