Song of Solomon 6:13

It is not clear at once who the speaker in this verse is. There must be either more than one person concerned in it, or quotation, for there is an evident interchange of question and answer. Probably we should, with Oettli, assign the verse to the bride. She is rehearsing all that happened on the eventful day when Solomon came upon her. When she found herself among the royal chariots she turned to flee, and the ladies called to her to return. Hearing the call, she stopped to ask, -Why would ye gaze at the Shulammite as upon the dance of Mahanaim"? See below.

O Shulammite] This name for the bride occurs here only, and cannot be a proper name, otherwise even in the vocative there would be no article, as there is here. It must, therefore, mean -maiden of Shulam" (cp. the Shunammite, 1 Kings 1:3). Not knowing her name, the courtiers call her by the name of the village near which they were when they saw her. This village was doubtless Shunem, in the plains of Esdraelon, which belonged to the tribe of Issachar. It has been identified by Robinson (Researches, 11. 325) with the modern Solam, a village in the neighbourhood of Jezreel on the southern slope of the east end of Little Hermon, as Nain is upon its northern slope. From the fact that the modern name has lfor n, it is probable that Shulam is a later form than Shunem.

that we may look upon thee The Heb. verb with the construction it has here means generally -to look upon with pleasure," but also simply -to gaze at" (cp. Isaiah 47:13). In the first clause here we have the first meaning, in the second the other according to many expositors. In this latter case, "What will ye see" should be What would ye gaze at? But it is better to keep the same meaning and translate, Why would ye look upon the Shulammite?

As it were the company of two armies The R.V. gives As upon the dance of Mahanaim? and probably this is the right translation. As she endeavours to escape, the Shulammite asks, would they stare at her as at a public spectacle. Some have thought that there is a reference here to the angel hosts from which Jacob is said to have named the place (Genesis 32:2). But there is no hint that there was anything resembling a dance in their movements. The probability, therefore, is that after Jacob's vision Mahanaim became a holy place, if it was not one before, and that God was there praised in the dance (cp. Judges 21:21), and that these dances had become famous either for their gracefulness or for their splendour. That Mahanaim was a place of importance, whether for political or for religious reasons or for both, is clear from the fact that Ishbosheth, Saul's son, set up his kingdom there, and that David fled thither when he was driven away from Jerusalem by Absalom. It was also a Levitical city. It lay to the N. of the Jabbok not far from the valley of the Jordan, on the heights above that valley. Its exact site is unknown, as it can hardly have been el-Michneas Robinson supposes, for that is too far both from the Jabbok and from the Jordan. That places were famed for dances is shewn by the name Abel-Mecholah= -Dance meadow." The R.V. has in the margin, "a dance of two companies." This might be supposed to be a dance specially worth seeing. Such a dance is described by Wetzstein, who says that in the Gof, or as Palgrave writes it, the Djowf, a region of N. Arabia, there is a variety of the dance called Sahqa, which is danced by two companies of men standing opposite each other, as in our country dances. But these Bedouin and Arab customs have no known connexion with the people west of the Jordan. Budde would change the dual into the plural and would read machanimand translate "as upon a camp dance," i.e. -a sword dance," which forms part of the marriage customs Wetzstein describes. But a campdance would be a very odd name for the sworddance, and though it is true that the place-name Mahanaim does not occur with the article, the article here may quite well define the dance, not Mahanaim.