Who is She, Black and Beautiful?

Song of Songs 1:5

Welcome to the Song of Songs - eight chapters of love poetry that have puzzled, pleasured, and inspired biblical readers for millennia, continuing to rouse, ruffle feathers, inform and ignite debates today. There are also numerous musical compositions and ritual uses of the most memorable lines of what's also known as the Song of Solomon.

What is this book - a scroll actually, the first of a series of five texts known as scrolls - all about? Why is it in the Biblical canon and what are its messages and love tips for our contemporary context?

We’ll try to unpack some of the secrets of the song saga during this next stop on this below the bible belt journey - reading through all 24 books of the Hebrew Bible in three and half years -- now only seven months left.

We just wrapped six weeks with Job. The nonstop news of suffering and sorrow from all over the world that breaks our hearts met the mythic tale of a human who lost everything and struggled to find faith, make meaning of his pain, and demand justice in a cruel world.

The shift from Job to the Song of Songs is swift and dramatic. Yet there’s potent poetry in this choice of ancient editors to place these two documents next to each other - moving us from gloom and grief to blooms and the search for love.

Dr. Jeremy Benstein reflects on this transition:

“Reading chapter by chapter, book by book, as we do in 929, the transition from the book of Job to the Song of Songs is rather jarring. From tortured theodical grapplings to luxuriant love poetry, from the quest for existential meaning of an isolated individual to the dyadic search for requited love, from agony to ecstasy.”

The shift is not only in topic and tone, helping us to lean into love, but also in the choice of characters. In Job - his nameless wife speaks briefly, once, leaving all 42 chapters to the domains of male voices, including God. But the Song of Songs invites the voices of women from the very first verse. She is named. But he is not.

The opening line of the song may have been misunderstood.

Even if it’s a king’s name that is mentioned - it’s likely her voice that we hear:

שִׁיר הַשִּׁירִים אֲשֶׁר לִשְׁלֹמֹה׃ יִשָּׁקֵנִי מִנְּשִׁיקוֹת פִּיהוּ כִּי־טוֹבִים דֹּדֶיךָ מִיָּיִן׃

The Song of Songs, by Solomon.

Kiss me with the kisses of your mouth,

For your love is more delightful than wine.

Song of Songs, 1:1

The 1917 JPS English translation, like many other classical translations such as the King James Bible, follows the original Hebrew that is more gendered:

“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth— For thy love is better than wine.”

It’s clearly she who is speaking and who will continue this seduction in the juicy verses that follow.

And although tradition ascribes this poem to King Solomon, who did have a thousand wives and concubines and presumably knew a thing or two about lovemaking, there is at least another view that holds that this poem wasn’t created by him - but for him, and by a woman. Abi Doukhan, a NY based professor of philosophy and fascinating thinker has written a compelling book called “Womanist Wisdom in the Song of Songs: Secrets of an African Princess.” She utilized feminist critical tools to question many of our assumptions about the song and its authorship:

“The first verse seems to assign authorship - the aforementioned King Solomon. But it then continues with declarations clearly spoken by the female beloved: first to the third person (assuming a dramatic setting, perhaps to an audience), then in the direct second person, which in the Hebrew, addresses a masculine interlocutor. This continues, with the narrator speaking of the king having brought her to his chambers.

So who is singing this Song? Some scholars have proposed a slight textual emendation which makes so much grammatical and emotional sense, that it convincingly sets the whole book in a new light. The first four words in the Hebrew are שיר השירים אשר לשלמה, shir hashirim asher l’shlomo. If that third word had the little letter yod, i.e., not אשר, asher, but אשיר, ashir, it would transform from the relative pronoun (“that is”) to the verb form, “I shall sing,” making that first line: “The Song of Songs, I shall sing to Solomon.” And then the feminine voice and her declarations of love flow quite naturally.

So maybe the Song of Songs is Solomon’s - not because he (or a male historical literary figure like him) wrote it - but because it was sung to him, as a declaration of love in the feminine, by a female author, hiding right there in the Garden, among the lilies, between the lines. “

The suggestion that women wrote or rather sung this famous song was voiced by other thinkers as well. The late author Amos Oz, co-wrote Jews and Words, a beautiful book about books with his daughter, Fania Oz-Salzberger. They too suggested that if a woman wrote:

“ ...the Bible’s most erotic tome, she should surely count as one of the great female poets of the Bible, alongside Miriam and Deborah, and of world literature in general, alongside Sappho and Emily Dickinson.”

And if she is to be honored as the author - we may as well use the name that is mentioned in this book: Her name is Shulamit. It’s a wink to Solomon whose Hebrew name is Shlomo - both his and hers are connected to the word ‘Shalom’ - wholeness or peace.

And though we don’t know much about her history, she self identifies proudly right as the song begins -- and stirs an ongoing debate about beauty - and racism:

שְׁחוֹרָה אֲנִי וְנָאוָה בְּנוֹת יְרוּשָׁלָ͏ִם כְּאׇהֳלֵי קֵדָר כִּירִיעוֹת שְׁלֹמֹה׃

I am dark—and beautiful—

O daughters of Jerusalem:

Like the tents of Kedar,

Like the pavilions of Solomon.

Song of Songs 1:5

“I am black, but comely” is the 1917 JPS edition, once again the same as the King James Bible - available in most modern motel rooms.

The Hebrew feminine word ‘Shechora’ is most often translated as either ‘black’ or ‘dark’. The letter ‘vav’ that connects this word to the next can be either read as ‘but’ or ‘and’. So which is it?

The Rev. Wil Gafney, a powerful teacher and creator of Womanist Midrash talks right back to that ‘but’ in this teaching:

“...Deeply entangled with the notion of otherness is the notion of beauty.

How can something, let alone someone, be black and beautiful?

So never mind that Song of Solomon 1:5 has a simple conjunction, black am I and beautiful, (and emphasizes her blackness by opening with it), a myriad of bible translators continuing into modernity persist with “I am black/dark but beautiful/comely/lovely.” Blackness and beauty cannot occupy the same space in the imaginations so they cannot occupy the same space in their translations, no matter what the text actually says.”

Gafney ends by quoting a translation of these verses from The Song of Songs: Love Lyrics from the Bible - yet another powerful feminist contemporary rendition of the Song of Songs, published by Marcia Falk two decades ago. Adrienne Rich wrote that this translation is “a beautiful and sensual poem in its own right . . . It's always a thrill when (as rarely happens) the scholar's mind and the poet's soul come together.”

“Yes, I am black! and radiant –

O city women watching me –

As black as Kedar’s goat hair tents

Or Solomon’s fine tapestries.

Will you disrobe me with your stares?

The eyes of many morning suns

Have pierced my skin, and now I shine

Black as the light before the dawn.”

Whoever sung and wrote the original song to Solomon was wise enough to weave scholarship with soul, pride and poetry with power and protest -- seducing listeners and readers ever since. The dance is just getting started.

Below the Bible Belt: 929 chapters, 42 months, daily reflections.

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