“When Love in graceful ringlets plants his toils,
The fool he catches, and the wise man foils;
But, thence released, the sage his snare discerns,
And Reason’s lamp with wonted lustre burns.”
מֶלֶךְ stands for הַמֶּלֶךְ; the article is not unfrequently omitted in poetry; comp. Ps. ii. 2; xxi. 2; Gesen. § 109; Ewald, § 277, b. רָהִיט, a ringlet, so called from its flowing down over the shoulders; vide supra, chap. i. 16. The construction of מֶלֶךְ with אַרְגָּמָן, i.e. royal purple (one of the Greek translators in the Hexapla, Vulgate, Syriac, Luther, Houbigant, &c.), is against the punctuation and the evenness of the metre, interferes with the interpretation of the remaining words, and has evidently arisen from a misunderstanding of the passage. Besides, no people is known by such a name. It was owing to a feeling of being consistent that the editor of Calmet felt himself constrained to take אַרְגָּמָן as a proper name, Argamen, to correspond with the parallel כַּרְמֶל; and to explain this clause as alluding to a particular mode of plaiting the hair, like the weaving of Arech, a city in Babylonia, supposed to be famous for its weaving manufactories.
How beautiful, &c. The captivated king, having described the beauty of the several parts of the body, now combines the separate members into one lovely form, and endows it with life and fascination, which none of the inanimate beauties to which he had compared her, however admirable, possessed. אַהֲבָה, love, abstract for concrete, loved one, vide supra, chap. v. 1. תַּעֲנוּג, charm, attraction, such as living beings possess. Aquila and the Syriac, separating the word בְּתַּעֲנֻגִים, render it θυγάτηρ τρυφῶν, בַּת עֲנֻגִים.
[7]. This thy growth, &c. The beautiful growth of the palm-tree, like that of the cedar and cypress, supplied a forcible image to the ancients. [[181]]Thus the Son of Sirach, xxiv. 13, 14:—
“I grew up as a cedar of Lebanon,
And as a cypress upon Mount Hermon;
I grew up as a palm-tree in En-gedi,