CANTICLES. One of the canonical books of the Old Testament. The name is derived from the Latin canticula, plural of canticulum, "a little sone In the Vulgate it is called canticum canticorum, °song of songs.>> This is a literal translation of the Hebrew uile which is generally understood to mean "the best song.') It may, however, signify "the best if the first word is taken in a collective sense, as it probably should be in the superscription "Songs of the in the Pilgrim Psalter (Pss. cxx-cxxxii). The Alexandrian MS of the Greek version has the plural ; the Old Latin apparently rendered the title canticula cantic ulorum; and the Targum paraphrases it "songs and hymns which Solomon uttered.) This is likely to be the original meaning. When the name of Solomon was added, it may have been the intention to characterize the collection as the choicest of the 1,005 songs ascribed to this monarch in 1 Kings v, 12. The conception of the work as a unit naturally led to understand ing the title in the former sense. At the time when the canon was reduced as a result of the critical inquiry caused by the idea that holy books possessed a sanctity rendering it improper to touch profane things without a ceremonial washing after they had been handled, the ques tion of canonicity arose; but it was settled at the Council of Jamnia (c. 90 Ax.) in favor of the book, probably through the weight of the traditional authorship and the allegorical inter R. Akiba seems to have adopted. Whenever in earlier times the allegorical exegesis was rejected, there was a tendency to question again the canonicity. To-day the literal sense is generally accepted, and most modern interpreters either look upon the love expressed in the poems as typical of spiritual devotion or seek for no ulterior significance, feeling with the historian Niebuhr that "some thing would be missing in the Bible, if there were not in it some expression of the pro foundest and strongest of human emotions.) There is no intimation of anything but the obvious meaning in the oldest Greek version, and the book is not mentioned by Philo or in the New Testament. But R. Akiba affirmed that the whole world was not worth the day when it was given to Israel, since all Scriptures were holy but this the holiest of all iii, 5), and declared that "whoever sings from the Song of Songs in the wine-houses and makes it a (profane) song shall have no share in the world to comes Sanhedrin> xii). He no doubt saw in the book a descrip
tion of the love of God and Israel, and this continued to be the interpretation in the "syna gogue. Hippolytus (c. 200 A.D.) applied it to the relation of Christ and the Church. In spite of his suggestion that the literary form is that of an epithalamium, Origen rejected the literal sense as inadmissible, and explained that ac cording to the moral or tropological sense the love of the soul for the heavenly bridegroom was represented, and according to the mystic sense the union of Christ and the Church. The mediaeval church also saw the love of Christ and the Virgin Mary depicted in the book. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote 86 sermons on it. A fine type of mystical interpretation is found in Teresa de Cepeda's commentary on the first chapter. Nicolaus de Lyra saw in the poem a prophetic adumbration of the course of ec clesiastical history, and Cocceius discovered in it the history of the Church down to the synod of Dort in 1618 A.D., just as the author of the Aramaic Targum had found in it the history of Israel down to 586 ac. In the same way ingenious exegetes have discerned veiled de scriptions of the political courting of the 10 tribes by Hezekiah, or of Samaria by Tirhaka. A different method was suggested by Honorius of Autun (died 1140), who held that the literal sense might be accepted, if a typical significance were attached to it, and this view has been adopted by Vatable, Bossuet, Lowth and many Catholic and Protestant scholars in recent times. The type may then be thought of either as having already been in the mind of the author or only subsequently recognized. From the former standpoint a comparison has been made, e.g., by Harper with the poems of Hafiz, Jami and Jeyadeva, where a double meaning seems to be intended, while the recognition of an original literal sense, having no mystical mean ing, afterward legitimately receiving an addi tional typical significance, is characteristic, e.g., of Gigot's interpretation.