“Awesome” Artistry: Ayummah Kannidgalot in Song of Songs 6:4, 10

Translators and commentators have often disagreed over a “famous crux”¹ in Song of Songs 6:4 and 6:10: how to understand the repeated phrase ayummah kannidgalot, rendered awesome as bannered hosts in the NJPS. In part, the difficulty is that the meaning in 6:4 may or may not be the same as the meaning in 6:10. I believe that insights from modern linguistic theory can help alleviate the difficulty many have seen in rendering this phrase in distinct ways.

In Song of Songs 6:4–5a, the man speaks to his beloved, You are beautiful, my darling, as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem, [ayummah] as [nidgalot]. Turn your eyes away from me, for they overwhelm me! In 6:10, the man speaks of her in the third person: Who is she that shines through like the dawn, beautiful as the moon, radiant as the sun, [ayummah] as [nidgalot]? In both passages, the poet makes a series of three similes using the Hebrew preposition ki [‘like’ or ‘as’].

The first word, ayummah, is a feminine adjective that only appears in these two verses (though a masculine version appears in Hab. 1:7 where it refers to the “terrifying” Chaldean army). English translators usually render it as “terrible” or “awesome.” Shelomo Goitein cited examples from Arabic, Syriac, and Ethiopic to argue that ayummah should encompass more than simple fear: there is a fine line between “awesome” as frightful and “awesome” as extraordinary or thrilling.² Many scholars have built on his argument to suggest that ayummah should not be read harshly here when used for the man’s beloved, and perhaps should be rendered as something more like “majestic.”³

The second word, nidgalot, has usually been understood as a niphal feminine participle from dgl, a verb meaning “[to] carry, or set up [a] standard, banner.”⁴ Literally, this would render “bannered,” “banners,” or “bannered ones,” reflected in NJPS’s “bannered hosts.” A related noun, degel, appears several times in the book of Numbers in reference to the banners or standards raised for the tribes and also appears in Persian-period Aramaic texts with the meaning of “military detachment,” suggesting how audiences contemporary with the Song may have thought of the term.⁵ Alternatively, some scholars beginning with Robert Gordis have claimed there is connection with the Akkadian verb dagalu, “to look upon, gaze, behold,” which has been used to reinterpret nidgalot as “visions” or “sights.”⁶

This two-word phrase in Song of Songs 6:4 and 6:10 has been understood in various ways. First, some scholars have seen military imagery in both verses.⁷ In 6:4, beautiful and comely are unremarkable descriptions for the man’s beloved, but Tirzah and Jerusalem are strikingly unexpected, given that women in biblical literature are rarely compared to cities (although cities are often compared to women, e.g., Isa. 60:1–12 or Ezek. 23:4–5). These cities served, respectively, as the capitals of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms. The militaristic connotation invoked by fortified rival capitals is reinforced in 6:5 when the man is so “overwhelmed” by what he sees that he asks the beloved to turn away. The verb rhb has a general sense of energizing, pressing, acting against strongly (the nominal form, rahab, appears in Isa. 51:9 as a primordial sea monster).⁸ All this could suggest that nidgalot in 6:4 should be understood in militaristic terms, a “bannered host.” Given those implications in 6:4, many scholars then assume the same meaning applies in the more enigmatic 6:10.

Second, some scholars have seen astral imagery in 6:4 and 6:10.⁹ They typically begin with 6:10, where nidgalot is the third item in a list beginning with the moon and the sun. In biblical literature, the trio of sun, moon, and stars often appear together, suggesting nidgalot could be filling in for the stars in this case.¹⁰ The fact that nidgalot appears to relate etymologically to the word for army banners need not pose a problem, as stars are often described using the language of armies (see Deut. 4:19; 17:3; II Kgs. 23:5; Jer. 8:2). Scholars who argue for this reading of 6:10 then read the astral imagery into 6:4 as well.

Third, some scholars have read “sights/visions” in 6:4 and 6:10.¹¹ As described above, this approach reinterprets nidgalot based on a proposed Akkadian cognate. If that be accepted, then in both 6:4 and 6:10 nidgalot refers back to the objects previously mentioned – Tirzah and Jerusalem in the former and the sun and moon in the latter.¹² Robert Alter argues his preference for this approach (he translates “daunting as what looms on high”) on the grounds that it preserves ambiguity and could refer to either cities or stars.¹³

Finally, some scholars have interpreted the Song as invoking military imagery in 6:4 and astral imagery in 6:10.¹⁴ Differentiating between the meanings in each passage has been a minority approach but has the advantage of taking the context of each passage seriously. However, even those who translate each passage distinctly have expressed some discomfort over rendering the same phrase so differently when these passages appear so close together. For example, one proposal suggests that each passage began as an independent composition and a redactor used the parallel phrasing as an excuse to place 6:10 shortly after 6:4.¹⁵ I believe that insights from linguistics can make a valuable contribution to this discussion.

Modern semantic theory suggests that there is a danger in trying to interpret a word or phrase independent of context, for “we do not speak with isolated words but with sentences.”¹⁶ Vyvyan Evans explains how linguists have come to understand word meaning: “Words are never meaningful independent of the utterance in which they are embedded, and the encyclopaedic knowledge and extra-linguistic context which guide how words embedded in an utterance should be interpreted. Indeed, evidence from the perspectives of social psychology, cognitive psychology, interactional sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, and computational linguistics reveals that the view that words constitute fixed, context-independent structures … is untenable. As observed by a large number of scholars, the meanings associated with words are flexible, open-ended, and highly sensitive to utterance context.”¹⁷ Or, as British linguist Rupert Firth famously put it, “You shall know a word by the company it keeps!”¹⁸

This insight may be pushed even further: the semantic environment in which a word is placed does not simply reveal a meaning that otherwise would be hidden, it creates it.¹⁹ That is why it is possible for a speaker to effectively communicate the meaning of even an invented phrase or a nonsense word: given appropriate contextual clues, listeners determine the meaning not simply through their encyclopedic lexical knowledge but also through their understanding of what must be the word’s significance in a given situation.²⁰

In light of these findings from linguistic theorists, the difficulty that many have seen in reconciling different meanings in Song of Songs 6:4 and 6:10 is significantly alleviated. It is perfectly permissible for ayummah kannidgalot to mean one thing in the first context and something else in the second.²¹ The respective meanings are revealed and created through the context of each passage. In 6:4, the twin similes beautiful … as Tirzah and comely as Jerusalem, by paring two famous cities, prepare the reader to read ayummah kannidgalot as an impressive human spectacle, “Awesome as a bannered host!” This majesty is reinforced in v. 5 when the sight is too overwhelming to look upon.

By contrast, in 6:10, the woman is introduced as she that shines through like the dawn, a visually compelling title that prepares the reader for the atmospheric images that follow. The references to the sun and the moon are especially potent because the standard terms are replaced by descriptive euphemisms, literally “the white (one)” and “the hot (one).” Using rare words for the sun and the moon heightens their sensory value, inviting readers to recall their colors and temperatures. When readers come to the third simile, ayummah kannidgalot, the celestial imagery of the preceding images prepares them to complete the mental sequence sun-moon-stars. Had the literal meaning of armies had no connection whatsoever to stars, the reader might have had quite the mental jump to make, but given the existing connections in Hebrew literature, the shift from human armies to heavenly hosts would not have been difficult. The first use of the phrase in v. 4, then, helps prepare the reader for its second use in v. 10, even as the meaning shifts from one appearance to the next.

Thus, translators and commentators need not shy away from rendering two distinct meanings for ayummah kannidgalot in Song of Songs 6:4 and 6:10. The contextual coloring can determine the meaning in each case, even as we recognize the brilliance of the Hebrew poet in employing the same phrase in different ways.