interior תּוך of the bed, is probably meant a covering which lay above this cushion. רצף, to arrange together, to combine (whence רצפה, pavement; Arab. ruṣafat, a paved way), is here meant like στορέννυμι, στόρνυμι, στρώννυμι, whence στρῶμα. And רצוּף אה is not equivalent to רצוּף אה (after the construction 1Ki 22:10; Eze 9:2), inlaid with love, but is the adv. accus of the manner; “love” (cf. hhesed, Psa 141:5) denotes the motive: laid out or made up as a bed from love on the part of the daughters of Jerusalem, i.e., the ladies of the palace - these from love to the king have procured a costly tapestry or tapestries, which they have spread over the purple cuchion. Thus rightly Vaihinger in his Comm., and Merx, Archiv. Bd. II 111-114. Schlottmann finds this interpretation of מן “stiff and hard;” but although מן in the pass. is not used like the Greek ὑπό, yet it can be used like ἀπό (Ewald, sec. 295b); and if there be no actual example of this, yet we point to Ps 45 in illustration of the custom of presenting gifts to a newly-married pair. He himself understands אהבה personally, as do also Ewald, Heiligst., Böttcher; “the voice of the people,” says Ewald, “knows that the finest ornament with which the invisible interior of the couch is adorned, is a love from among the daughters of Jerusalem, - i.e., some one of the court ladies who was raised, from the king's peculiar love to her, to the rank of a queen-consort. The speaker thus ingeniously names this newest favourite 'a love,' and at the same time designates her as the only thing with which this elegant structure, all adorned on the outside is adorned within.” Relatively better Böttcher: with a love (beloved one), prae filiis Hierus. But even though אהבה, like amor and amores, might be used of the beloved one herself, yet רצוף does not harmonize with this, seeing we cannot speak of being paved or tapestried with persons. Schlottm. in vain refers for the personal signification of אהבה to Sol 2:7, where it means love and nothing else, and seeks to bring it into accord with רצוף; for he remarks, “as the stone in mosaic work fills the place destined for it, so the bride the interior of the litter, which is intended for just one person filling it.” But is this not more comical, without intending to be so, than Juvenal's (i. 1. 32 s.):Causidici nova cum veniat lectica Mathonis Plena ipso ... .
But Schlottm. agrees with us in this, that the marriage which is here being prepared for was the consummation of the happiness of Solomon and Shulamith, not of another woman, and not the consummation of Solomon's assault on the fidelity of Shulamith, who hates him to whom she now must belong, loving only one, the shepherd for whom she is said to sigh (Sol 1:4), that he would come and take her away. “This triumphal procession,” says Rocke,[1] “was for her a mourning procession, the royal litter a bier; her heart died within her with longing for her beloved shepherd.” Touching, if it were only true! Nowhere do we see her up to this point resisting; much rather she is happy in her love. The shepherd-hypothesis cannot comprehend this marriage procession without introducing incongruous and imaginary things; it is a poem of the time of Gellert. Solomon the seducer, and Shulamith the heroine of virtue, are figures as from Gellert's Swedish Countess; they are moral commonplaces personified, but not real human beings. In the litter sits Shulamith, and the appiryon waits for her. Solomon rejoices that now the reciprocal love-bond is to find its conclusion; and what Shulamith, who is brought from a lowly to so lofty a station, experiences, we shall hear her describe in the sequel.
- ↑ Das Hohelied, Erstlingsdrama, u.s.w. The Song, a Primitive Drama from the East; or, Family Sins and Love's Devotion. A Moral Mirror for the Betrothed and Married, 1851.
