Texts in Conversation
The Song of Songs praises the beloved, compared to a garden of calamus, cinnamon, and a well of fresh water. 1 Enoch describes those same spices and a valley of water at the edge of the earth, reshaping that tradition into a cosmic setting.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Song of Solomon 4:14
Song of Songs
Hebrew Bible
12 The Lover to His Beloved: You are a locked garden, my sister, my bride; you are an enclosed spring, a sealed-up fountain. 13 Your shoots are a royal garden full of pomegranates with choice fruits: henna with nard, 14 nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon with every kind of spice, myrrh and aloes with all the finest spices. 15 You are a garden spring, a well of fresh water flowing down from Lebanon. 16 The Beloved to Her Lover: Awake, O north wind; come, O south wind! Blow on my garden so that its fragrant spices may send out their sweet smell. May my beloved come into his garden and eat its delightful fruit!
1 Enoch 30:3
Pseudepigrapha
1 And beyond these, I traveled far to the east, and I saw another place, a valley full of water. 2 There, there was a tree, the color of fragrant trees such as the mastic. 3 Along the sides of those valleys, I saw fragrant cinnamon. And beyond these, I continued to the east.
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Notes and References
... The spices which follow, 'cypresses with nards, nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices' take us immediately to Exodus 30: 23 and 34, where the 'chief spices' are listed: myrrh, cinnamon, and calamus for the holy anointing oil, and stacte, onycha, galbanum, and frankincense for the holy perfume. But the list of spices in the Song also takes us to 1 Enoch and to his journeyings in paradise where he sees aromatic trees which exhale the fragrance of frankincense and myrrh, cinnamon, galbanum, and stacte. The text goes on: 'And after these fragrant odours . . . I saw seven mountains full of choice nard and fragrant trees and cinnamon and pepper.' Then Enoch comes to the Garden of Righteousness, the pardes kushta of the Aramaic fragments, where 'beyond those trees' he sees the tree of wisdom 'whereof they eat and know great wisdom.' ...
Kingsmill, Edmée
The Song of Songs and the Eros of God: A Study in Biblical Intertextuality
(p. 161) Oxford University Press, 2009
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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