Solomon's Love of Divine Virtue and Beauty

Septuagint, Sir Lancelot Charles Lee Brenton (T) · Higher Ethics and Devotion Series · 9 pages

The Song of Songs — Ἄσμα Ἀσμάτων — translated from the Greek of the Septuagint by Sir Lancelot Charles Lee Brenton, 2nd Baronet, 1807–1862, first published by Bagster & Sons Ltd., London, 1851. The frontispiece is Edmund Dulac's Wilderness is Paradise enow.

A head-note states the reading under which the text is offered, and it governs everything that follows: that Solomon was not a person but an emblem of Sol, that his whole life is a symbol of initiatory rites, that his concubines symbolised man's passions, and that his temple — his kingdom of heaven — is within every man's heart and not outside it. The text is then given plainly, in Brenton's rendering of the Greek rather than the familiar English of the Authorised Version, and the differences are visible from the first verses: the kisses of his mouth and the breasts better than wine, the ointments whose smell is better than all spices and the name that is ointment poured forth, the king who has brought the speaker into his closet. The famous line appears here as I am black, but beautiful, ye daughters of Jerusalem, with the explanation that follows — that she is dark because the sun has looked unfavourably upon her, her mother's sons having strove with her and made her keeper of the vineyards so that she did not keep her own. The exchange continues with the question of where the beloved tends his flock at noon, and the answer that begins If thou know not thyself — a phrase the allegorical reading naturally makes much of.

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