Thomas and Other Syrian Literature
23
The Songs of
Solomon
I he Songs of Solomon (or Odes of Solomon) is one of the great
I wisdom poetry anthologies of antiquity. No more lyrically power-
JL. ful and imaginative collection of poems exists in ancient religions.
Their eclectic outsider's vision, the outrageously imaginative symbolism, the
conversation with the soul and the divine, the passionate embrace of love, and
the separation, search, and encounter with deity—all of these aspects make it
a major volume of religious poetry: a book of light, knowledge, and the en-
lightened voice.
Until 1909 only five odes from this very important hymnbook were
known. They appeared in the Pistis Sophia, a gnostic text preserved in Cop-
tic. Then, in 1909, the archaeologist and Syriac scholar J. Rendel Harris dis-
covered a four-hundred-year-old Syriac text of the collection. The original
language of the songs was probably Greek, although some scholars argue for
a Syriac original. Harris conjectured a Jewish-Christian origin from the first
century CE. Others suggest a Jewish original with a Christian redaction. Wal-
ter Bauer offers a third possibility, that the songs constitute a second-century
gnostic hymnbook.
Scholars disagree over how gnostic the Songs of Solomon really are. Many
scholars, from Harris and Gunkel to Bultmann, Jonas, Grant, and Rudolph,
take the songs to be gnostic, but others, such as Charlesworth, Chadwick,
Burkitt, Braun, and Worrell, do not see them as fully gnostic. In his book The