ABSTRACT
U"NDERST AND ING a text is always a work of comparison, both with our own experience, oflove for mstance, and w1th other texts, w1thm the
same literary tradition or beyond it. In this artide I will suggest that a partic:ularly useful comparison can be made between the Song of Songs and the myth of the Garden of Eden in Genesis, whose preoccupations it shares, and of which it is an inversion, since it portrays Pararlise in this world, rediscovered through love. The Song transforms the images and motifs ofthe story of the Garden of Eden, so that i t can be seen as a commentary on it, as a participant in a debate, whose subject is the emergence of culture from nature. Each of the texts, moreover, has secret correspondences with the other; the narrative of the loss of Eden anticipates its survivat in the union of man and wo man, while in the Song of Songs love is protected from society and returns to origins. There is an interplay of concord and opposition, a fourfold structure:
Pararlise is lost (Genesis)------~
Love is a return to origins ------~ (The Song)
Rediscovered through love (The Song of Songs)
Pararlise survives in the world through love (Genesis)
The relationship of the Song with Genesis 2 has been remarked upon at length by Karl Barth, in his immensely comprehensive Church Dogmatics, 1 from a theological perspective; for him they sanctify sexual love, in contrast with the repressive attitude towards eraticism in thce rest of the OT. Daniel Lys,2 too, points to the paraHel with the garden of Eden in discussing the function of the Song in the Bible. He writes "Le Cantique n'est rien d'autre qu'un c:ommentaire de Gen.2," without substantiatingthe relationship. By far the most detailerl comparison isthat constructed by Leo Krinetski,J for who m the Song is an allegory of the Christian dramas of sin and redemption, a view conditioned by the need to find a Christian relevance for it. Allthese writers
are preoccupied with theological considerations, the chargethat a love song is an anomal y in the Bible, a strange if fortunate intrusion. For the literary critic, however, the Song, like all poetry, transcends simple categories such as seeular and sacred. "Man loves because God loves and as God loves. "4 l t is a human love poem, and for that reason it is sacred.
