The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

ALEXANDER The Targum of the Song of Songs 337
compares the position of Israel to God to that of a bride to a bridegroom,
because she (Israel) is dear to him, and he to her'. 27 However,
the historical schema which Saadia produces differs in detail from that
found in the Targum. Rashi was also drawn to a historical explanation:
'It is my opinion', he writes in his introduction,
that Solomon, with the aid of the holy spirit, foresaw that Israel was
going in the future to endure one exile after another, one destruction after
another, and that during this exile she would lament for her former glory
and remember that first love when she was God's special treasure out
of all the nations, saying, 'I will go and return to my first husband, for
it was better with me then than now' (Hos. 2.9). And she would call
to mind his mercies, and 'their treachery which they committed'
(Lev. 26.40), and the good things which he promised to give them in the
last days.
Rashi sets out his historical schema in his comments on Song 2.7: 'In
my view Solomon prophesied and spoke concerning the Exodus, the
giving of the Torah, the Tabernacle, the entry into the Land, the
Temple, the Babylonian exile, the Second Temple and its destruction.'
His detailed historical schema works out so close to that of the
Targum that it must be dependent on the Targum. 28 Ibn Ezra also
espoused a historical reading, and expounded it in his 'third gloss' to
the book, though again his schema is not identical to that in the
Targum. 29
The historical interpretation was taken up within the Christian
church. The earliest clearly attested example of it is in the thirteenth
century Latin Expositio hystorica Cantici Canticorum secundum
Salomonem—an edition of which was produced by Sarah Kamin and
Avrom Saltman. 30 This commentary, as Kamin and Saltman show, is
simply an adaptation and Christianization of Rashi. Thus there is clear
evidence linking the introduction of historicizing exegesis of the Song
among Christian scholars with Jewish sources. A little later Nicholas
27. See C.D. Ginsburg, The Song of Songs (London, 1857), pp. 35-38. There
is considerable doubt whether the commentary which Ginsburg quotes as Saadia's is
in fact by him.
28. I translate JTSA, New York, ms L778, as transcribed in S. Kamin and
A. Saltman, Secundum Salomonem: A Thirteenth Century Latin Commentary on the
Song of Solomon (Ramat Gan, 1989), Hebrew section, pp. 81ff.
29. Ginsburg, Song of Songs, pp. 44-46.
30. Kamin and Saltman, Secundum Salomonem (see n. 28).