Good Book

by David Plotz

  TWENTY

  The Song of Songs

  Hot and Holy

  In which two lovers get hot and heavy, and Solomon drops by for a visit.

  CHAPTER 1

  Like my grandmother’s basement, which is crammed with jelly jars, eighty-three-year-old report cards, and failed perpetual motion machines, the Bible is a magnificent hodgepodge. It contains everything under the sun, from a creation story (or two), to law books, genealogical tables, prophecies, histories, ritual handbooks, self-help manuals, and now—erotica.

  The Song of Songs—also called the “Song of Solomon”—is like nothing else in the Bible, a steamy poem narrated by two lovers. She is foxy, young, and dark. He is strong, sexy, and seductive. (He may even be Solomon, the purported author of the song.) Some biblical scholars, whose libidos we must question, insist that the song is merely an allegory, that the lusty verses are just enthusiastic prayers. No way. This is no religious metaphor. This is Last Tango in Judah.

  The poem begins with her daydreaming. Imagine a young woman alone in her room, hugging her pillow: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine.” Now that’s an opening line.

  In one of my translations, our songstress describes herself as “dark and swarthy but beautiful.” The New Revised Standard Version uses a saucier, modern coinage: “I am black and beautiful.”

  CHAPTER 2

  She’s very forward, our dusky beauty. She says her lover is an apple tree, “and his fruit is sweet to my mouth.” (She follows this with the carnal imperative, “comfort me with apples,” borrowed as a book title by both Ruth Reichl and Peter De Vries.)

  In the middle of the erotic reverie, she catches herself, and sits up long enough to address a word to her young readers: “I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem…do not stir up or awaken love until it is ready!” She repeats this line twice in later chapters. What does it mean and why is it so important? She includes this caution to remind us that she can be wanton only because he is her true love. She guarded her heart and found the right man, and that has liberated her to indulge her sensual desires. She wants girls to be careful, not to give away their hearts, or their virginity, too easily. This lesson—that true love waits, to steal a phrase—makes the otherwise spicy poem suitable for church and synagogue.

  A pretty exchange between the two of them—he’s a gazelle; she’s a dove—climaxes with a verse that has been co-opted by brides and grooms everywhere: “My beloved is mine and I am his.”

  CHAPTER 3

  She can’t sleep, so she gets out of bed and wanders the city, seeking him out. (See Patsy Cline, “Walking after Midnight.”) She finds him, brings him back to her mom’s house, and—well, you’ll have to imagine the rest.

  Meanwhile, Solomon’s wedding procession comes to town. He’s riding in a palanquin, and he has seriously pimped his ride for maximum scoring: “He made its posts of silver, its back of gold, its seat of purple; its interior was inlaid with love.” Inlaid with love, oh my! On the back, Solomon attached a bumper sticker: If this palanquin’s a rockin’, don’t come a knockin’.

  CHAPTER 4

  Now it’s the guy’s turn to praise his lover. Either he’s not much of a wordsmith, or men chatted girls up differently back in the day. He says: “Your hair is like a flock of goats…your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes.” Your brow is like a “pomegranate split open.” “Your neck is like the tower of David.” You’re so beautiful—your hair looks like goats! Your forehead is a pomegranate—a fruit that resembles, um, acne. And you have a neck made of brick. These lines wouldn’t go over well at my house.

  His most famous compliment is: “Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle.” This isn’t exactly insulting, but it is confusing. Fawns are bony, muscular, and jumpy—not at all how I would describe breasts. However, someone pointed out to me why the metaphor may work: “I’ve always thought that the comparison between breasts and twin fawns is more that they are soft-looking and symmetrical—and, in her case, similarly colored. If you see a fawn, don’t you want to pet it? Especially two of them?”

  When he calls her a “locked garden,” that really turns her on. “Awake, O north wind, and come, O south wind! Blow upon my garden that its fragrance may be wafted abroad. Let my beloved come to his garden, and eat its choicest fruits.”

  CHAPTER 5

  This is probably the hottest passage in the song. She recalls her beloved knocking on the door. Then he “thrust his hand into the opening, and my inmost being yearned for him. I arose to open to my beloved, and my hands dripped with myrrh, my fingers with liquid myrrh, upon the handles of the bolt.”

  She praises his good looks. Her compliments, unlike his, withstand the test of time. He’s “radiant and ruddy.” His hair is black like a raven’s. His cheeks “are like beds of spices…his lips are lilies…his arms are rounded gold…his legs are alabaster columns.” Is it any wonder the girl digs him?

  CHAPTER 6

  He is her true love. But is she his true love? In this chapter, he mentions sixty queens and eighty concubines, then says she’s the finest of them all, the only woman he really cares about: “My dove, my perfect one, is the only one.” Should we believe him? That depends on how you interpret the line about queens and concubines. If the author is just a regular guy, and he’s saying that his love is more beautiful than any queen—the way you hear guys brag, “My girlfriend looks like Salma Hayek, only hotter”—then perhaps he does love her truly. But as I read it, the author—perhaps Solomon—is referring to these sixty queens and eighty concubines as his own queens and concubines. And that sets off the alarm bells. If he has already run through 140 women, he’ll run through one more. (And if the author actually is Solomon, he’ll run through 860 more women, since he ends up with 700 wives and 300 concubines.) All his sweet compliments mean nothing: they’re just lines he’s using to get her into his palanquin.

  CHAPTER 7

  In a wonderful passage, she proposes that they go for a walk in the fields and vineyards, to see if the blossoms have opened: “There I will give you my love.”

  CHAPTER 8

  She wishes that her lover were her brother. Then they could be together in public and kiss in the street, and no one would notice. Doesn’t this sound eerily like what must happen today, in Islamic nations such as Saudi Arabia that have turned ancient sexual taboos into the law of the land?

  She says he can drink “the juice of my pomegranates.”

  And one final line plagiarized for weddings: “Set me as a seal upon your heart.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  The Book of Ruth

  My Favorite Bible Story

  In which two poor widows, Naomi and her daughter-in-law Ruth, move back to Bethlehem; while gleaning in the fields, Ruth meets Boaz, a relative of her dead husband; he falls in love with her; eventually they get married, and are great-grandparents to King David.

  CHAPTER 1

  It’s the time of Judges. There’s a famine in Bethlehem, so Elimelech, his wife Naomi, and their two sons immigrate to Moab. Elimelech promptly dies. The sons marry Moabite girls—a brave move, since we know how the Lord feels about intermarriage with idolaters. Both sons die, though their deaths are not attributed to divine disapproval of the mixed marriages. This is our first sign that Ruth is not like other books of the Bible. God won’t be the prime mover here. The characters in Ruth are faithful, but they make their own fate; the Lord won’t make it for them. Ruth is a great book for agnostics, since it shows how good people should behave even when they don’t expect God to intervene.

  Naomi decides to return to Bethlehem, but before she leaves she gently tells her widowed Moabite daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth, to remain in Moab and remarry. Naomi isn’t trying to ditch them for selfish reasons. On the contrary, Naomi knows that she herself is too old to marry again, and she doesn’t want to burden the young women. They insist on going with her anyway. Naomi orders them not to follow her. Orpah finally
leaves, but Ruth sticks to her like glue, delivering one of the most moving speeches in the Bible: “For wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried.” This speech is impressive in many ways, but perhaps most because of its insight into how people choose a religion. Ruth does not come to the Lord because He is the Lord. She comes because she loves Naomi. If Naomi worshipped Baal, Ruth probably would have become a Baalite. Sometimes theologians forget that religion is not a calculation: almost always, we come to God or Allah or the Buddha not because we have carefully analyzed the relevant laws, texts, and miracles but because someone we love leads us to him. Relationships, not theories, make religions grow.

  Incidentally, this chapter is the source of the most famous quasi-biblical name of our time. Oprah Winfrey was officially named Orpah—it’s on her birth certificate—but because of spelling confusion, the family called her Oprah instead.

  CHAPTER 2

  Naomi and Ruth return to Bethlehem during the barley harvest. They’re flat broke. Ruth goes to glean in the fields, collecting the grain left behind by the harvesters. (Leviticus 19 orders farmers to leave gleanings for the poor. This is one of many passages in which Ruth shows us biblical laws in practice.) Ruth doesn’t yet know it, but she happens to glean the field of Boaz, a relative of Naomi’s dead husband, Elimelech. Boaz shows up in the field and hears that Naomi’s daughter-in-law has been gleaning. He immediately invites her to drink his water and glean from all his fields. He calls her “daughter,” a red herring that distracts us from the idea that they could ever marry. She asks why he’s being so kind to a stranger, and he says he heard how good she was to his kinswoman Naomi. He invites her to eat and drink with him, then surreptitiously orders his workers to leave extra stalks so she can glean more.

  CHAPTER 3

  Naomi decides that Ruth needs to remarry, and that Boaz would be a catch. She has Ruth wash and dress up, then go to the barn where Boaz is spending the night, in preparation for a big day of threshing. Naomi instructs Ruth to uncover his feet, then to fall asleep at them. Ruth does this. He wakes up astonished, and asks who she is. She tells him to put his robe over her—a euphemism for “have sex with,” perhaps?—because he is “a redeeming kinsman.” This means he is a male relative of her dead husband and thus has an obligation to marry her. No spring chicken, Boaz is evidently thrilled to find a lovely young woman throwing herself at him. His first response is to thank her for not seeking a younger man. Then he hesitates. Because he’s a deeply good and law-abiding man, he knows he can’t say yes. Full of regret, he tells her that there is a “closer” male relative, who gets first dibs on her. He invites her to spend the night anyway. (As friends, I think. Boaz does not seem to want to get in her pants. In fact, he appears to be trying to protect her reputation.)

  CHAPTER 4

  The next day, Boaz waits by the town gate for the closer kinsman. When he arrives, Boaz offers him a deal: you buy Elimelech’s land and marry Ruth, but any son you have with Ruth will inherit the estate. The relative, though tempted, says no. The relative then offers Ruth and the land to Boaz. Without hesitating a second, Boaz accepts. They seal the deal, with the other kinsman removing his sandal. (In discussing Deuteronomy, I made fun of the weird law by which a man refusing a levirate marriage has his sandal removed and is known as the “unsandaled one.” And now, it has happened.) The townspeople cheer Boaz’s announcement that he is marrying Ruth. He is the beloved old bachelor of Bethlehem, and everyone is overjoyed that he’s finding happiness in his declining years. No one blinks at the idea of his marrying a Moabite: by her actions, Ruth has made herself as much a Jew as anyone. The women of Bethlehem congratulate Naomi, telling her that her daughter-in-law Ruth “is better to you than seven sons.” True enough.

  Ruth and Boaz have a son, whom they name Obed. He grows up to be the father of Jesse, who is in turn the father of King David. (Ruth, thus, is also an ancestor of Jesus, since he is descended from David.)

  And that’s it. That’s the whole story. No smiting. No prophecies. No laws. No kings. No God. Just the story of one family and its two good women.

  I had never read Ruth, so going into the story I didn’t understand the fierce loyalty it inspired. But I do now. Like the Song of Songs, Ruth is very different from everything that precedes it. For starters, it’s inspiring for observant Jewish readers because it shows biblical laws in action. We see how a nice family follows the Bible’s (peculiar) rules about gleaning and levirate marriage and thrives as a result. The law is no longer an abstraction; it’s alive, and it’s good.

  What’s even more important and unusual about Ruth, and the reason why so many Christians and nonobservant Jews love it, is its domesticity. Ruth reminds me of nothing so much as a Jane Austen novel, compressing the whole world into the intimate details of family life. Grand national and religious politics are absent. Ruth revels in the small moments where love is forged. It holds out the prospect of redemption, but in the smallest, most personal way—for the young foreign widow, for the kind mother-in-law, for the lonely old bachelor. Ruth is the quietest of all Bible books, a short story that manages to combine extraordinary power and extraordinary serenity. Like an old country song, it leaves me feeling calm, joyful, inspired, and also a little bit melancholy—sad that the world can’t always be so sweet.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The Books of Lamentations and Ecclesiastes

  Bible Books for Rock Stars

  In which Jerusalem’s destruction is remembered again; a teacher wonders what the point of life is, since we all die anyway, then advises us to enjoy every day, since you can’t take it with you.

  THE BOOK OF LAMENTATIONS

  As you might surmise from the name, Lamentations is not the cheeriest read. It begins “Alas,” and goes downhill from there. Its five poetic chapters address the destruction of Jerusalem and the misery of the Jews. The first one, written in the voice of the Israelites, admits that God “is in the right” to punish Jerusalem, but it mourns because the enemy has conquered and humiliated the city. The lamenter tries to look on the bright side, begging the Lord to make Israel’s enemies as miserable as the Israelites. Sometimes the Bible denounces schadenfreude, and sometimes that’s the only item on the menu.

  Lamentations is tossed way in the back of the Hebrew Bible, but it really belongs with the prophets, since it addresses the same depressing themes as they do: destruction, exile, God’s disappointment with us.

  THE BOOK OF ECCLESIASTES

  Chapters 1–2

  Ecclesiastes, like Deuteronomy, has a name that is at once familiar and nonsensical. Goodness knows I have heard “Ecclesiastes” a million times, but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what the word means. So, I Googled and learned that it’s the Greek for “preacher,” in turn a translation of the Hebrew goheleth or koheleth.

  In the first sentence, Ecclesiastes announces that the book is “the words of Koheleth son of David, king in Jerusalem.” This immediately sets wheels spinning, since the only son of David who became king is Solomon. Does that make Koheleth Solomon? One current theory is that Ecclesiastes was actually written hundreds of years after the time of Solomon, and was attributed to Koheleth in order to give it street cred. But other translations simply call him the Teacher or the Preacher.

  In any case, Koheleth is a thoughtful, weary fellow, trying to come to grips with the fact that wealth, power, and wisdom don’t seem to matter. In the end, we all make a meal for worms. The book mixes the contemplative, self-help style of Proverbs with a shrugging, though not cheerless, fatalism.

  The second verse of the book is one of the most famous in the Bible, at least as the King James Version translates it: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” My translation renders it “Utter futility! All is futile!,” which, I think, better captures the tone of the book. The King James Version suggests that Ecclesiastes is a hectoring book, but actually it’s
a hopeless one.

  Koheleth’s big question is: what does a man gain from all his work, prosperity, and success “under the sun”? The key phrase, which appears probably thirty times in the book, is “under the sun.” Koheleth is interested in the here and now. “Under the sun” suggests brightness, joy, youth. He is seeking to sum up life at its best. How does it hold up?

  Not well, apparently. Koheleth immediately concludes that generation after generation lives on Earth, but nothing ever changes: “There is nothing new under the sun.” Koheleth studies wisdom, and realizes that it’s pointless, because the wiser you are, the more heartache you suffer. He examines merriment—that’s pointless as well. He builds houses, plants vineyards, buys slaves and cattle, amasses gold and silver. He gets nothing out of it except a little pleasure. It’s futile, of “no real value under the sun!” At first he thinks the wise man is better than the fool, but then he realizes there is no difference, because “the same fate awaits them both.” He decides that he loathes life because “all is futile, and pursuit of wind.” Pretty bleak, eh?

  Eventually, he decides to embrace a kind of nihilistic hedonism. If life is pointless, you might as well enjoy it. So eat, drink, be merry!

  Chapter 3

  Another of the most famous passages in the Bible—“there’s a time for everything.” (Ecclesiastes is, verse for verse, the most quoted book in the Bible.) There’s “a time for being born, and a time for dying, a time for planting, and a time for uprooting the planted…a time for loving and a time for hating; a time for war and a time for peace.” And a bunch more times, as well. If you’re like me, you know this best as the Byrds’ cover of a song by Pete Seeger. Modern readers view this passage as soothing: Ah, look, the whole world fits together. There is a time for everything. Cool. But Koheleth reaches a gloomier conclusion: If it’s all put together by God, all planned out in this way, then what purpose is life? If the fix is in, we might as well just “eat and drink and get enjoyment.” This is another case of the messy Bible being cleaned up.