Reversals?

LaCocque is irritating.  He finds striking parallels between the Song and other biblical texts, but consistently says that the Song is undermining, subverting, reversing the other texts.  Very few of these reversals begin to resemble actual reversals.

Lamentations 4:1-8, for example, shares several terms with Song of Songs 5:6-10.  Whereas Jeremiah is mourning the desolation of a bride, the poet (he thinks, the poetess , another annoyance) of the Song, however, uses the same terms positively.  Therefore, the poet must be reversing the prophets.

No.  Not even close.

First, LaCocque assumes (wrong, in my view) that the Song is later that Jeremiah.  Second, even if the Song is later, the reversals are not subversions but variations on a theme.  If I say “Jerusalem is a city of gold,” and a generation later, when Jerusalem has been desolated by Babylonians, you say “Jerusalem’s gold is tarnished,” you’re not reversing me.  You are in fact agreeing with me – that Jerusalem is gold – but noting that the condition of the golden city has drastically changed.

The Song gives us an idealized portrait of lover-and-beloved, of Yahweh-and-Israel.  If the prophets say that the covenant marriage didn’t live up to the ideal, they aren’t rejecting the Song, and the Song is not rejecting them.  They both have the same ideal – joyous mutual possession of Yahweh and His bride.  Both – especially the prophets – lament the bride’s infidelities.