The vindication of the Hebrew song from degradation to the level of the Syrian wasf is easy enough. But some may feel that there is more plausibility in the case that has been set up for the connection between Canticles and another type of love song, the Idylls of Theocritus, the Sicilian poet whose Greek compositions gave lyric distinction to the Ptolemaic court at Alexandria, about the middle of the third century B.C.E. It is remarkable how reluctant some writers are to admit originality in ideas. Such writers seem to recognize no possibility other than supposing Theocritus to have copied Canticles, or Canticles Theocritus. It does not occur to them that both may be original, independent expressions of similar emotions. Least original among ideas is this denial of originality in ideas. Criticism has often stultified itself under the obsession that everything is borrowed. On this theory there can never have been an original note. The poet, we are told, is born, not made; but poetry, apparently, is always made, never born.
The truth rather is that as human nature is everywhere similar, there must necessarily be some similarity in its literary expression. This is emphatically the case with the expression given to the emotional side of human nature. The love of man for maid, rising everywhere from the same spring, must find lyric outlets that look a good deal alike. The family resemblance between the love poems of various peoples is due to the elemental kinship of the love. Every true lover is original, yet most true lovers, including those who have no familiarity with poetical literature, fall instinctively on the same terms of endearment. Differences only make themselves felt in the spiritual attitudes of various ages and races towards love. Theocritus has been compared to Canticles, by some on the ground of certain Orientalisms of his thought and phrases, as in his Praise of Ptolemy. But his love poems bear no trace of Orientalism in feeling, as Canticles shows no trace of Hellenism in its conception of love. The similarities are human, the differences racial.
Direct literary imitation of love lyrics certainly does occur. Virgil imitated Theocritus, and the freshness of the Greek Idyll became the convention of the Roman Eclogue. When such conscious imitation takes place, it is perfectly obvious. There is no mistaking the affectation of an urban lyrist, whose lovers masquerade as shepherds in the court of Louis XIV.
Theocritus seems to have had earlier Greek models, but few readers of his Idylls can question his originality, and fewer still will agree with Mahaffy in denying the naturalness of his goatherds and fishermen, in a word, his genuineness. Mahaffy wavers between two statements, that the Idylls are an affectation for Alexandria, and sincere for Sicily. The two statements are by no means contradictory. Much the same thing is true of Canticles, the Biblical Song of Songs. It is unreasonable for anyone who has seen or read about a Palestinian spring, with its unique beauty of flower and bird and blossom, to imagine that the author of Canticles needed or used second-hand sources of inspiration, however little his drama may have accorded with the life of Jerusalem in the Hellenistic period. And as the natural scenic background in each case is native, so is the treatment of the love theme; in both it is passionate, but in the one it is nothing else, in the other it is also spiritual. In both, the whole is artistic, but not artificial. As regards the originality of the love-interest in Canticles, it must suffice to say that there was always a strong romantic strain in the Jewish character.
Canticles is perhaps (by no means certainly) post-Exilic and not far removed in date from the age of Theocritus. Still, a post-Exilic Hebrew poet had no more reason to go abroad for a romantic plot than Hosea, or the author of Ruth, or the writer of the royal Epithalamium (Psalm xlv), an almost certainly pre-Exilic composition. This Psalm has been well termed a "prelude to the Song of Songs," for in a real sense Canticles is anticipated and even necessitated by it. In Ruth we have a romance of the golden corn-field, and the author chooses the unsophisticated days of the Judges as the setting of his tale. In Canticles we have a contrasted picture between the simplicity of shepherd-life and the urban voluptuousness which was soon to attain its climax in the court of the Ptolemies. So the poet chose the luxurious reign of Solomon as the background for his exquisite "melodrama." Both Ruth and Canticles are home-products, and ancient Greek literature has no real parallel to either.
Yet, despite the fact that the Hebrew Bible is permeated through and through, in its history, its psalmody, and its prophetic oratory, with images drawn from love, especially in rustic guise, so competent a critic as Graetz conceived that the pastoral background of the love-story of Canticles must have been artificial. While most of those who have accepted the theory of imitation-they cannot have reread the Idylls and the Song as wholes to persist in such a theory-have contended that Theocritus borrowed from Canticles, Graetz is convinced that the Hebrew poet must have known and imitated the Greek idyllist. The hero and heroine of the Song, he thinks, are not real shepherds; they are bucolic dilettanti, their shepherd-rôle is not serious. Whence, then, this superficial pastoral mise-en-scène? This critic, be it observed, places Canticles in the Ptolemaic age.
"In the then Judean world," writes Graetz, "in the post-Exilic period, pastoral life was in no way so distinguished as to serve as a poetic foil. On the contrary, the shepherd was held in contempt. Agriculture was so predominant that large herds were considered a detriment; they spoiled the grain. Shepherds, too, were esteemed robbers, in that they allowed their cattle to graze on the lands of others. In Judea itself, in the post-Exilic period, there were few pasture-grounds for such nomads. Hence the song transfers the goats to Gilead, where there still existed grazing-places. In the Judean world the poet could find nothing to suggest the idealization of the shepherd. As he, nevertheless, represents the simple life, as opposed to courtly extravagance, through the figures of shepherds, he must have worked from a foreign model. But Theocritus was the first perfect pastoral poet. Through his influence shepherd songs became a favorite genre. He had no lack of imitators. Theocritus had full reason to contrast court and rustic life and idealize the latter, for in his native Sicily there were still shepherds in primitive simplicity. Under his influence and that of his followers, it became the fashion to represent the simple life in pastoral guise. The poet of Canticles—who wrote for cultured circles—was forced to make use of the convention. But, as though to excuse himself for taking a Judean shepherd as a representative of the higher virtues, he made his shepherd one who feeds among the lilies. It is not the rude neat-herds of Gilead or the Judean desert that hold such noble dialogues, but shepherds of delicate refinement. In a word, the whole eclogic character of Canticles appears to be copied from the Theocritan model,"
This contention would be conclusive, if it were based on demonstrable facts. But what is the evidence for it? Graetz offers none in his brilliant Commentary on Canticles. In proof of his startling view that, throughout post-Exilic times, the shepherd vocation was held in low repute among Israelites, he merely refers to an article in his Monatsschrift (1870, p. 483). When one turns to that, one finds that it concerns a far later period, the second Christian century, when the shepherd vocation had fallen to the grade of a small and disreputable trade. The vocation was then no longer a necessary corollary of the sacrificial needs of the Temple. While the altar of Jerusalem required its holocausts, the breeders of the animals would hardly have been treated as pariahs. In the century immediately following the destruction of the Temple, the shepherd began to fall in moral esteem, and in the next century he was included among the criminal categories. No doubt, too, as the tender of flocks was often an Arab raider, the shepherd had become a dishonest poacher on other men's preserves. The attitude towards him was, further, an outcome of the deepening antagonism between the schoolmen and the peasantry. But even then it was by no means invariable. One of the most famous of Rabbis, Akiba, who died a martyr in 135 C.E., was not only a shepherd, but he was also the hero of the most romantic of Rabbinic love episodes.
At the very time when Graetz thinks that agriculture had superseded pastoral pursuits in general esteem, the Book of Ecclesiasticus was written. On the one side, Sirach, the author of this Apocryphal work, does not hesitate (ch. xxiv) to compare his beloved Wisdom to a garden, in the same rustic images that we find in Canticles; and, on the other side, he reveals none of that elevated appreciation of agriculture which Graetz would have us expect. Sirach (xxxvii. 25) asks sarcastically:
How shall he become wise that holdeth the plough,
That glorieth in the shaft of the goad:
That driveth oxen, and is occupied with their labors,
And whose talk is of bullocks?