intended for the stage. In this they succeeded more in displaying a flair for
creating musical comedies than in manifesting a gift for exegeting ancient texts.
But nineteenth century exegetes of the caliber of Franz Delitzsch, H. Ewald,
and S. R. Driver also championed the dramatic view of the Song and this
approach continues to enjoy some support in our century.
The dramatists are divided over the question of whether the
Shulammite’s true love is Solomon or a rustic lover to whom she remains
faithful in a triumph of pure love over the seductions of Solomon’s royal court.
The second plot obviously has greater dramatic tension and that perhaps is why
it is the more popular; but it has little else to commend it.
Critics of the dramatic view correctly observe that full-fledged drama was
unknown among the Hebrews or the Semites in general; some of them also
protest, but incorrectly, that the Song cannot be a drama because it is not a
literary unit. The real question vis-à-vis sober proponents of the dramatic view
is whether Canticles traces the love of Solomon and the Shulammite through a
temporal sequence of scenes from courtship to their wedding and marriage life.
Expounding the thesis that such a sequence does emerge in the Song,
Delitzsch locates the wedding in the third of six acts. The successive acts end at
2:7, 3:5, 5:1, 6:9, 8:4, and 8:14. Each act is divided into two scenes, the first
scenes ending at 1:8, 2:17, 3:11, 6:3, 7:6, and 8:7. Hand in hand with the
temporal sequence Delitzsch traces a thematic movement: “Solomon appears