he Old Testament and the pantheistic mysticism of Islam, and
there is every reason to believe that, where the allegory takes a
form really analogous to Canticles, the original sense of these songs
was purely erotic.

[2] Repeated recently by Scholz, _Kommentar_, pp. iii. and iv.

[3] The chief passages of Jewish writings referring to this dispute
are Mishna _Jadaim_, iii. 5 and Tosifta _Sanhedrin_, xii. For other
passages see Gratz's _Commentary_, p. 115, and in control of his
criticism the introduction to the commentary of Delitzsch.

[4] The text of the Targum in the Polyglots and in Buxtorf's Rabbinic
Bible is not complete. The complete text is given in the Venice
editions, and in Lagarde's _Hagiographa Chaldaice_ (Lipsiae, 1873).
The Polyglots add a Latin version. A German version is given by
Riedel in his very useful book, _Die Auslegung des Hohenliedes_
(1898), which also reviews the interpretation of Canticles by
Hippolytus, Origen and later Greek writers.

[5] Ewald and others make this song a distinct scene in the action of
the poem, supposing that the author here exhibits the honourable form
of espousal by which Solomon thought to vanquish the scruples of the
damsel. This view, however, seems to introduce a complication foreign
to the plan of the book.

[6] Wetstein, _Zeitschrift f. Ethn._, 1873, pp. 270-302; quoted and
condensed by Budde as above in _Comm_. p. xvii.; for a fuller
reproduction of Wetstein in English see Harper, _The Song of Songs_,
pp. 74-76.

[7] For the connexion of the threshing-floor with marriage through
the idea of sexual fertility, we may compare many primitive ideas and
customs, such as those described by Frazer (_The Golden Bough_, ii.
p. 181 f., 186).

[8] Castelli (_Il Cantico dei Cantici_, 1892) has written a very
attractive little book on Canticles (quite apart from the Wetstein
development) regarded as "a poem formed by a number of dialogues
mutually related by a certain succession"; they require for their
understanding nothing but some indication of the speaker at each
transition (such as we find in codex A of the Septuagint).

[9] On the erotic meaning of many of the figures employed see the
notes of Haupt in _The American Journal of Semitic Languages_ (July
1902); also G. Jacob, _Das Hohelied_ (1902), who rightly protests
against the