Your Two Breasts like Moses and Aaron?

Song of Songs 4:

A rose is a rose is a rose and sometimes a cigar is just a cigar - and when do women’s breasts, depicted by an ancient poet describing her own body with zoological imagery - become man-made metaphors for male-only leadership models?

When it comes to the myriad ways with which traditional readings of the sexy song of songs permeated Jewish and Christian culture, there are some astounding, humorous and horrifying examples of interpretations.

The breasts, for instance.

Chapter 4 continues the postmodern fragmented courtship saga of this song, and it begins from her lover’s gaze, with his head to toe appraisals, singing to her with specifics of what he loves most about her lips, eyes, teeth, hair, and breasts:

שְׁנֵי שָׁדַיִךְ כִּשְׁנֵי עֳפָרִים תְּאוֹמֵי צְבִיָּה הָרוֹעִים בַּשּׁוֹשַׁנִּים׃

Your breasts are like two fawns,

Twins of a gazelle,

feeding among the roses.

Song of Songs 4:5

Some translators prefer ‘lilies’ to ‘roses’ yet most translate this verse exactly roughly the same.

Traditional Jewish readers preferred to read this image in the context of the overall allegory for the love between God and the community. The two breasts become the two sets of tablets that Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai, according to one tradition. And there’s also this Byzantine era Midrash Rabba on the Song of Songs’s suggestion:

“Your two breasts are like two fawns” This refers to Moses and Aaron. Just as a woman’s breasts are her glory and her ornament, so Moses and Aaron are the glory and the ornament of Israel. Just as a woman’s breasts are her grace, so Moses and Aaron are the grace of Israel.”

There are plenty of problems with this patriarchal attitude - yet it is a daring artist’s touch to proscribe the two founding fathers of the nation as the lover’s breasts.

Not all readers of the poem quite see it like that.

In recent years, with the rise of more feminist critical reading of the bible, there are voices that prefer to stick to the original eros and not imagine women’s bodies as symbols of prominent men.

In her introduction to the incredibly important series The Feminist Companion to the Bible, Prof. Athalya Brenner writes about the choice to begin the series with the Song of Songs:

“The Song of Songs appears to be a completely secular collection of love lyrics, its allegorical interpretation notwithstanding. God is perhaps mentioned in one opaque expression (8:6), but no more. The primary subject matter in the Song is earthy enough–heterosexual love and its erotic manifestations. Since the book’s primary signification appears to be neither theological nor even religious, it is easier to handle and highly suitable for an introductory anthology of feminist criticism.”

From this critical-feminist perspective, allegorical readings that substitute breasts with Moses and Aaron and reduce women’s worth through the male gaze - seems absurd and abusive.

And there are those who advocate for the value in presenting and preserving these interpretations as valid samples of theological renderings and our slow yet steady evolution of ideas and norms.

Prof. Rabbi Wendy Zierler makes a passionate argument for the both/and position - “I want my feminism and my God, all at the same time.”

She presents the following compelling argument in A Feminist Literalist Allegorical Reading of Shir Hashirim:

“There’s a certain joke that goes back and forth between my husband Daniel and me every year as we get ready to read Shir Hashirim. It has to do with the decision in the ArtScroll edition of Shir Hashirim to translate the megillah according to the rabbinic allegory and not the simple meaning. So the words שני שדיך (lit., “your two breasts”) are translated as “your two sustainers, your nourishing synagogues.” We laugh at this as well as the other instances where these same words are translated as “Your two tablets” or “Your Moses and Aaron.”

We are students of literature and we know allegory when we see it. We are familiar with the business of allegorical reading, according to which every element within a text is assigned a separate symbolic referent or meaning. We know the traditional allegorical reading of Shir Hashirim. We also know that’s not really the intended meaning of the author(s).

I want to confess a certain discomfort, however, with my own smug, smarter-than-thou, dismissal of the allegorical translation of Shir Hashirim. I confess this because I am not entirely pleased with the alternatives.

..I want my feminism and my God, all at the same time.

I want my literal reading of the text, one that acknowledges the exceptional role and voice assigned to women in this extraordinary canonical book.

I want a reading that acknowledges the marvelous reciprocal love shared by the young male and female protagonists of the story.

I want the text to have its literal meaning and other meanings too.

This is great literature, and like all works of this caliber, I want to read the text in a way that activates all of its interpretive possibilities, that allows the text to mean one thing and another, and another, that doesn’t force me to strip the text down to its most secular and least godly meaning.

I look at our world which is filled with explicit sexual imagery on every billboard or every street corner, on every TV channel and every radio station, and I am sick at heart for a reading of the world, which can elevate my sexuality above base, prosaic level to which it is has fallen in daily discourse. This is not to say that the love poetry in Shir Hashirim is casual and base, or that one should not, at least at first, appreciate the plain meaning of these love lyrics. What I mean is that I am also moved by the dogged interpretive effort in midrashic literature to draw theological meaning from human, bodily experience and thereby, to sanctify the material world.”

Layer by layer, unveiled and undressed, the secrets of the song of songs hint at subtle levels of consciousness, our erotic, emotional and spiritual senses seeking union, fusion and cohesion, face to face with the most primal longing within ourselves and for each other.

What do we talk about here when we talk about this sacred layered image? Who is She whose breasts we invoke?

It’s the constant yearning for this face to face encounter that will feature in the heartbreak scene that’s coming next.

Image: The Venus of Willendorf/

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