Exquisite Desire [Paperback]

Carey Ellen Walsh (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2000

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth for better is your love than wine, your anointing oils are fragrant, your name is better than perfume poured out. Therefore women love you! Draw me after you, let us run! Let the king bring me into his chambers. —Song of Songs 1:1–4

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Carey Ellen Walsh is Professor of Old Testament at Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee. She is also the author of The Fruit of the Vine: Viticulture in Ancient Israel and the Hebrew Bible.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From Chapter One (pre-publication version):

CHAPTER 1: A Question of Desire: Is There Some Accounting for Biblical Taste?

Let him kiss me with kisses of his mouth for better is your love than wine, your anointing oils are fragrant, your name is better than perfume poured out. Therefore women love you! Draw me after you, let us run! Let the king bring me into his chambers. —Song of Songs 1:1-4

God bless the feisty ancient woman who felt this fierce passion and excitement and somehow saw to it that it got preserved in the Bible. Without any introduction of characters or context, we glimpse a bald declaration of sexual want as the book’s opening. We are startled by what this biblical woman wantskisses and plenty of thembut why is a biblical book jumping right in, devoting itself to sexual desire? These opening verses are not even just the racy, preliminary lines meant to entice readers into the book—this biblical Song writhes for eight enjoyable, unnerving chapters on a woman’s desire and arousal. What does this Song tell us about ancient wants, and which of those wants persist today for readers of the Bible?

CANONICAL SETTING What is a book of erotica (that is, descriptions of sexual yearning between two lovers) doing in the Bible anyway? And how are we to copein embarrassed silence or in glee, essentially mimicking the very pleasure described in the Song? How can modern readers feast on this biblical treat and gain nourishment for their lives today? There is much that we still share with the ancient spirit, even though our means of expression have changed over the centuries. In this instance, what we share with the author(s) of the Song of Songs is a furtive fascination with desire. Desire fuels the motives behind many of our actions. In fact, a good part of our socialization process involves our desires, which often get scripted by the media through an onslaught of advertisements, movies, and cultural messages. What we see and hear over and over again in a culture becomes what we desire, yet in large measure, we never give our full consent to this external shaping of our desires. The powe! r of desire in our individual lives has never been examined.

But there is definitely interest. We like to see desire acted out or taken to the extreme in works of fiction, film, and television. How else can we explain the popularity of soap operas, fatal attractions, and the tragic romances from Romeo and Juliet to Titanic? There is comfort and safety, a vicarious thrill, gained from watching how desire propels an individual to act. We also, perhaps, hope to learn something about how to manage or even admit to our own desires. Art and popular culture offer a way to try on perspectives about desire. We awaken and then hone our own desires by reacting with a variety of expressions, from “I would never do that!” to “I bet I would do that,” to the starker expression “God, I want that.” What looks at first outrageous begins to elicit our own desires. The Song of Songs partly offers a vicarious journey of an ancient woman and man in a crush. But it does more than enact a desire. It lays bare desire’s impact on the individual and probes its co! mplexity as a force in life. It offers a depth charge into the nature of desire itself, one that the modern can learn from as much as the ancient Israelite must have. If, as Freud contended, desire drives everything or nearly everything we do, then coming to understand its force is certainly worth the effort and is easily worth an entire biblical book.

The Song of Songs is worth reading for its exploration of desire, not because of some blind adherence to an established tradition of biblical authority. Today, if we are to get anywhere with understanding the Bible or being open to its world, it has to earn our respect. The days are gone when it held authoritarian power in people’s lives, and the change is for the best. The options for responding to the Bible become real ones: dismissal or rediscovery. The Song offers insight into the nature of human desire, not just more biblical legislation with the force of the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount. Instead, it is investigative, probing, and wholly experiential. Impressively, it holds its own, as I shall show, with current post-modern theoreticians of desire such as Michel Foucault, Georges Bataille, and Julia Kristeva. My intent in this book is to demonstrate just what this ancient Hebrew Song can teach us about desire.

The desire in the Song of Songs has long taxed and excited the interpretive skills of biblical scholars over the centuries. The canonicity, that is, the authoritative sacredness, of this biblical book was early on disputed by the rabbis (Mishnah Yadaim 3:5), since it was unclear what specifically religious, legal, or wisdom material it contained. For there is in the eight chapters of this book of the Hebrew Bible no mention of God, no clear moral instruction, and nothing about the nationhood of Israel. The book lacked, in other words, much of what was identifiably “biblical” about the other writings already collected in the canon. And it contained much that was not in the other biblical books as well, namely sexual desire, fantasies of coupling, and descriptions of bodily arousal. In its plain sense, the book describes longing and ancient lust. This topic undoubtedly interests the historian bent on constructing a history of pleasure for the biblical world, but it also snags th! e curiosity of just about anyone who experiences lust today, a good two thousand years after the Song was written.

Product Details

• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: Fortress Press (November 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0800632494
• ISBN-13: 978-0800632496
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,292,097 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Sophisticated Study of Desire, July 26, 2006

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Rebecca Johnson "The Rebecca Review" (Washington State) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Exquisite Desire (Paperback)

Carey Ellen Walsh's philosophical discussion of desire is a stimulating intellectual exploration of what fuels our lives. Desire, often banned to some corner of our existence, if often unspoken and controlled by social norms. In the Song of Songs, desire reigns in all its beauty and captivating spirituality, leaving us wondering why we didn't recognize the importance of this book before.

"We are confessing our vulnerability to desire, admitting that it threatens our very selfhood. The paradox of human sexual desire is that we simultaneously want to be undone by love and fear it." ~ pg. 71

You may even start to find it humorous that for years people may be carrying a Bible around not knowing that within the pages a book of erotica (desire with emotion not only description of action) has been preserved through the ages. While many believe the poetry is also representative of our longing for a union with the divine, the metaphors indicate a very earthly and erotic masterpiece. The sensually charged language, once explained fully, takes our understanding of love much further than a general understanding of yearning and infatuation. After studying the poetry, the desire seems representative of a much deeper need, a bonding of soul mates.

"The woman's life force is marked through and through by her love for this man. In her case, it is not simply her romantic interest alongside other life interests. Instead, it characterizes the whole of her existence." ~ pg. 78

What many books don't indicate is that this is a book written by King Solomon who was wooing a shepherdess. The author does mention this briefly in "Woman's voice in the Canon." Could this Shulamite virgin have been his soul mate? The poetry makes more sense within the context of a couple meeting, marrying and then making a life together. The word "my spouse" is used in the KJV. Whether you decide this was written by a man or a woman, this ancient love poetry is still fascinating to study. A door is no longer a door, water takes on multiple meanings and nature is used as powerful symbols of the lover's desires.

This book gave me completely new insights into how and why we write poetry. This book takes forever to read because it is an intricate study, but if you enjoy poetry it may open up new worlds. Carey Ellen Walsh also discusses desire throughout history, briefly mentions Romeo and Juliet and delves into examples from the Odyssey. She does seem to have her own agenda throughout, but you can take what you need and take some of her ideas and think about them from her perspective.

A beautiful compliment to this book is the Song of Songs adapted and illustrated by Judith Ernst.

~The Rebecca Review