RE: Help with a Christian girlfriend
January 14, 2012 at 9:45 am
(This post was last modified: January 14, 2012 at 10:39 am by The Grand Nudger.)
Yep, that's the preamble. Has nothing to do with the narrative proper. (By the way, it is not common for a feminine character to speak in the masculine, in fact it's incredibly uncommon as women assuming a masculine tenor (even in cases of the written word) was taboo. Nowhere else in any of the OT text does a female assume the masculine. So much for hand-waving that eh?
How about we take a look at the end of the song of songs? There's a great little exchange after the deed is done.
barach (baw-rakh')
to bolt, i.e. figuratively, to flee suddenly -- chase (away); drive away, fain, flee (away), put to flight, make haste, reach, run away, shoot.
This would be 8:13-14. It's a sentiment that is being echoed from 2:14, where "she" urges him to run away before sunrise so that he will not be caught. 2:17. There is actually a wedding scene in the song, the wedding of Solomon, which is swiftly followed by the male speaker criticizing Solomon, making it plainly clear that he is not Solomon himself. It is easily understood as imaginative play and flirting, and of course the spell is switfly broken. The "female" refers to "her" lover as a king for a few verses and then suddenly demotes him to a shepherd as the change from 1:3-1:7 again makes plainly clear. Fantasy is difficult to maintain, the strength of the narrative is in how descriptive it can be, how many wonderful metaphors it invokes, while actually portraying a very familiar picture of desire and sexual interaction (including passive aggressive flirting and word-play...this "female" was a dirty bitch...and I love it). You know, along the lines of the above, the active role the female takes as initiator (speaking in the masculine) is very surprising throughout the entirety of the text. She's being the dominant one, this is surprising only if you translate masculine pronouns as "she" to make it seem as though it isn't two men having a conversation with each other. No "she" wrote this text to begin with, and is not entirely original work, as it echoes the style and metaphors of a great many other erotic poems of the ancient near east and represents an example of a style that was already flourishing by the time this was incorporated into the text.
As a side note, the Song is one of those portions of the text that I particularly enjoy, as it is (at least in part) authentic. 4Q108 contains a few lines of the song establishing it as part of the tradition going at least that far back. It's gone through many "translations" as the wind of popular doctrine has changed over time, and it's one of those examples where we have a literal mountain of editing over the centuries. It was a text that was determined to need such massive editing (by so many different editors), and yet the text itself is so good that the editors just couldn't bring themselves to trash it entirely. You know it's only very recently that christian denominations have even begun to acknowledge it's erotic dimension? That may seem strange to us, considering the narrative, but one has to keep in mind that there was a great urge to remove any extolling of the beauty of "acts of the flesh" for a good span of time. This was due to the influence of hellenized culture with it's strong stance against anything material.
So, pray tell, what argument am I making and why is it circular? I'm just trying to determine at what point you chose not to like penis, and whether or not it would be possible for you to choose to like penis. You made the claim, stop wriggling. Was there some point in your life when you were indifferent? When you said to yourself "meh, I could go either way". How did you decide to be a heterosexual, what tipped the scales? Do you will each and every hard-on you get to happen?
What's up buddy, you toss around words like "disgusting"...or "condemned by god", but you can't take a little turnabout? Disappointing.
How about we take a look at the end of the song of songs? There's a great little exchange after the deed is done.
barach (baw-rakh')
to bolt, i.e. figuratively, to flee suddenly -- chase (away); drive away, fain, flee (away), put to flight, make haste, reach, run away, shoot.
This would be 8:13-14. It's a sentiment that is being echoed from 2:14, where "she" urges him to run away before sunrise so that he will not be caught. 2:17. There is actually a wedding scene in the song, the wedding of Solomon, which is swiftly followed by the male speaker criticizing Solomon, making it plainly clear that he is not Solomon himself. It is easily understood as imaginative play and flirting, and of course the spell is switfly broken. The "female" refers to "her" lover as a king for a few verses and then suddenly demotes him to a shepherd as the change from 1:3-1:7 again makes plainly clear. Fantasy is difficult to maintain, the strength of the narrative is in how descriptive it can be, how many wonderful metaphors it invokes, while actually portraying a very familiar picture of desire and sexual interaction (including passive aggressive flirting and word-play...this "female" was a dirty bitch...and I love it). You know, along the lines of the above, the active role the female takes as initiator (speaking in the masculine) is very surprising throughout the entirety of the text. She's being the dominant one, this is surprising only if you translate masculine pronouns as "she" to make it seem as though it isn't two men having a conversation with each other. No "she" wrote this text to begin with, and is not entirely original work, as it echoes the style and metaphors of a great many other erotic poems of the ancient near east and represents an example of a style that was already flourishing by the time this was incorporated into the text.
As a side note, the Song is one of those portions of the text that I particularly enjoy, as it is (at least in part) authentic. 4Q108 contains a few lines of the song establishing it as part of the tradition going at least that far back. It's gone through many "translations" as the wind of popular doctrine has changed over time, and it's one of those examples where we have a literal mountain of editing over the centuries. It was a text that was determined to need such massive editing (by so many different editors), and yet the text itself is so good that the editors just couldn't bring themselves to trash it entirely. You know it's only very recently that christian denominations have even begun to acknowledge it's erotic dimension? That may seem strange to us, considering the narrative, but one has to keep in mind that there was a great urge to remove any extolling of the beauty of "acts of the flesh" for a good span of time. This was due to the influence of hellenized culture with it's strong stance against anything material.
So, pray tell, what argument am I making and why is it circular? I'm just trying to determine at what point you chose not to like penis, and whether or not it would be possible for you to choose to like penis. You made the claim, stop wriggling. Was there some point in your life when you were indifferent? When you said to yourself "meh, I could go either way". How did you decide to be a heterosexual, what tipped the scales? Do you will each and every hard-on you get to happen?
What's up buddy, you toss around words like "disgusting"...or "condemned by god", but you can't take a little turnabout? Disappointing.
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