Testament, Volume 14 #1

A Song of Love, a Whisper of God

By the latter part of the first century CE, most of the books in what we now know as the Hebrew Scriptures were in place, but the canonical status of some, such as Song of Songs, Esther, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, remained in doubt. In the case of Song of Songs, reasons for hesitation were not hard to find. The book takes the form of a suite of love lyrics without apparent religious content, in which a young woman and a young man express their desire for each other against a backdrop of resplendent nature and jealous onlookers.

But Song of Songs was championed by the most prominent rabbi of his day and one of the greatest of any day, Akiva ben Joseph. "All the books in Scripture are holy," Akiva argued, "but Song of Songs is the holy of holies." He maintained that the book was an extended metaphor for the love between God and Israel; to see it as simply a secular love poem was to commit an act of desecration.

Akiva's sponsorship, and his projection of explicit religious meaning onto the book, were enough for it to gain inclusion in the canon. The metaphorical interpretation caught on, and Christians came to see Song of Songs as a metaphor for the love between Christ and the Church. Let us keep this idea of regarding erotic love as a metaphor for the relationship between God and human beings in the back of our minds for a moment while we take a closer look at Akiva and his unusual route to rabbinic eminence.

The story of Akiva is a conversion story, and his twentieth-century biographer, Louis Finkelstein, compares him to his near-contemporary Paul of Tarsus in the depth of his conversion, his impact on his religious tradition and his eventual martyrdom. In Akiva's case, however, there was no sudden flash of light from heaven, but rather an arduous path involving years of hard work. The catalyst that set him on this path was love.

In his youth Akiva was a poor and illiterate shepherd, who was not only far removed from the world of scholarship but contemptuous of that world. "Would that I had a scholar in my hands," he would say, "and I would bite him like an ass." But he fell in love with a woman named Rachel, who saw great potential in him and agreed to marry him if he would study under the scholars he despised. Akiva accepted the condition, but was so discouraged by his initital attempts at study that he went back to his life as a shepherd.

Meanwhile Rachel gave birth to a boy. When the child was five years old, he went to a teacher to begin study--along with his father, who had agreed to try again. This time Akiva quickly learned the alphabet, then began to study the books of the Bible. When he had mastered these, he went to the vineyard in the coastal town of Yavneh where the great scholars conducted their deliberations after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. The couple's material needs were taken care of primarily through Rachel's work; they had to live apart for long stretches and on occasion, according to legend, she sold her hair so that they could buy food. But Akiva rose quickly and eventually became one of the most respected scholars in the academy.

An old and all-too-familiar story: the woman who sacrifices herself to advance a man's career. In social circumstances less hostile to women's aspirations, what would a woman of Rachel's insight and determination have achieved? The story's redeeming feature, however, is Akiva's lifelong gratitude to Rachel, which he was never shy about expressing publicly.

Indeed, his entire outlook was shaped by his relationship with Rachel. On one occasion, when various sages were expressing opinions about what constitutes true wealth, Akiva's contribution was, "A wife who is comely in her deeds." He believed marriage could only be based on love, and he hated lewd jokes and sexual innuendo. Hence his profound conviction that the erotic verses of Song of Songs were holy. A person who treated Song of Songs with levity, he taught, was barred from the world to come.

Strictly metaphorical interpretations of Song of Songs are not as compelling to most late-twentieth-century readers as they were to Akiva and his Jewish and Christian successors. But with the question of the book's inclusion in Scripture long settled, the case for its holiness has stood the test of time. "The more its authors sing of love," writes the contemporary American poet Grace Schulman, "the more they whisper of God." The very fact that Song of Songs is in our Bible means that what it says to us is not so different from what it said to Akiva: that the passion of one human being for another, wild and unruly as it is, with all its potential to bring joy or misery, contains a spark of the divine.

Robert Chodos is editor of Compass. He lives in New Hamburg, Ontario.