" "My beloved is mine, and I am his: He feedeth
his flock among the lilies," "Come, my beloved, let us
go forth into the field, let us lodge in the villages.
Let us get up early to the vineyards.... There will I
give thee my love."
The home-sick country girl, in a word, has found out that the
splendors of the palace are not to her taste, and the thought of being
a young shepherd's darling is pleasanter to her than that of being an
old king's concubine. The polygamous rapture with which Solomon
addresses her: "There are three-score queens and four-score
concubines, and maidens without number," does not appeal to her rural
taste. She has no desire to be the hundred and forty-first piece of
mosaic inlaid in Solomon's palanquin (III., 9-10), and she stubbornly
resists his advances until, impressed by her firmness, and unwilling
to force her, the king allows her to return to her vineyard and her
lover.
The view that the gist of the _Song of Songs_ is the Shulamite's love
of a shepherd and her persistent resistance to the advances of
Solomon, was first advanced in 1771 by J.F. Jacobi, and is now
universally accepted by the commentators, the overwhelming majority of
whom have also given up the artificial and really blasphemous
allegorical interpretation of this poem once in vogue, but ignored in
the Revised Version, as well as the notion that Solomon wrote the
poem.
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