[1] An argument for the allegorical interpretation has been often drawn from Mahommedan mysticism—from the poems of Hafiz, and the songs still sung by dervishes. See Jones, Poëseos Asiaticae Com. pt. in. cap. 9; Rosenmüller’s remarks on Lowth’s Praelectio, xxxi., and Lane’s Modern Egyptians, ch. xxiv. But there is no true analogy between the Old Testament and the pantheistic mysticism of Islam, and there is every reason to believe that, where the allegory takes a form really analogous to Canticles, the original sense of these songs was purely erotic.
[2] Repeated recently by Scholz, Kommentar, pp. iii. and iv.
[3] The chief passages of Jewish writings referring to this dispute are Mishna Jadaim, iii. 5 and Tosifta Sanhedrin, xii. For other passages see Grätz’s Commentary, p. 115, and in control of his criticism the introduction to the commentary of Delitzsch.
[4] The text of the Targum in the Polyglots and in Buxtorf’s Rabbinic Bible is not complete. The complete text is given in the Venice editions, and in Lagarde’s Hagiographa Chaldaice (Lipsiae, 1873). The Polyglots add a Latin version. A German version is given by Riedel in his very useful book, Die Auslegung des Hohenliedes (1898), which also reviews the interpretation of Canticles by Hippolytus, Origen and later Greek writers.
[5] Ewald and others make this song a distinct scene in the action of the poem, supposing that the author here exhibits the honourable form of espousal by which Solomon thought to vanquish the scruples of the damsel. This view, however, seems to introduce a complication foreign to the plan of the book.
[6] Wetstein, Zeitschrift f. Ethn., 1873, pp. 270-302; quoted and condensed by Budde as above in Comm. p. xvii.; for a fuller reproduction of Wetstein in English see Harper, The Song of Songs, pp. 74-76.
[7] For the connexion of the threshing-floor with marriage through the idea of sexual fertility, we may compare many primitive ideas and customs, such as those described by Frazer (The Golden Bough, ii. p. 181 f., 186).
[8] Castelli (Il Cantico dei Cantici, 1892) has written a very attractive little book on Canticles (quite apart from the Wetstein development) regarded as “a poem formed by a number of dialogues mutually related by a certain succession”; they require for their understanding nothing but some indication of the speaker at each transition (such as we find in codex A of the Septuagint).
[9] On the erotic meaning of many of the figures employed see the notes of Haupt in The American Journal of Semitic Languages (July 1902); also G. Jacob, Das Hohelied (1902), who rightly protests against the limitation in the Comm. of Budde and Siegfried (p. 10) of all the songs to the marriage relation. Haupt thinks that the songs were not originally composed for weddings, though used there (p. 207, op. cit.). Diestel had pointed out, in another connexion (B.L. 125), that nothing is said in the book of the blessing of children, the chief end of marriage from a Hebrew standpoint.