Michael Fishbane offers a learned and accessible guide to the lush garden of Jewish interpretations of Song of Songs in his new contribution to the JPS Bible Commentary series. Like its companion volumes, Fishbane's Song of Songs presents line-by-line commentary on the masoretic text alongside the JPS English translation. His introduction describes the poetics of Song of Songs and contextualizes the work within Jewish tradition and religious practice. The book concludes with a seventy-five-page excursus exploring the history of Jewish interpretation of Song of Songs.
Fishbane's work departs from earlier JPS Bible Commentary volumes by structuring the line-by-line commentary according to the four-fold interpretive rubric known by the acronym PaRDeS, ordering their sequence as peshat, derash, remez, and sod throughout the volume. His peshat commentary builds on contemporary historical-critical and traditional Jewish scholarship, focusing on the structure of literary units, language, syntax, and poetic and stylistic features. The derash exposition addresses the treatment of Song of Songs in the various midrashic collections and how this mode of interpretation explicates Song of Songs “for teaching Jewish traditions and ideals” (18). His remez comments explore how the Song of Songs may serve as an allegory for the individual's spiritual development. Finally, under sod he examines the esoteric exposition of Song of Songs prominent in Jewish mystical literature. Fishbane's volume will be most valuable for scholars and educated nonspecialists seeking an introduction to the broad spectrum of Jewish interpretation of Song of Songs. In addition to the helpful format of the commentary, Fishbane strives to make the often “arcane and complex” comments of earlier generations accessible by reformulating them in modern terms (ix).
Modern historical critics too rarely engage premodern commentators in their analyses because they focus instead on recovering authorial intention through ancient Near Eastern parallels and historical contextualization. In contrast, Fishbane views peshat not simply as historical criticism but rather as a mode of intellectual engagement with the literary character of Song of Songs. As such, he draws on both modern historical-critical scholarship and his expansive knowledge of Jewish literature throughout the peshat section of his commentary. For instance, his comments on Song of Songs 3:8 include engagement with Ugaritic and Akkadian as well as references to B. Berakhot 54b and Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer 12. Similarly, in his discussion of Song of Songs 7:6, he draws on Ibn Janaḥ, Ibn Ezra, Akkadian cognates, and Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. In general such an approach leads to evidence that reinforces and enhances the interpretations of contemporary commentators.
Fishbane's work joins a growing chorus of commentaries, including C. L. Seow's Job 1–21 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013) and the Wiley Blackwell Bible Commentary series, that display a renewed interest in the history of biblical interpretation and cultural reception. Of course, some modern critical commentators on Song of Songs have engaged some precritical Jewish interpretation. For instance, in the nineteenth century C. D. Ginsburg published (at the age of 25!) an important treatment of the work, which includes an extensive summary of its history of interpretation as well as excerpts of the Targum, Rashi's commentary, and other exemplars in both original and translation (Song of Songs, Translated from the Original Hebrew, with a Commentary, Historical and Critical [London: Longman, 1857], 20–124). Marvin H. Pope, in his volume in the Anchor Bible Commentary series (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977), discussed both the Targum and Shir Ha-shirim Rabbah alongside his line-by-line historical-critical commentary. These works and others concentrate on locating the historical-critical meaning of Song of Songs; mystical, philosophical, and midrashic interpretations of the text are intellectual curiosities at best. In contrast, Fishbane places all four modes of interpretation on equal intellectual and spiritual footing and examines “how the Song shaped Jewish thought and spiritual values over time and how Jewish thought and spirituality transformed the Song in many diverse expressions of love” (xlvii).
Fishbane's “iterative and synchronous” approach to Song of Songs raises some important questions for biblical studies that, while not explicitly discussed in this volume, deserve further exploration (ix). To begin, Fishbane's category of peshat encompasses both premodern and historical-critical modes of interpretation. Granted, Fishbane does delineate the modern historical-critical mode as “type two” of “modern exemplars” of peshat (254–55), a mode that, in his evaluation, begins with Heinrich Graetz's 1871 commentary and continues apace to the recent volume by J. Cheryl Exum (Louisville: WJKP, 2005). But is historical-critical scholarship truly compatible with classical modes of peshat? Premodern practitioners of peshat saw the text of Song of Songs as divinely inspired and (in most cases) operating on a wide range of interpretive levels. Modern historical-critical scholars view Song of Songs as a product of human culture. Certainly the observations of premodern practitioners of peshat can be used to enrich historical-critical interpretation of the Bible, but to understand them as seamlessly part of the same continuum fails to take seriously the presuppositions of both intellectual traditions.
While Fishbane's description of peshat (and also his discussion of the development of sod) describes the historical evolution of this interpretive mode, his portrayal of derash lacks sufficient treatment of its historical development (255–70). Such an undertaking is not without its methodological pitfalls, but Fishbane's nuanced thematic treatment of midrashic interpretation of Song of Songs would be enriched by tracing the development of particular modes of interpretation or contextualizing historically specific interpretations. For instance, Fishbane notes the classical interpretation of the adjuration “Do not arouse or awaken love before its time” (2:7; 3:5; cf. 8:4) and its association with messianism and national restoration (265, cf. 66 citing Shir Ha-shirim Rabbah 2.i.7, 2.vii.1; B. Ketubot 111a; B. Sanhedrin 111b). He does not, however, take the opportunity to demonstrate the use of this tradition in B. Ketubot to heighten the Babylonian rabbis' preeminence over their contemporaries in Roman Palestine. Including such a description of historical context would serve to enrich the reader's understanding of the midrashic tradition.
Another area of Fishbane's commentary that deserves further historical reflection is the use of Song of Songs in contact between Jews and Christians over the past two millennia. For instance, while he discusses Origen in his history of interpretation in reference to early evidence for esoteric interpretation of Song of Songs in Judaism (291), he does not explore how, already in the third century, Origen discussed in detail the literary form of the work as a nuptial song, presaging the prominence of peshat in Judaism by hundreds of years. Origen also describes two other modes of interpretation. The first of these two modes (analogous to Fishbane's derash) interprets Song of Songs as describing Jesus's relationship with the church. This element of Origen's commentary and collected sermons has been discussed by a number of scholars, beginning with E. E. Urbach, in connection to third-century Jewish-Christian disputation. The final mode of interpretation in Origen's commentary (parallel to Fishbane's remez) describes Song of Songs as an allegory of the relationship between God and the soul of the individual believer. Fishbane also does not highlight other salient connections between Jewish and Christian interpretations of Song of Songs, such as the earlier emergence of four-fold interpretation in Christianity or the proposed influence of medieval Christian iconography on the Zohar. While one would not expect such material in the main commentary, its absence from his excursus on the history of Jewish interpretation gives the impression that Jewish interpretation developed in a vacuum, virtually unconditioned by the vicissitudes of history or geographic context. While this point may seem small, especially concerning a commentary written for a Jewish audience, it raises a larger issue about the role of historical inquiry, not only in critical academic commentary on the Bible but also in confessional contexts as well.
