Repetitive Literary Patterns in Song of Songs Rabbah

My presentation analyzes a special type of repetitive literary structure which occurs with relative frequency in the Song of Songs Rabbah (ShirR). Some drashot (homilies) of ShirR explain more than one verse of Song of Songs and give more than one explanation, repeating certain parts of the previous drasha. These repetitions-variations give a certain structure for the given string of drashot and create out of them a single literary unit. This literary structure is found in ten different places in ShirR. The longest among them is ShirR 4,1-4, consisting of eight drashot.

The other nine occurrences of the mentioned literary structure in ShirR are shorter homiletic units or "compositions". Some of them combine attributed drashot with anonymous ones (with davar aher), while others have only one type of the two. If a given unit combines both types, it first presents the attributed ones and then the anonymous ones.

All drashot have one main motive, using the Standing at Mt. Sinai, the Crossing of the Red Sea, the Second Temple, the Sanhedrin etc. as interpretive frameworks for the given verse and its parts. Generally, the drashot presented by the "editors" in the name of a concrete sages tend to use historical events (like the Exodus, Entering the Land) as the interpretive framework, while the anonymous drashot offer "institutional" frames of reference, (like the sacrificial cult, priests, Sanhedrin).

The paper will summarize the findings about the ten mentioned literary units and offer some hypothetical explanations for the mentioned particular literary constructs.