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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - Song of Solomon 4:13 - 4:13
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13 What sprouts forth for thee is a park of pomegranates,
With most excellent fruits;
Cypress flowers with nards;
14 Nard and crocus; calamus and cinnamon,
With all kinds of incense trees;
Myrrh and aloes,
With all the chief aromatics.
The common subject to all down to Son 4:15 inclusive is שְׁלָחַיִךְ (“what sprouts for thee” = “thy plants”), as a figurative designation, borrowed from plants, of all the “phenomena and life utterances” (Böttch.) of her personality. “If I only knew here,” says Rocke, “how to disclose the meaning, certainly all these flowers and fruits, in the figurative language of the Orient, in the flower-language of love, had their beautiful interpretation.” In the old German poetry, also, the phrase bluomen brechen to break flowers was equivalent to: to enjoy love; the flowers and fruits named are figures of all that the amata offers to the amator. Most of the plants here named are exotics; פַּרְדֵּס (heaping around, circumvallation, enclosing) is a garden or park, especially with foreign ornamental and fragrant plants - an old Persian word, the explanation of which, after Spiegel, first given in our exposition of the Song, 1851 (from pairi = περί, and dêz, R. diz, a heap), has now become common property (Justi's Handb. der Zendsprache, p. 180). מְגָדִים פְּרִי (from מֶגֶד, which corresponds to The Arab. mejd, praise, honour, excellence; vid., Volck under Deu 33:13) are fructus laudum, or lautitiarum, excellent precious fruits, which in the more modern language are simply called מְגָדִים (Shabbath 127b, מיני מגדים, all kinds of fine fruits); cf. Syr. magdo, dried fruit. Regarding כֹּפֶר, vid., under Son 1:14; regarding מֹר, under Son 1:13; also regarding נֵרְדְּ, under Son 1:12. The long vowel of נֵרְדְּ corresponds to the Pers. form nârd, but near to which is also nard, Indian nalada (fragrance-giving); the ē is thus only the long accent, and can therefore disappear in the plur. For נרדים, Grätz reads יְרָדִים, roses, because the poet would not have named nard twice. The conjecture is beautiful, but for us, who believe the poem to be Solomonic, is inconsistent with the history of roses (vid., under Son 2:1), and also unnecessary. The description moves forward by steps rhythmically.
כַּרְוֹכם is the crocus stativus, the genuine Indian safran, the dried flower-eyes of which yield the safran used as a colour, as an aromatic, and also as medicine; safran is an Arab. word, and means yellow root and yellow colouring matter. The name כַּרְוֹכם, Pers. karkam, Arab. karkum, is radically Indian, Sanscr. kunkuma. קָנֶה, a reed (from קָנָה, R. qn, to rise up, viewed intrans.),
(Note: In this general sense of “reed” (Syn. arundo) the word is also found in the Gr. and Lat.: κάνναι (κάναι), reed-mats, κάνεον κάναστρον, a wicker basket, canna, canistrum, without any reference to an Indo-Germ. verbal stem, and without acquiring the specific signification of an aromatic plant.)
viz., sweet reed, acorus calamus, which with us now grows wild in marshes, but is indigenous to the Orient.
קִנָּמנֹן is the laurus cinnamomum, a tree indigenous to the east coast of Africa and Ceylon, and found later also on the Antilles. It is of the family of the laurineae, the inner bark of which, peeled off and rolled together, is the cinnamon-bark (cannella, French cannelle); Aram. קוּנְמָא, as also the Greek κιννάμοομον and κίνναμον, Lat. (e.g., in the 12th book of Pliny) cinnamomum and cinnamum, are interchanged, from קָנַם, probably a secondary formation from קָנָה (like בָּם, whence בָּמָה, from בָּא), to which also Syr. qenûmā', ὑπόστασις, and the Talm.-Targ. קִנּוּם קוֹנָם, an oath (cf. קְיָם), go back, so that thus the name which was brought to the west by the Phoenicians denoted not the tree, but the reed-like form of the rolled dried bark. As “nards” refer to varieties of the nard, perhaps to the Indian and the Jamanic spoken of by Strabo and others, so “all kinds of incense trees” refers definitely to Indo-Arab. varieties of the incense tree and its fragrant resin; it has its name fro the white and transparent seeds of this its resin (cf. Arab. lubân, incense and benzoin, the resin of the storax tree, לִבְנֶה); the Greek λίβανος, λιβανωτός (Lat. thus, frankincense, from θύω), is a word derived from the Pheonicians.
אֲהָלוֹת or אֲהָלִים (which already in a remarkable way was used by Balaam, Num 24:6, elsewhere only since the time of Solomon) is the Semitized old Indian name of the aloe, agaru or aguru; that which is aromatic is the wood of the aloe-tree (aloëxylon agallochum), particularly its dried root (agallochum or lignum aloës, ξυλαλόη, according to which the Targ. here: אלואין אכסיל, after the phrase in Aruch) mouldered in the earth, which chiefly came from farther India.
(Note: Vid., Lassen's Ind. Alterthumsk. I 334f. Furrer, in Schenkel's Bib. Lex., understands אהלות of the liliaceae, indigenous to Palestine as to Arabia, which is also called aloë. But the drastic purgative which the succulent leaves of this plant yield is not aromatic, and the verb אחל “to glisten,” whence he seeks to derive the name of this aloe, is not proved. Cf. besides, the Petersburg Lex. under aguru (“not difficult”), according to which is this name of the amyris agallocha, and the aquilaria agallocha, but of no liliaceae. The name Adlerholz (“eagle-wood”) rests on a misunderstanding of the name of the Agila tree. It is called “Paradiesholz,” because it must have been one of the paradise trees (vid., Bereshith rabba under Gen 2:8). Dioskorides says of this wood: θυμιᾶται ἀντὶ λιβανωτοῦ; the Song therefore places it along with myrrh and frankincense. That which is common to the lily-aloe and the wood-aloe, is the bitter taste of the juice of the former and of the resinous wood of the latter. The Arab. name of the aloe, ṣabir, is also given to the lily-aloe. The proverbs: amarru min eṣ-ṣabir, bitterer than the aloe, and es-sabr sabir, patience is the aloe, refer to the aloe-juice.)
עִם, as everywhere, connects things contained together or in any way united (Son 5:1; cf. Son 1:11, as Psa 87:4; cf. 1Sa 16:12). The concluding phrase וגו כָּל־רַ, cum praestantissimis quibusque aromatibus, is a poet. et cetera. ראֹשׁ, with the gen. of the object whose value is estimated, denotes what is of meilleure qualité; or, as the Talm. says, what is אלפא, ἄλφα, i.e., number one. Ezek; Eze 27:22, in a similar sense, says, “with chief (ראֹשׁ) of all spices.”