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Sunday 20 June 2010

Variations on שלמ in the Song

The sound of peace is in the Song but not untempered by some foxes. Here is the graph of all words where shin, lamed, and mem occur in that order.

If one was to search out this letter combination in the Song - what could one make of it?

So we have in order
  1. Jerusalem 7+1 times,
  2. Solomon 4+1+1 times, 
  3. Foxes twice,
  4. 'which all of them' twice,
  5. the Shulamite twice

If we eliminate the ones that are comprised of relative and personal pronoun with all (#4), we have only 4 words playing on the Shalom sound. I can see one could go somewhere with this.

Both structure and allusion are present in many of the texts I have read closely. Allusion is very easy to hear but may be misleading. Take for instance the comments on this post on this same subject. Carl asks for my 'umble opinion. And I immediately think of Uriah Heep - but is that what Carl meant? It would be very appropriate since in Dickens' Copperfield, David is called Dodi, my beloved in Hebrew and definitely a Song word, by his wife.  But one dropped h is not necessarily an allusion. How much do we need to establish allusion or structure in a Biblical text when we can't ask the authors?

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