Dodi and Yahweh

Kingsmill ( The Song of Songs and the Eros of God: A Study in Biblical Intertextuality (Oxford Theological Monographs) ) notes that, like Esther, the Song of Songs has no “fully explicit reference to God,” but wisely adds “it has always been the way of poets to avoid explicit reference to their subjects, and the poet of the Song uses every device, known and unknown, to keep his meaning hidden from observation.”  In fact, she claims that “the principal clue to the meaning of the Song has, to the best of my knowledge, never been noticed.”

She means this: “there are twenty-six occurrences of the term ‘my beloved’ [ dodi ] in the Song, and that twenty-six is the numerical value of the divine name, YHWH.”

Within the Song, the identity of dodi is hidden, but Kingsmill suggests that readers saturated in Scripture would have another clue:

She cites Isaiah 5:1: “Let me sing, I pray, to my beloved, a song of my beloved concerning his vineyard.”  Clearly, this is a “song to God,” whose vineyard is the subject of the Song, and it is linked to the Song by the fact that this is “the only biblical verse outside the Song that uses the form dodi , ‘my beloved.’”

But there’s another layer to the Song/Isaiah 5 connection: “The first ‘beloved’ in this verse uses the name yedidi , which is very close to ‘beloved of Yah,’ yedidyah , the name given by Nathan the prophet to Solomon (2 Sam 12:25).”  Whose vineyard is Isaiah 5 about?  Yahweh’s certainly, but if Yahweh is identified as yedidi -Jedidiah-Solomon, then the Song is also about Solomon’s vineyard.  Vineyard, bride, temple, people are all overlapping concepts in the Song of Songs, and so too in the song of Isaiah.  And this of course all rushes into the parable of the vineyard told by Jesus, the greater Solomon.

The Solomonic connection is reinforced by the fact that Isaiah’s second use of “beloved” uses dodi , which, without the first person suffix (- i ) consists of the same three letters as the name “David.”  Kingsmill cites Raymond Tournay’s suggestion that the “beloved” ( dod ) of the Song is linked to David.  The word dod , without or without the suffix, is used 33x in the Song of Songs, and this is the number of years David reigned in Jerusalem (1 Kings 2:11).  Thus, “The messianic figure of David is central to Tournay’s understanding of the Song, and this link between the thirty-three occurrences of dod seems to be as important as the link between the twenty-six occurrences of ‘my beloved’ and the divine name.”

If I were a medieval monk, I’d note that 33 is also the putative age of Jesus at His death.