Why This Text Matters | Song of Songs | Simeon Chavel

Religious studies courses can feature a broad range and variety of texts, including anything from The Daodejing, to The Mishnah, to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, to Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger, to Said’s Orientalism. The Marty Center partnered with the Undergraduate Religious Studies Program to design “Why This Text Matters” as a series of videos to help faculty prepare for courses, their students, and anyone generally curious about important texts in the study of religion. In the space of about 30 minutes, viewers can gain a deeper understanding of the context, themes, and significance of texts taught by experts at the University of Chicago Divinity School.  

About the Text:
The Song of Songs is an utterly unique work in Hebrew from Judea of the late-Persian or early-Hellenistic period (4th–3rd centuries BCE), whose coy character, simultaneously alluring and resistant, has generated the richest history of religious interpretation. The work exploits the textual medium and the Hebrew verbal system maximally to present the voice of a woman in the midst of an erotic reverie. She dreams of her Solomonic beloved and renders it verbally, switching her position between that of an observer of the dream and at a participant in it. Its heading, which underlies the title people have given it, reveals the author's level of intent about every aspect of it, literally, “the songest of songs."

Видео Why This Text Matters | Song of Songs | Simeon Chavel канала UChicago Divinity School