Investigation: One Drama or Many Songs?

Origen (c. 240) called the Song a marriage song written in the form of a drama. Centuries later, scholars tried to recover the plot: in one version Solomon woos and weds a country girl (two characters); in another, a shepherd and his beloved resist King Solomon, who tries to take her into his harem (three characters).

In the 1870s a German consul in Damascus, J. G. Wetzstein, described Syrian village weddings with a week of songs, a bride praised in descriptive poems and a groom crowned as king. Scholars read the Song as a collection of such wedding songs. Today many see an anthology of love poems, edited with recurring refrains into a loose unity.

Patterns that bind the poem

The adjuration refrain (2:7; 3:5; 8:4); the mutual-belonging formula (2:16; 6:3; 7:10); "who is this coming up from the wilderness" (3:6; 8:5); the gazelle on the mountains (2:9, 17; 8:14); two night searches (3:1–5; 5:2–8); four praise poems (4:1–7; 5:10–16; 6:4–7; 7:1–9); the mother's house (3:4; 8:2); the vineyard (1:6; 8:11–12). These make it more than a random collection; how much more is debated.

Speaker labels in manuscripts

No Hebrew manuscript has speaker names. Some Greek codices (Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus are reported) carry marginal notes naming "the bride," "the bridegroom" and others, and early Latin manuscripts have similar rubrics; the library's Giguet French even inserts "(Épouse)" and "(Époux)" into its text (for example 7:9; 8:5, 10, 11). These are early interpretations, valuable as reception history, not part of the poem. Which codices carry which notes is a C check (S-C03, S-C07).