Does Song of Solomon 1:5 say Solomon was Black?

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1. Was Solomon Black? Song of Solomon 1:5 in Hebrew Text, Grammar, and Reception History

   1. Introduction

   Among the passages most frequently cited in contemporary discussions of the ethnicity of biblical figures, few have generated as much debate as Song of Solomon 1:5–6:

   “I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me: my mother’s children were angry with me; they made me the keeper of the vineyards; but mine own vineyard have I not kept.” (KJV)

   In modern Hebrew Israelite interpretations, these words have frequently been employed in arguments concerning Solomon’s complexion. Separately, the Ethiopian Solomonic tradition has developed a rich account of Solomon’s relationship with the Queen of Sheba and the ancestry of the Ethiopian royal line. These traditions raise related but distinct questions, and their respective claims must not be conflated. This chapter re-examines the passage on three levels: the grammar of the Hebrew text, the lexical meaning of its color vocabulary, and its reception in several interpretive traditions (the Targum, medieval Jewish exegesis, modern critical scholarship, and the Ethiopian Kebra Nagast). The argument advanced here is that each level of evidence, when examined on its own terms, converges on the same conclusion: Song 1:5–6 is the speech of a woman describing her own sun-darkened beauty to the man she loves. It is not a statement about Solomon, and it is not an explicit statement of ethnic identity.

   2. The Question of the Speaker: Song 1:2–6

   The first question any reader of the Song must settle is also the one most often passed over: who is speaking? The Song is a dramatic poem without narrative markers, and the attribution of its speeches depends entirely on grammatical and contextual clues. In the case of 1:2–6, those clues are unusually clear.

   2.1 The grammatical evidence

   The speaker’s gender is established most directly by the feminine singular adjectives of verse 5: שְׁחוֹרָה (sheḥôrâ, “dark”) and נָאוָה (nāʾwâ, “lovely”). It should be stated precisely what kind of evidence this is: Hebrew first-person pronouns and verbal forms do not ordinarily distinguish masculine from feminine speakers, and nothing in the first-person grammar of verses 2–6 marks the speaker’s gender one way or the other. The gender of the speaker is established by the adjectives of verse 5 — both feminine singular, predicating qualities of the speaker identified by the first-person pronoun אֲנִי (“I”) — and it is confirmed by the feminine form שְׁחַרְחֹרֶת (“darkened”) in verse 6. The form of address that follows, בְּנוֹת יְרוּשָׁלִָם (“daughters of Jerusalem”), identifies the audience as female and sets the scene of the speech, but it is not in itself evidence of the speaker’s gender; the adjectives carry that evidence. Verse 2 sets the scene: the desire of a woman for a man — “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is better than wine.”

   2.2 The contextual evidence

   Verse 4 supplies important contextual confirmation: “The king has brought me into his chambers” (1:4a). The speaker is brought into the chambers of the king; she therefore cannot be the king. Verse 4 also counsels caution, however: the plural clauses with which the verse closes — “we will rejoice and be glad in you; we will remember your love more than wine” — are assigned by most modern commentators and translations to a chorus (the daughters of Jerusalem or the woman’s companions), and the Song divides its speeches without explicit markers. The argument of this chapter therefore does not depend on treating 1:2–6 as a single uninterrupted speech. What matters is the attribution of verse 5 itself. The prevailing interpretation among modern commentators identifies the speaker of verse 5 as the woman, whatever position one takes on the division of the surrounding dialogue; and the feminine adjectives supply direct grammatical evidence for that attribution — independent of any disputed allocation of the preceding speeches, and independent grounds for rejecting its attribution to Solomon.
   Nor is any shift of speaker recoverable between verses 4a and 5. Verse 5 addresses the daughters of Jerusalem — the same audience in view in verse 6, where the speaker recounts how her brothers set her to keep the vineyards — and verse 5b takes up the thread of verse 4 directly, comparing herself to the curtains of “Solomon,” the very king into whose chambers she has just been brought. The speaker of verse 5 is the woman of verses 4a and 6. This is likewise the nearly unanimous judgment of modern commentators (Fox 1985; Exum 2005; Longman 2001; Alter 2019).

   2.3 Objection and response

   An objection remains available to the reading that assigns verse 5 to Solomon: if speeches shift elsewhere in the chapter — as they plausibly do at 1:4b — perhaps verse 5 alone is his. The objection fails, because it can be sustained only by severing verse 5 from its own immediate context. A speech attribution that posits a change of speaker at precisely the point the feminine adjectives appear misconstrues the evidence. The adjectives are themselves grammatical markers, and they mark the speaker as female; the problem with the attribution is not the absence of a marker but the presence of a contradiction. Speech shifts in the Song are recoverable from the grammar and the situation; the attribution of verse 5 to Solomon runs counter to both. It is not an interpretation of the text but an imposition upon it.

   3. The Identity of the Woman

   The text itself never names the woman. In 6:13 she is called the Shulammite (הַשּׁוּלַמִּית, haššûlammît), but the meaning of the designation is disputed: it has been connected with the town of Shunem (or an unknown Shulem), while other interpreters have associated it linguistically with the name Solomon (from the root šlm). What no proposal establishes is an ethnic identification: the poem does not call her the Queen of Sheba, a Cushite, or a member of any named people. Notably, the one identifier the poem never gives her is an ethnic one.
   Later traditions filled the silence variously: the Targum and much of the rabbinic tradition read her allegorically as Israel; a stream of imaginative tradition, ancient and modern, identified her with the Queen of Sheba; and the Ethiopian tradition later developed this association as well (see §8 below) — though as a reception-level identification resting on liturgical usage, rather than as an interpretation grounded in the Hebrew text. These are reception traditions of considerable interest in their own right, but none of them is a claim made by the Hebrew text, and none of them can be retrojected into verse 5 as evidence of what the verse says.

   4. “Dark and Beautiful”: Translation and Lexical Analysis of 1:5–6

   4.1 The syntax of the line

   The Hebrew of 1:5 runs: שְׁחוֹרָה אֲנִי וְנָאוָה — sheḥôrâ ʾănî wĕnāʾwâ, literally, “dark am I, and lovely.” Two translation decisions follow. First, the conjunction ו (waw) may be translated either conjunctively (“and”: NRSV, NJPS) or adversatively (“but”: KJV), depending on context. The KJV’s “black, but comely” is therefore grammatically defensible, particularly in view of verse 6, where the woman anticipates an unfavourable response to her appearance. Nevertheless, the Hebrew does not require an adversative interpretation, and renderings such as “dark and lovely” preserve the possibility that the two qualities are presented together without inherent opposition. In either case, the woman affirms her beauty rather than allowing her darkened appearance to diminish it. Second, the adjective שָׁחוֹר (šāḥôr) denotes darkness of color — “dark,” “black” — and modern versions increasingly prefer “dark” to avoid the anachronistic associations of “black” as a racial category in English. The similes that follow — “as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon” — are comparisons of appearance, not genealogy. The black goat-hair tents of the nomadic Qedarites were proverbial for their swarthy color; the point is descriptive, not ethnic.

   4.2 The cause of the darkness

   Verse 6 supplies the explanation: אַל־תִּרְאוּנִי שֶׁאֲנִי שְׁחַרְחֹרֶת שְׁזָפַתְנִי הַשָּׁמֶשׁ — “Do not gaze at me because I am dark, for the sun has scorched me.” The verb שָׁזַף (šāzap) denotes the effect of sustained exposure — to tan, to scorch, to burn dark (HALOT; BDB). The woman’s darkened appearance is explicitly associated with exposure to the sun.
   The verse, however, supplies a second detail that should not be passed over: “my mother’s children were angry with me; they made me the keeper of the vineyards, but my own vineyard I have not kept” (1:6). Her darkened skin is thus doubly situational — the consequence of imposed outdoor labor as well as of climate. As Exum observes, the daughters of Jerusalem stare at her precisely because her appearance marks her social position: she has been put to work in the sun while others remained sheltered (Exum 2005, ad loc.). Fox reads the image more simply as pastoral realism — a country girl, sun-tanned from outdoor life (Fox 1985, ad loc.) — but both commentators agree on the essential point: the darkness described is a condition she has suffered, not an ancestry she proclaims. One qualification belongs here: the verse establishes that the sun darkened her; it does not disclose what her complexion would have been apart from that exposure, since sustained sun darkens any skin. Nor does the argument of this chapter require the stronger claim. The relevance of verse 6 to the question at hand is simply that the description belongs to the woman and her circumstances — not to Solomon.
   The poetic force of the line lies exactly here. Against the social shame attached to her appearance — the stares of the daughters of Jerusalem — the woman asserts her beauty on her own terms: “I am dark, and lovely.” The verse is a statement of dignity in the face of contempt, not a claim of ethnic identity.

   4.3 The vineyard motif

   The vineyard imagery of verse 6, often read in isolation, belongs to a thread that runs through the entire poem and confirms the attribution of the speech. Near the poem’s close, the woman declares: “Solomon had a vineyard at Baal-hamon… my vineyard, my very own, is for myself” (8:11–12). The keeper of vineyards who neglected “her own vineyard” in 1:6 reclaims that vineyard as her own in 8:12. The opening and closing of the Song thus frame the woman’s voice between two vineyard sayings — and in both, Solomon is spoken about, by her, never speaking himself.

   5. Reception History I: The Targum to the Song

   The Targum to the Song of Songs (Targum Šîr haššîrîm), composed in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic in a form that reached its final shape in the early medieval period, reads the entire Song allegorically as the history of Israel’s relationship with God. Its treatment of 1:5–6 ranks among the earliest surviving sustained interpretations of these verses and is instructive precisely because the possibility that Solomon is describing his own complexion never occurs to it.
   On 1:5, the Targum reads:

   “When the House of Israel made the [Golden] Calf, their faces grew dark like the children of Cush (Ethiopians) who dwell in the tents of Qedar. And when they turned in repentance and their guilt was pardoned, the splendor of their faces’ glory increased like the angels, because they made the curtains for the Tabernacle and the Presence of the Most High dwelt among them.” (Targum Šîr haššîrîm 1:5)

   The interpretation turns on a comparison: Israel’s faces at the incident of the Calf are said to have grown dark like the Cushites. The comparison is rhetorical rather than ethnographic — the Targum is describing a change in Israel’s moral condition, not the original complexion of a population — and the darkness marks a moral state, not a constitution. On 1:6, the allegory continues:

   “The Assembly of Israel said to the nations: ‘Do not despise me because I am darker than you… for false prophets caused the powerful fury of the Most High to be drawn down upon me. They taught me to worship your idols…'” (Targum Šîr haššîrîm 1:6)

   Here again the darkness signifies idolatry and its consequences — Israel’s lapse and the nations’ contempt — and the restoration of light signifies repentance. The midrash on the Song develops the same allegorical pattern: Song of Songs Rabbah (1:5) reads “black” as Israel’s degradation and “comely” as her redemption [translation to be verified against a standard edition]. Two observations follow. First, the Targum’s exegesis is metaphorical through and through; it finds no racial meaning in the verse because it is not looking for one. Second, the Targum attributes the declaration of 1:5 to the Assembly of Israel, not to Solomon; the “king” remains the Holy One, and no complexion is assigned to Solomon even allegorically. Among the earliest extended interpretations of our passage, the Targum is an important witness to the Jewish reception of the Song: although its interpretation is allegorical rather than a grammatical analysis of the literal text, it offers no support for the claim that Solomon describes his own complexion in Song 1:5. (On the Targum’s date relative to the earliest surviving Christian commentaries on the Song — those of Hippolytus and Origen — see the introduction to Alexander’s translation.)

   6. Reception History II: Rashi

   Rashi (R. Solomon ben Isaac of Troyes, d. 1105), whose commentary on the Song follows the rabbinic allegorical framework while attending closely to the plain sense of the language, is equally instructive on the literal level. On 1:5–6 he writes, in the standard rendering:

   “My blackness and my ugliness are not from my mother’s womb, but from the sun’s tanning, for that blackness can easily be whitened by staying in the shade.”

   Two features of this remark deserve attention. First, Rashi, like the Targum, treats the darkness as acquired — explicitly not innate (“not from my mother’s womb”) — and explains it by reference to the sun in verse 6. Second, Rashi assumes, without argument, that the speaker is the woman; the possibility that Solomon might be describing himself does not arise. Medieval Jewish exegesis thus presents, across two very different interpretive frameworks, the same unbroken consensus: the darkness is situational, and it belongs to the woman’s speech.

   7. The Verse in Modern Scholarship

   Modern scholarship has treated Song 1:5–6 extensively, and the discussion is worth surveying briefly — both because it grounds the argument of this chapter and because it marks the limits of what the text can settle.

   7.1 Mainstream critical scholarship

   The standard critical commentaries are in agreement on the essential exegesis: the speaker of 1:5 is the woman, and her darkness is attributed to the sun (Pope 1977; Murphy 1990; Keel 1994; Fox 1985; Exum 2005; Longman 2001; Alter 2019, ad loc.). Within that consensus there are differences of emphasis. Exum draws attention to the social dimension of the verse: the woman’s sun-darkened skin marks her as one who has labored outdoors, and the stares of the daughters of Jerusalem register class contempt (Exum 2005). LaCocque presses the imagery further, reading the bride’s darkness as one feature of her portrayal as a woman of lower status on the margins of the poem’s social world (LaCocque 1998). Fox and Murphy treat the verse as pastoral realism — a country girl darkened by outdoor life (Fox 1985; Murphy 1990). What none of these readings claims is that verse 5 is spoken by Solomon. The attribution of the speech to the woman is not a contested question in the critical literature.

   7.2 The woman’s own ethnicity: a question this chapter does not decide

   A distinct strand of scholarship, associated especially with African American, womanist, and Afrocentric interpretation, has read the bride as a woman of dark — in some formulations Black — complexion, and has read her declaration as a defiant assertion of beauty against a colorist gaze (Felder 1991; Weems 1998; Bailey 2003; Page 2010). These readings differ in kind from the claim examined in this chapter: they concern the woman’s appearance and her social world, not Solomon’s self-description. It is therefore important to state precisely what the present argument does and does not establish. Nothing in the exegesis of §4 rules out the possibility that the woman was dark-skinned by ancestry as well as by sun: the adjectives describe her present appearance and give no account of her parentage. What the argument establishes is the narrower and, for its purpose, sufficient point: whoever this woman was, and whatever her complexion, verse 5 is her speech. As a witness to Solomon’s appearance, it is inadmissible.

   7.3 Blackness in antiquity

   Finally, a body of scholarship on the ancient construction of blackness supplies relevant background. Goldenberg’s study of Cush, Ethiopian identity, and blackness in biblical and early Jewish literature illustrates the importance of distinguishing ancient descriptions of physical appearance from modern racial classifications (Goldenberg 2003). Although physical characteristics could be associated with particular peoples in antiquity, the significance of such descriptions must be determined from their literary and historical contexts. In Song 1:5–6, the language concerns the woman’s appearance and circumstances; it does not identify her ancestry, and still less does it describe Solomon’s complexion.

   8. Reception History IV: The Ethiopian Tradition and the Kebra Nagast

   The oldest and most venerable body of tradition to connect Solomon with Ethiopia does not, on closer inspection, claim precisely what is sometimes attributed to it. It belongs to one of Africa’s oldest Christian civilizations and deserves to be treated with the seriousness due to a living religious tradition — and, equally, to be described with precision.
   The Kebra Nagast (“Glory of Kings”), Ethiopia’s national epic, was composed in Ge’ez and received its final form in the fourteenth century, though it draws on much older materials. It narrates that Makeda, queen of Sheba, journeyed to Jerusalem, was received by Solomon, and bore his son Menelik I; that Menelik later visited his father and returned to Ethiopia accompanied by the firstborn sons of Israel’s nobles; and that the Ark of the Covenant itself was carried to Axum, where Ethiopian tradition holds it remains to this day. On the basis of this narrative, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and the Solomonic dynasty — which ruled, with interruptions, until 1974 — grounded both their religious identity and their political legitimacy in descent from Solomon and the queen of Sheba. An association between the bride of the Song of Songs and Makeda is widely repeated in discussions of the Ethiopian tradition, and it gave the “dark and lovely” bride of 1:5 a natural referent in the queen who had come to Solomon from the south; but this association is a matter of later liturgical and homiletic usage, and it must be documented from identifiable Ethiopian sources before it can bear evidential weight (see note 6).
   This tradition must be respected on its own terms; it is not the subject of this chapter’s criticism. But it must also be correctly located in the history of interpretation, for three reasons.
   1. Chronology. The Kebra Nagast postdates the composition of the Song by some two millennia. It is a work of theological legitimation — of a church, a dynasty, and a nation — and its account of Solomon belongs to that genre, not to the exegesis of the Hebrew text.
   2. The direction of the claim. It is important to distinguish what the tradition actually claims. The Kebra Nagast claims descent from Solomon — the grounding of a dynasty and a church in his line. It does not claim that Solomon was a dark-complexioned man, and it nowhere has Solomon describe his own appearance. What enters Ethiopia through Menelik is the Solomonic lineage, not a description of Solomon’s complexion; genealogy and physical description are different kinds of claim, and only the former is at stake in the epic. The epic does not have Solomon say “I am dark”; it has Solomon father a son who will carry his line to Ethiopia.
   3. The nature of the identification. The reading of the Song’s bride as Makeda is a liturgical-allegorical association, of the same kind as the Targum’s identification of the bride with Israel — a homiletic move, not a lexical or grammatical argument about what verse 5 says.
   The Ethiopian tradition is therefore best understood, provisionally, as a chapter in the reception of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba — the epic’s principal subject — and, through the later association of the bride with Makeda, in the reception of the Song as well. It is not evidence of what the Hebrew of 1:5 means, and until the liturgical sources for the bride–Makeda association are documented, the tradition’s bearing on the Song must be regarded as suggestive rather than established. The claim that “Solomon described himself as a Black man in Song 1:5” remains, as a statement about the biblical text, a misreading.

   9. The Female Voice Confirmed: Song 1:13

   A further confirmation of the speaker’s identity comes from later in the chapter, at a point where the poetic imagery becomes anatomically specific. Verse 13 reads: “A bundle of myrrh is my beloved to me, that lies all night between my breasts.” The noun rendered “breasts” is שָׁדַיִם (šādayim), a dual form that in every one of its biblical occurrences denotes a woman’s breasts — it recurs in the Song at 4:5 and 7:3 (“your two breasts are like two fawns…”) — and is never used of the male chest.
   The speaker of verse 13 is therefore a woman. Strictly, the verse identifies the speaker of verse 13; it does not by itself prove who speaks every preceding verse. But within chapter 1 the female voice of 1:13 is continuous with the voice heard in 1:5–6: she who was brought into the king’s chambers (1:4a) and who calls herself dark and lovely (1:5) now keeps her beloved between her breasts (1:13). Any reading that assigns the chapter’s speeches to Solomon — or, in some modern theological appropriations, to a male messianic figure — would require a male speaker referring to his own breasts in erotic imagery, for which the poem’s usage of šādayim (the female breast: 4:5; 7:3; cf. Ezek 16:7; Hos 2:4) offers no support. The verse functions as corroboration of §2 — a second witness, not a second proof. The grammatical settlement of the question remains the feminine adjectives of 1:5.

   10. The Portrait of the Beloved: Song 5:10–11

   Later in the poem the woman paints her beloved in the conventional language of the ancient waṣf, the descriptive catalogue of the beloved’s beauty. The passage is sometimes cited as a counter-image — a description, allegedly, of a “Black” man — and is therefore worth examining in the Hebrew.

   10.1 “Radiant and ruddy”

   “My beloved is צַח וְאָדוֹם (ṣaḥ wĕʾādôm)… the chiefest among ten thousand” (5:10). The KJV renders “white and ruddy”; modern versions (NJPS, NRSV, NIV) prefer “radiant and ruddy,” understanding צַח here as brightness — gleaming, dazzling — rather than skin pigmentation. “White” (KJV) remains within the word’s semantic range, which spans “white,” “bright,” and “radiant,” so the versions differ in nuance rather than in substance; in neither rendering does the word function as an ethnic designation. The second adjective, אָדוֹם (ʾādôm), means “red” or “ruddy.” Within the poetic description it contributes to the portrayal of the beloved’s attractive appearance, although the precise physical characteristic intended cannot be established with certainty. The related adjective אַדְמוֹנִי (ʾadmōnî) is applied to the young David, “ruddy, with beautiful eyes and goodly to look upon” (1 Sam 16:12). The collocation expresses vitality and beauty in the idiom of ancient Near Eastern love poetry; it is a statement about attractiveness, not ethnicity.

   10.2 “His locks”

   “His head is as the most fine gold; his קְוֻצּוֹתָיו (qĕwuṣṣôtāyw) are bushy [KJV], wavy [NJPS, NIV], and black as a raven” (5:11). Here honesty about the evidence requires a caveat. The noun is a hapax legomenon: it occurs nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, so its precise sense cannot be fixed by comparison with other occurrences. What can be said is this. The ancient versions already understood the word as “locks” or “curls” (LXX βόστρυχοι; Vulgate crines), and modern lexicons (BDB; HALOT) gloss it accordingly, with a range of nuance from “curls” to “wavy” or “bushy” hair. The more modest — and more defensible — conclusion is that the Hebrew does not identify any specific modern hairstyle. The word denotes the beloved’s hair in some curled or clustered form; no ancient version or modern lexicon uses it to establish an ethnic identity, and the verse cannot bear the weight placed on it in claims that it depicts dreadlocks. At most the verse portrays the beloved’s thick, black, curled hair.
   The descriptive vocabulary of the Song, in short, is that of beauty, not of race: the woman is “dark and lovely”; the man is “radiant and ruddy” with hair “black as a raven.”

   11. Translation Comparison

   The following comparison sets the KJV against two modern versions on the verses discussed:
   • 1:5 — KJV: “I am black, but comely” | NJPS: “I am dark and comely” | NIV: “Dark, yet lovely”
   • 1:6 — KJV: “Look not upon me because I am black…” | NJPS: “Do not stare at me because I am dark…” | NIV: “Do not stare at me because I am dark…”
   • 5:10 — KJV: “white and ruddy” | NJPS: “radiant and ruddy” | NIV: “radiant and ruddy”
   • 5:11 — KJV: “his locks are bushy” | NJPS: “his hair is wavy” | NIV: “his hair is wavy”
   Two trends are visible: the shift from “black” to “dark,” which removes the racial connotation that the English word has acquired; and the shift from “white” to “radiant,” which removes the false implication of pale skin. Modern translators have recognized that the language of these verses is aesthetic, not racial or genealogical — a judgment this chapter has argued is warranted by the text itself.

   12. Conclusion

   Read in its Hebrew text and its literary context, Song of Solomon 1:5–6 does not claim that Solomon was Black. It presents a woman rejoicing in her sun-darkened beauty while addressing the king she loves; later in the same poem she depicts that beloved as radiant and ruddy, with thick, black curls. The feminine grammatical forms and the literary context establish that the declaration belongs to the woman; the Targum, Rashi, and modern critical scholarship, read on their own terms, reinforce that reading. The Ethiopian Kebra Nagast, properly distinguished from the interpretation of the Hebrew text, provides no independent basis for attributing the declaration to Solomon. No biblical text, the Song included, identifies Solomon’s race or skin color.
   The claim that Solomon described himself as a Black man in verse 5 rests on a misreading of both the grammar and the imagery. The misreading is understandable, for it trades on the prestige of the King James Version’s “I am black” and on a modern English word whose associations the biblical text does not carry. But the correction is not a denial of anything the text affirms. What the text affirms is more remarkable: a woman, shamed for her sun-darkened skin, stands before the daughters of Jerusalem and declares, on her own authority, “I am dark, and lovely.” The Song celebrates mutual love and the dignity of beauty — and it does so without reference to race.

   Notes

   1. Text and versification follow Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 4th ed., 1997). Transliterations are simplified.
   2. For the grammar of the Song’s dialogue and the attribution of speeches, see Michael V. Fox, The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), ad loc.; J. Cheryl Exum, Song of Songs, Old Testament Library (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), ad loc.; Tremper Longman III, Song of Songs, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), ad loc.; Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, vol. 3 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), ad loc.
   3. Lexical entries: šāḥôr (“dark, black”), šāzap (“to scorch, tan”), ṣaḥ (“bright, radiant”), ʾādôm (“red, ruddy”), qĕwuṣṣôt (“locks of hair”), šādayim (“breasts”) — see L. Koehler, W. Baumgartner, and J. J. Stamm, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (HALOT), rev. ed., 5 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1994–2000); F. Brown, S. R. Driver, and C. A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907).
   4. Targum Šîr haššîrîm 1:5, 1:6, trans. Philip S. Alexander, The Targum of Canticles: Translated, with Introduction, Commentary, and Glossary, The Aramaic Bible 17A (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003), ad loc. [page numbers to be added from print edition].
   5. Rashi, Commentary on Song of Songs, ad 1:5–6 [translation to be verified against a standard edition, e.g., the Sefaria text or the Judaica Press/ArtScroll rendering].
   6. On the Kebra Nagast and the Solomonic tradition, see E. A. Wallis Budge, The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menyelek (London: Oxford University Press, 1932); on the date and formation of the text, see the introduction in the more recent critical literature [consult current scholarship for precise dating]. The liturgical association of the bride with Makeda should be verified against an Ethiopian Orthodox source before publication.
   7. On ruddiness as a beauty trait, cf. 1 Sam 16:12 (David); on qĕwuṣṣôt as a hapax legomenon, see HALOT, s.v.
   8. Translation comparison: KJV; Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985); New International Version (2011).
   9. Marvin H. Pope, Song of Songs, Anchor Bible 7C (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977); Roland E. Murphy, The Song of Songs, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990); Othmar Keel, The Song of Songs, Continental Commentaries (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), ad loc.
   10. André LaCocque, Romance, She Wrote: A Hermeneutical Essay on Song of Songs (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1998).
   11. Cain Hope Felder (ed.), Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991); Randall C. Bailey (ed.), Yet with a Steady Beat: Contemporary U.S. Afrocentric Biblical Interpretation, Semeia Studies 42 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003); Hugh R. Page Jr. (ed.), The Africana Bible: Reading Israel’s Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010); Renita J. Weems, “Song of Songs,” in Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (eds.), The Woman’s Bible Commentary, expanded ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998).
   12. David M. Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
   13. Song of Songs Rabbah 1:5 [translation to be verified against a standard edition, as with the Rashi citation in note 5].

   
   
   
   

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