Thursday, May 2, 2013

Cool Point on the Song of Songs

I was looking through the April Biblical Studies Carnival on Jacob Cerone's biblio-blog, and I noticed Matt Emerson's series on biblical hermeneutics.  The methods that Emerson discusses are Christological, Pneumatological, Canonical, and Narrative.  I myself am leery of Christian interpretations of the Hebrew Bible, for I believe that they project Christian beliefs onto the text.  But I really liked a point that Emerson made in his post about Canonical Method:

"The idea that this book is not really about Christ and the Church is so commonplace among Christians today that to say otherwise is deemed insane allegory, but I want to suggest that not only is Songs about Jesus, but it is explicitly textually so. I can’t go into all the detail needed to prove this here, but suffice it to say that the author of Songs very clearly quotes, alludes to, and echoes passages about the Davidic covenant, the Temple (specifically 1 Kings 7), eschaotological restoration (specifically Numbers 24), Garden imagery from Genesis 2, and Lady Wisdom language from Proverbs 1-9. Look at that list again – David, Temple, Garden, Restoration, Lady Wisdom. And while I can’t list them here, there are obvious and explicit textual connections to each of these – the author ties off his work textually to these highly charged, and indeed Messianic, OT themes."

I became interested in biblical studies to learn cool points like this! 

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