The Lovers of Vence (Les Amoureux de Vence), Marc Chagall, 1957. Sotheby's
The Poetry of Beauty: What Does it Mean to See the Beloved?
Three descriptive poems in the Song of Songs wrestle with the experience of being in the beloved’s presence. In each case, the woman’s body is described using layered landscape imagery and complex, overlapping angles of vision. These poems ask us to consider what it means to see.
Published: April 2, 2020
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Last Updated: September 7, 2026
One other descriptive poem focuses on the body of the man, Song 5:10–16.
Translations are my own.
Editor’s note: See Aaron Demsky, “Looking through the Window: A Gendered Motif,” TheTorah (2017).
Intervening between these latter two descriptions is the descriptive poem of the young man (5:10–16). This poem, uttered from the perspective of the young woman, is an appreciation of the young man’s beauty that proceeds downward from the top of the head to the legs. Its metaphors have some overlap with the young woman’s (eyes like doves, v. 12; cheeks like beds of spices, v. 13) but the overall cast of the imagery seems to be drawn more from statuary than from local landscape: “His arms are rounded gold, set with jewels. His body is ivory work, encrusted with sapphires” (5:14). The final description of the young woman seems to benefit both from the previous two iterations, as well as dialogically from her description of the young man’s beauty—her speech prompts and perhaps models yet another—and more complete—answering glance.
The translation of “umbilical cord” for šārərēk is early, (LXX, Vulgate, Syriac), following Ezek 16:4. Pope and others connect šōr to Arabic sirr, meaning “secret,” suggestive of “vulva,” (Murphy, The Song of Songs, 182). Keel notes a visual overlap between navel and vulva in Syrian clay figurines of the female form (Keel, The Song of Songs, 232).
Taken as a geographical name, in keeping with the succession of final words in these lines, although it was translated “daughter of many” by LXX (thygatros pollon) and Vulgate (filiae multitudinis).
Ḥammûqê is a hapax legomenon, although it seems clearly related to ḥāmaq “turn,” which occurs in 5:6; Ḥălāʾîm is a hapax legomenon. The singular ḥălî occurs in Prov 25:12, parallel to “ring of gold”; and in Hos 2:15, it is another item of adornment. Both suggest a meaning “jewelry”; The form of ʾommân is a hapax. The meaning is made by way of the Akkadian ummânu and Aramaic ʾummân, meaning “artisan.” A variant form, ʾāmôn, occurs in Jer 52:15 and Prov 8:30; Ḥassahar is also a hapax legomenon, which likely specifies the kind or quality of the bowl. LXX and Vulgate understood it to refer to artisanal crafting; they render it as a “turned” bowl, translating it with the same word as for the young man’s hands in 5:14, which are “turned gold,” (Pope, Song of Songs, 618); Mezeg is also a hapax legomenon. This is an Aramaism (mzîg, mzāgāʾ) for Heb. mesek (Ps 75:9). It refers to mixed or diluted wine, the root becoming common in Rabbinic Hebrew (F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, “Late Linguistic Features of the Song of Songs,” in Perspectives on the Song of Songs, ed. Anselm Hagedorn [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005], 57).
For a fuller treatment of these themes, see Elaine T. James, Landscapes of the Song of Songs: Poetry and Place (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
