Texts in Conversation
In Song of Songs, the woman asks the winds to spread her garden's fragrance. In 3 Enoch, winds carry that fragrance to the righteous in Eden, giving the lovers' garden a new meaning as a promise of future happiness.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Song of Solomon 4:16
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!
3 Enoch 23:18
Hebrew Book of Enoch
Pseudepigrapha, Apocalypses
And in the midst of the Garden they join together and blow from one side to the other and are perfumed with the spices of the Garden even from its remotest parts, until they separate from each other, and, filled with the scent of the pure spices, they bring the odour from the remotest parts of Eden and the spices of the Garden to the righteous and godly who in the time to come shall inherit the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Life, as it is written (Cant. iv. 16): "Awake, O north wind; and come, you south; blow upon my garden, that its spices may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden and eat his precious fruits".
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Notes and References
“... Interestingly, too, the lengthy passage that describes the winds (3 Enoch
23, §35)59 does not make use of the metrological imagery that I noted to be sig-
nificant in the Parables; rather, it brings together an array of biblical texts that
speak of the winds and combines their imagery. In fact, there is only one point
in 3 Enoch where scales/balance imagery is used, in 18:20 (§27):
Why is his name called Šoqedḥozi? Because he weighs men’s merits in
scales in the presence of the Holy One, blessed be he.60
So, while there appears to be more entanglement with the content of Parables
of Enoch and 2 Enoch than is seen in the biblical material or even in b.Ḥagigah, ...”
Macaskill, Grant
The Entangled Enoch: 2 Enoch and the Cultures of Late Antiquity
(p. 138) Brill, 2024
* 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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