Exquisite Desire: Religion, the Erotic, and the Songs of Songs

by Carey Ellen Walsh

Overview

An examination of the erotic ideal in ancient IsraelThis provocative work investigates the character of the erotic in writings from ancient Israel and how the erotic is connected to the experience of the divine.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780800632496
Publisher:	1517 Media
Publication date:	11/01/2000
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

Carey Ellen Walsh is currently Adjunct Professor in the Graduate Division of Saint Joseph's College, Maine. She also is RCIA instructor at Immaculate Conception in Portland, Maine.

She began her studies at Allegheny College and received her B.A. and from there she went on to receive her M.Div. from Yale Divinity School, M.A. University of Chicago, and Th.D. from Harvard Divinity School.

During her career she also has a book published; The Fruit of the Vine: Viticulture in Ancient Israel.

Along with writing she is a member of numerous organizations; Benedictine Oblates of St. Meinrad's Monastery, Catholic Biblical Association, and Society of Biblical Literature.

Carey's interests include hiking, Catholic Education, watercolor painting, liturgy, and Irish history and culture.

Read an Excerpt

From Chapter One (pre-publication version):
CHAPTER 1: A Question of Desire: Is There Some Accounting for Biblical Taste?

Let him kiss me with kisses of his mouth
for better is your love than wine,
your anointing oils are fragrant,
your name is better than perfume poured out.
Therefore women love you!
Draw me after you, let us run!
Let the king bring me into his chambers.
-Song of Songs 1:1-4

God bless the feisty ancient woman who felt this fierce passion and excitement and somehow saw to it that it got preserved in the Bible. Without any introduction of characters or context, we glimpse a bald declaration of sexual want as the book's opening. We are startled by what this biblical woman wants¾kisses and plenty of them¾but why is a biblical book jumping right in, devoting itself to sexual desire? These opening verses are not even just the racy, preliminary lines meant to entice readers into the book-this biblical Song writhes for eight enjoyable, unnerving chapters on a woman's desire and arousal. What does this Song tell us about ancient wants, and which of those wants persist today for readers of the Bible?
Canonical Setting

What is a book of erotica (that is, descriptions of sexual yearning between two lovers) doing in the Bible anyway? And how are we to cope¾in embarrassed silence or in glee, essentially mimicking the very pleasure described in the Song? How can modern readers feast on this biblical treat and gain nourishment for their lives today? There is much that we still share with the ancient spirit, even though our means of expression have changed over the centuries. In this instance, what we sharewith the author(s) of the Song of Songs is a furtive fascination with desire. Desire fuels the motives behind many of our actions. In fact, a good part of our socialization process involves our desires, which often get scripted by the media through an onslaught of advertisements, movies, and cultural messages. What we see and hear over and over again in a culture becomes what we desire, yet in large measure, we never give our full consent to this external shaping of our desires. The power of desire in our individual lives has never been examined.

But there is definitely interest. We like to see desire acted out or taken to the extreme in works of fiction, film, and television. How else can we explain the popularity of soap operas, fatal attractions, and the tragic romances from Romeo and Juliet to Titanic? There is comfort and safety, a vicarious thrill, gained from watching how desire propels an individual to act. We also, perhaps, hope to learn something about how to manage or even admit to our own desires. Art and popular culture offer a way to try on perspectives about desire. We awaken and then hone our own desires by reacting with a variety of expressions, from "I would never do that!" to "I bet I would do that," to the starker expression "God, I want that." What looks at first outrageous begins to elicit our own desires. The Song of Songs partly offers a vicarious journey of an ancient woman and man in a crush. But it does more than enact a desire. It lays bare desire's impact on the individual and probes its complexity as a force in life. It offers a depth charge into the nature of desire itself, one that the modern can learn from as much as the ancient Israelite must have. If, as Freud contended, desire drives everything or nearly everything we do, then coming to understand its force is certainly worth the effort and is easily worth an entire biblical book.

The Song of Songs is worth reading for its exploration of desire, not because of some blind adherence to an established tradition of biblical authority. Today, if we are to get anywhere with understanding the Bible or being open to its world, it has to earn our respect. The days are gone when it held authoritarian power in people's lives, and the change is for the best. The options for responding to the Bible become real ones: dismissal or rediscovery. The Song offers insight into the nature of human desire, not just more biblical legislation with the force of the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount. Instead, it is investigative, probing, and wholly experiential. Impressively, it holds its own, as I shall show, with current post-modern theoreticians of desire such as Michel Foucault, Georges Bataille, and Julia Kristeva. My intent in this book is to demonstrate just what this ancient Hebrew Song can teach us about desire.

The desire in the Song of Songs has long taxed and excited the interpretive skills of biblical scholars over the centuries. The canonicity, that is, the authoritative sacredness, of this biblical book was early on disputed by the rabbis (Mishnah Yadaim 3:5), since it was unclear what specifically religious, legal, or wisdom material it contained. For there is in the eight chapters of this book of the Hebrew Bible no mention of God, no clear moral instruction, and nothing about the nationhood of Israel. The book lacked, in other words, much of what was identifiably "biblical" about the other writings already collected in the canon. And it contained much that was not in the other biblical books as well, namely sexual desire, fantasies of coupling, and descriptions of bodily arousal. In its plain sense, the book describes longing and ancient lust. This topic undoubtedly interests the historian bent on constructing a history of pleasure for the biblical world, but it also snags the curiosity of just about anyone who experiences lust today, a good two thousand years after the Song was written.
Author Bio: Carey Ellen Walsh is Professor of Old Testament at Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee. She is also the author of The Fruit of the Vine: Viticulture in Ancient Israel and the Hebrew Bible.

Table of Contents

A Question of Desire: Is There Some Accounting for Biblical Taste?

Erotica in the Bible: "Faint with Love"

Biblical Flirting

A Ravished Heart

Drunk with Love

Woman's Desire in Prophecy

Spiritual Yearning