[In the following essay, Pope contends that the emphasis in the Song of Songs on expressions of love might link the work to the occasion of a funeral feast.]

LOVE AND DEATH

It has been recognized by many commentators that the setting of Love and Passion in opposition to the power of Death and Hell in 8:6c,d is the climax of the Canticle and the burden of its message: that Love is the only power that can cope with Death. Throughout the Song the joys of physical love are asserted, but this singular mention of Death and his domain, Sheol, suggests that this fear may be the covert concern of the Canticle, the response to inexorable human fate with the assertion of Love as the only power that frustrates the complete victory of Death. The sacred marriage was a celebration and affirmation of this vital force. The inevitable circumstance in which Life and Love come into stark confrontation with Death is in mortuary observances, not only in the wake and burial but in the ongoing concern to commune with the departed and provide for their needs in the infernal realm with offerings of food and drink.

The sacral meal with ritual drinking of intoxicating beverage, music, song, dance, and sexual license was a feature of religious praxis in the Near East from early times. Glyptic art of ancient Mesopotamia presents vivid scenes of such festivities. Seals from the Royal Cemetery at Ur depict banquet scenes with celebrants imbibing from large jars through drinking tubes while a bed with cross bands is presented by an attendant. The cross bands, or saltire, are the symbol and attribute of the great goddess of love and war. The saltire of the love goddess adorning the couch (perhaps also serving to brace it) suggests the use to which it will shortly be put and this is graphically confirmed in other scenes which show the bed occupied by a copulating couple. Beneath the love couch is sometimes depicted the scorpion, symbol of tile goddess Isara, or the dog related to the goddess Gula. Both these goddesses, Ishara and Gula, are, according to H. Frankfort, "aspects of that great goddess of fertility whose union with a male god, consummated at the New Year's festival, insured the prosperity of the community; for the fertility of nature depended upon this act." The dog under the love couch depicted on a Mesopotamian seal of the Early Dynastic III period (ca. 2500 B.C.), recalls the canine beneath the couch which is common on Hellenistic funerary sculptures but which has not been plausibly explained. A recently published Ugaritic text, however, when correlated with observations by a couple of Fathers of the Church concerning accusations against the early Christians, throws light on the persistent canine at the connubium and the funeral feast. The Ugaritic text (UG 5.1) describes a banquet given by El, the father of the gods, in which a dog has an important but unspecified role. The highlights of the affair are given here in translation without notes.…

El offered game in his house,
Venison in the midst of his palace.
He invited the gods to mess.
The gods ate and drank,
Drank wine till sated,
Must till inebriated.

'Astarte and Anat arrived
'Astarte prepared a brisket for him,
And Anat a shoulder.
The Porter of El's house chided them:
"Lo, for the dog prepare a brisket.
For the cur prepare a shoulder."
El his father he chided.
El sat (in) (his pl)ace,
El sat in his mrzh.
He drank wine till sated,
Must till inebriated.

An apparition accosted him,
With horns and a tail.
He floundered in his excrement and urine.
El collapsed, El like those who descend into
 Earth.
Anat and 'Astarte went roaming.

There is a gap of a couple of lines on the obverse of the tablet and the text continues for several lines on the reverse, with mention of the return of the goddesses and the administration of various medicines, including juice of green olives, to relieve the deity's crapulence.

The mention of special pieces of meat for the dog, the same cuts prepared by the goddesses for their father, recalls the allegations against the early Christians regarding the role of the dog in their festal meals. Tertullian in chs. 7 and 8 of his Apology in rebutting the charges that Christians in their reprobate feasts murdered and ate infants and climaxed the celebration with an incestuous sexual orgy, mentions dogs as "the pimps of darkness" procuring license for these impious lusts by putting out the lights in a rather bizarre fashion. Tertullian ridiculed the charges simply by recounting the alleged proceedings:

Yet, I suppose, it is customary for those who wish to be initiated to approach first the father of the sacred rites to arrange what must be prepared.… Now, you need a baby, still tender, one who does not know what death means, and who will smile under your knife. You need bread, too, with which to gather up his juicy blood; besides that, candlesticks, lamps, some dogs and bits of meat which will draw them on to overturn the lamps. Most important of all, you must come with your mother and sister.

These rites were alleged to have been performed for the purpose of gaining eternal life, to which charge Tertullian retorted:

For the time being, believe it! On this point I have a question to ask: If you believed it, would you consider the acquisition of eternal life worth attaining with such a (troubled) conscience? Come, bury your sword in this baby, enemy though he be of no one, guilty of no crime, everybody's son; or, if that is the other fellow's job, stand here beside this (bit of) humanity, dying before he has lived; wait for the young soul to take flight; receive his fresh blood; saturate your bread with it; partake freely! Meanwhile, as you recline at table, note the place where your mother is, and your sister; note it carefully, so that, when the dogs cause the darkness to fall, you may make no mistake—for you will be guilty of a crime unless you commit incest.

Marcus Minucius Felix tells us a bit more about these alleged initiation rites for Christian novices:

An infant covered with a dough crust to deceive the unsuspecting is placed beside the person to be initiated into the sacred rites. This infant is killed at the hands of the novice by wounds inflicted unintentionally and hidden from his eyes, since he has been urged on as if to harmless blows on the surface of the dough. The infant's blood—oh, horrible—they sip up eagerly; its limbs they tear to pieces, trying to outdo each other; by this victim they are leagued together; by being privy to this crime they pledge themselves to mutual silence. These sacred rites are more shocking than any sacrilege.

Minucius Felix continues:

On the appointed day, they assemble for their banquets with all their children, sisters, and mothers—people of both sexes and every age. After many sumptuous dishes, when the company at the table has grown warm and the passion of incestuous lust has been fired by drunkenness, a dog which has been tied to a lampstand is tempted by throwing a morsel beyond length of the leash by which it is bound. It makes a dash, and jumps for the catch. Thus, when the witnessing light has been overturned and extinguished, in the ensuing darkness which favors shamelessness, they unite in whatever revolting lustful embraces the hazard of chance will permit. Thus, they are all equally guilty of incest, if not indeed, yet by privity, since whatever can happen in the actions of individuals is sought for by the general desire of all.

Dogs figure in cultic symbolism and funerary rites of many cultures and there is no warrant to consider the topic in detail here since dogs play no part in the Song of Songs. The practice of putting pieces of meat on or around a corpse, as among the Parsees is easily understood as intended to distract the dogs from attacking the corpse. There is a rabbinic story about the death of King David and the cutting of an animal's carcass to keep the hungry dogs from attacking the corpse. Other references to food for dogs at funerals and weddings occur in rabbinic literature. An Anatolian funerary relief from Thasos, dating to the fifth century B.C., shows a dog under the banquet couch with muzzle to the ground, as if eating while a stela from Piraeus, also of the fifth century B.C., shows the dog reclining under the banquet couch and gnawing at a hefty hunk of meat. The meat in this instance could be explained as a sop. An early Corinthian crater, however, shows leashed dogs underneath the couches of the celebrants which suggests that the details related by Tertullian and Minucius Felix as to the function of the dogs as "the pimps of darkness" in sacral sexual orgies, for all its similarities to a Rube Goldberg mechanism, may have been an ancient artifice.

It is of interest to observe that the earliest representation of the dog under the couch, ca. 2500 B.C., is in a scene with two couples copulating in different positions and suggestive at least of the sort of group activity of which the later Christians were accused. Scenes of group sex involving three or more participants are not uncommon in the glyptic art of ancient Mesopotamia. The dog continued on funeral reliefs down to late antiquity, as on the urn of lulia Eleutheris in the Thermen Museum in Rome showing moumers engaged in conclamtio mortis while beneath the bier reposes the persistent canine.

The dog played an important role in the funerary cults at Palmyra and Hatra. At Hatra there appears to have been a sanctuary dedicated to the infernal deity Nergol as a dog (nrgwl klb').

The term mrzh applied in the Ugaritic text to the place where El imbibed to the point of delirium, diarrhea, and enuresis, and finally to a state resembling death, is of particular interest and importance for the understanding of the nature and purpose of the bacchanalian banquet. This word occurs twice in the Old Testament, Amos 6:7 and Jer 16:5, and the RSV renderings "revelry" in the first instance and "mourning" in the second, reflect the long standing puzzlement as to the precise meaning of the term. In Amos 6:4-7 the dissolute luxury of the proceedings is explicit:

The lie on ivory beds,
Sprawled on their couches,
Eating rams from the flock,
Bullocks from the stall.
They chant to the tune of the lyre,
Like David they improvise song.

They drink wine from bowls,
Choicest oils they smear,
But are not sickened at Joseph's ruin.
Therefore they will go at the head of the
 exiles,
And the sprawlers, banquet cease.

The "sprawlers' banquet," marzeah seruhim, is ambiguous. The root srh I is applied to an overhanging curtain in Exod 26:12 and to a spreading vine in Ezek 17:6, and possibly to a flowing headdress in Ezek 23:15. There is also a root srh II apparently meaning "be putrid," or the like, in Jer 49:7 and Sir 42:11.

The couch (mesib) of the king whereon he enjoys, among other things, the fragrance of his lady's perfume, 1:12, in its feminine form mesibbah is the post-Biblical Hebrew equivalent of the Greek term symposion, in which the revelers sprawl on couches.

The expresslon "marzeah-house," bet marzeah, is used in Jer 16:5:

Thus says YHWH:
Do not enter the marzeah-house,
Do not go to mourn,

Do not lament for them.
For I have removed my peace from this
 people.

LXX here rendered bit marzeah as thiasos, a term which designates a company assembled to celebrate a festival in honor of a deity, or a mourning feast. Jeremiah goes on (Jer 16:6-9) to describe the funeral celebration which will not take place:

Great and small will die in this land
And they will not be buried.
None shall mourn or lament;
None shall gash himself,
None be made bald for them.
None shall provide a mourning meal
To comfort him for the dead,
Nor make him drink the cup of consolation

For his father and his mother.
You shall not enter the drinking-house

To sit with them,
To eat and to drink.
For thus says YHWH of Hosts,
The God of Israel:
Behold, I am banishing from this place.
Before your eyes, and in your days,
The sound of exultation,
The sound of joy,
The sound of the groom,
And the sound of the bride.

The terms "marzeah-house," bet marzeah, and "drinking-house," bet mišteh, appear to be roughly synonymous in the passage just cited, as designations of a place in which banquets were held in both mourning and revelry for the dead, with drunkenness and sacral sexual intercourse. The mention of ivory beds, feasting, music and song, wine bibbing, and perfume oil in Amos 6:4-7 and of mourning and lamentation, eating and drinking, the sounds of exultation and joy, and the sounds of groom and bride in Jer 16:6-9 are all features of the funeral feast in the marzeah (-house), or the drinking-house.

The drowning of sorrow in the cup of consolation is a practice older than the Irish wake. The rabbis felt it necessary to reform the custom and control the tendency to alcoholic excess at funeral feasts. Ten cups were permitted to be drunk in the house of mourning, but then four extra cups were added as special toasts to various notables, civic and religious leaders, and one in honor of Rabban Gamaliel, so that some became intoxicated and the limit of ten cups was restored. At the festival of Purim, however, it was permissible to drink until one could not tell the difference between Haman and Mordecai. The example of the father of the gods of Ugarit, reeling in drunken delirium, wallowing in excrement and urine, and collapsing as if dead, was on occasion emulated by the Israelites, to judge from the prophet's animadversion, Isa 28:7-9:

These, too, reel with wine,
With drink they stagger;
Priest and prophet stagger with drink,
Dazed with wine,
Reeling with drink.

They stagger in—,
Totter in—;
All the tables full of vomit,
Excrement without place.

The mention of tables full of vomit and excrement in the last couplet suggests that similar terms may have originally stood in lines f and g where MT has the bizarre readings br'h, vocalized as bārô'eh, "in the seer," and pělîliyyāh, "judicial decision," as the setting of their staggering. With very slight change of br'h one may restore bhr', "in excrement." The word here' was considered obscene and the less offensive term so'āh, "excretion," was imposed in Isa 36:23=11 Kings 18:27. It is harder to guess what term may have been changed to pělîliyyāh, but the context suggests the common connection and parallel of solid and liquid excreta, as in Isa 36:12 and Ugaritic hr' and tnt, "excrement" and "urine." Isaiah's allusion to priests and prophets reeling among tables strewn with vomit and excrement, and the appalling picture of the drunken father of the gods wallowing in his own filth recall the rabbinic derision of the coprophilia ascribed to the cult of Baal Peor whose worship was alleged to include ceremonial defecation. A Jew was forbidden to relieve himself before the idol, even with the intention of degrading it, since this was the alleged mode of worshiping Baal Peor. A story is told of a certain Jew who entered the shrine of Baal Peor, defecated and wiped himself on the idol's nose and the acolytes praised his devotion saying, "no man ever served this idol thus." It is difficult to know whether this story is based on direct knowledge of such worship or was suggested by one of the meanings of the verbp 'r in Jewish Aramaic.

While the coprological aspects of the cult of Baal Peor were not especially attractive, there were other features which had potent appeal and to which the Israelites succumbed at the first encounter with the Moabites at Shittim, and frequently thereafter. The "sacrifices" to which the Moabite women invited their Israelite cousins featured a contact sport which made it possible for Phinehas to skewer an Israelite man and a Moabite woman with a single thrust of the spear. Now these festivities are explicitly identified as funeral feasts in Ps 106:28:

They yoked themselves to Baal Peor,
And ate the sacrifices of the dead.

These sacrifices of the dead characterized by sacral sexual intercourse are identified by the rabbis as marze'him in the Sifre, the same term applied to the setting of El's potation and self-pollution. Midrashic comment further related the marzeah to the Mayumas festival, a celebration which featured wife-swapping. Mayumas festivals were observed along the Mediterranean, especially in port cities like Alexandria, Gaza, Ashkelon and Antioch, with such licentiousness that the Roman rulers felt constrained to ban them. Rabbi Hanan apparently alluded to such rites in his comment that "it was done in the cities of the Sea what was not done in the generation of the Flood." The equation of Marzeah and Mayumas is also made in the mosaic map of the sixth-century church at Madeba which labels the Transjordanian area in which the Baal-Peor apostasy occurred as "Betomarseas (i.e. Beth Marzeah) alias (ho kai) Maioumas." Several scholars have recently treated the term marzeah in detail, and only a brief summary with a few supplementary observations need be given for the present concern to understand the nature of the marzeah and suggest a relationship to the Song of Songs.

Considerable information on the marzeah comes to us from Palmyra in the form of dedicatory inscriptions and tessarae decorated with banquet scenes and bearing inscriptions mentioning the term mrzh. J. T. Milik has brought together the Semitic and Greek epigraphic materials dealing with these celebrations by gods and mortals with chapters on the vocabulary of the Palmyrene tessarae and inscriptions, and other data on the religious associations at Palmyra, Dura, Hatra, Syria, Phoenicia, and among the Nabateans. This work is a veritable treasure-trove of information on the funeral feasts, with data which may be correlated with the Ugaritic materials to provide new and provocative insights which may have relevance for the understanding of the Song of Songs. Some data from Milik's study will be briefly noticed in supplements to the commentary which had been completed before Milik's work appeared. There is much in Milik's study which will stimulate further research and discussion.

The members of the association were termed in Aramaic bny mrzh', "children of the mrzh," and specific deities were sometimes designated, e.g., bny mrzh nbw, "members of the mrzh of Nabu." The most popular association at Palmyra was apparently associated with Bel (Baal), to judge from the numerous tessarae which mention the priests of Bel. Each mrzh had a chief, Phoenician rb mrzh, Aramaic rb mrzh', Greek symposiarches. The priests of Bel at Palmyra were organized in a college headed by the chief priest, archiereus kai symposiarches, who served also as eponym for dating the acts of the association. The symposiarch of the priests of Bel was also chief of all other symposia of the city and had charge of the "house of distribution," bt qsm'.… An inscription erected in recognition of the services of a certain Yarhai Agrippa in the year A.D. 243 notes that in his leadership of the symposia he "served the gods and presided over the distribution (qsm') a whole year and supplied old wine for the priests a whole year from his house."

The Akkadian documents from Ugarit which mention the marzēah suggest that it was an important institution. The king Niqmepa bequeathed "a house of the marzēah-men" to the marzēah-men and their children. A house of the marzēah-men of (the god) Šatran was taken over for official use, but another house was given in its place. A vineyard of Istar was divided between the marzēah-men of the city of Ari and those of the city of Siyanni. In a fragmentary Ugaritic alphabetic text (2032) there are five or six occurrences of the phrase mrzh 'n […] and in line 2 occur the words šd kr […], "field vineya[rd]." Eissfeldt proposed the restoration mrzh 'n[t] and suggested that the text may deal with the bequest of several vineyards to the marzēah (Kultverein) of Anat.

The connection between the marzēah and the funeral feast, attested in both biblical and rabbinic references, is confirmed by Ugarit data. Although there are no explicit references to the funeral character of the sacrificial banquet in which all the gods become drunk but El sits in his mrzh and topes till he sinks down as if dead, and although there are no hints of sexual activities in connection with this occasion which centers on El's hangover and its medicinal relief, there are elsewhere hints of sexual activity in connection with funeral feasts at Ugarit. The so-called Rephaim Texts, thus designated because of the frequent occurrence of the term (rpum in the nominative case and rpim in the oblique cases), which in biblical usage is connected with the departed dead, denizens of the netherworld, supply all the elements of a marzēah, a funeral feast to which the gods and the deified dead are invited to join with the mourners in a seven-day celebration with flesh and wine and with hints, at least, of sexual activity. The Rephaim Texts apparently belong to the Aqht Epic and fit into the action following the murder of Daniel's son Aqht. In spite of the fragmentary state of the texts and numerous lexical and grammatical uncertainties, it is apparent that Daniel invites the Rephaim to a mrz', a variant form of mrzh, in a shrine (atr, "place") in his house.

From the various strands of evidence, we gather that the marzēah was a religious institution which included families and owned houses for meetings and vineyards for supply of wine, that the groups met periodically to celebrate seven-day feasts with rich food and drink and sometimes with sexual orgies. The biblical and rabbinic identification of these revels as funeral feasts is illustrated by a wealth of sepulchural sculpture depicting the deceased as participating in the banquet. The charge that the early Christians in their initiation rites immolated infants and ate their flesh and drank their blood is of interest in light of the cannibalistic language of the Eucharist in which the bread and wine are Christ's flesh and blood. The eating of the flesh and drinking of the juices of deceased loved ones is a primitive practice and is attested also at Ugarit. In a brief vignette inscribed on the back of a lexical text, the goddess Anat is depicted as consuming the flesh and blood of her brother consort (Baal):

Anat went and waxed mad (?)
At the beauty of her brother,
And at the handsomeness of her brother,

For he was fair.
She ate his flesh without a knife,
She drank his blood without a cup.

While we are not informed whether Anat's beauteous brother was alive or dead when she thus consumed him, we may reasonably assume that he was defunct and that this was a mourning rite motivated by what anthropologists have termed "morbid affection." M. Astour related Anat's cannibalism to the raw flesh feasts of the Dionysiac and Orphic orgies. It is apparent that the Christian Eucharist and Love-Feast, as well as the Jewish Qiddush, represent radical reformations of the ancient funeral feasts with elimination of such gross features as cannibalism, drunkenness, and sexual license. Paul's rebuke of unseemly behavior at the sacred meals and the charges ridiculed by Tertullian and Minucius Felix suggest that there were those who resisted reform and persisted in the old ways and this is confirmed by the repeated condemnations of other fathers of the Church.

In his first letter to the Christians at Corinth the Apostle Paul was distressed about licentious conduct in the festal meals when they partook of "spiritual" (pneumatic) food and drink, I Corinthians 10-11. Paul cited in censure of the Christian misbehavior the example of the Israelites' mode of worship of the Golden Calf: "The people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to sport (paizein)," I Cor 10:7. The kind of sport implied by the Hebrew term in Exod 32:6 (lesaheq) is clear from Isaac's uxorious play in Gen 26:8. Paul explicitly inveighed against fornication in these pneumatic feasts and cited as a warning the fate of the twenty-three thousand (give or take a thousand; cf. Num 25:9) who fell in a single day, with obvious reference to the affair at the shrine at Baal Peor, Numbers 25. We are told in Ps 106:28 that the cult of Baal Peor involved the eating of sacrifices for the dead. The rabbis further identify the festivities of Baal Peor as marzehim and relate them to the infamous Mayumas festivals, a correlation supported by the Madeba Map which labels the area in which the scandal occurred as Marzeah-House, alias Mayumas.

The etymology of the term marzeah remains unclear. Joseph Qimhi, followed by his son David, connected the word with Arabic mirzih alleged to signify a vehement voice or loud cry as in mourning or revelry. Eissfeldt posited a meaning "unite" for the root rzh and took the word to designate a cultic union, "Kultverein." B. Porten regarded Eissfeldt's distinction between two supposed homonyms rzh, "shout," and rzh, "unite," to be arbitrary. The basic meaning of rzh in Arabic is to fall down from fatigue or other weakness and remain prostrate without power to rise; it may be used of a man, a camel, or a grapevine. A marzah is a place where a camel collapses from fatigue and a mirzah is a prop for a fallen grapevine. The collapse of El in his mrzh and the mirzāh of sprawled ones Amos 6:7 comport with this sense of the term. The celebrants at a marzih, thiasos, or symposium recline on couches and after several rounds of drink would, no doubt, be aptly described as sprawling, or perhaps even more relaxed to the state of comatose stupor.

Whatever the etymology, it is apparent that the ^*marzih designated a bacchanalian celebration roughly synonymous with the Greek thiasos and symposion. The "Marzeah House" is thus virtually synonymous with the "Banquet House," bet mišteh literally "house of drinking." Rabbi Aqiba anathematized those who trilled verses of the Song of Songs in "drinking houses" and this has been understood to mean that the good rabbi objected to the singing of snatches of the most holy song in the wine shops or taverns The banquet house, or drinking house, however, was not a tavern or pub, but rather a place for sacral feasting and drinking, as evidenced by Belshazzar's feast in the bêt mištĕyā, Dan 5:10, with the appropriation of the holy vessels taken from the Jerusalem Temple for sacral drinking in praise of the heathen gods by the king and his nobles and courtesans, Dan 5:1-4,10. The more explicit term "house of the drinking of wine," bêt mišgteh hayyayin, is used in Esther 7:8 when the king returned to the wine-fest and found Haman prostrate on the couch with Esther, Haman apparently being in a drunken stupor and unaware of his predicament. In the festival of Purim which is supposed to celebrate and commemorate the deliverance of the Jews through the elimination of their enemy Haman by the counterplot of Mordecai and Esther, it is nevertheless permissible and even obligatory to become more than moderately inebriated. It has been suggested that Purim is in reality a disguised "feast of the dead," related to the Persian All Souls' Day, Farvardigan, and that the feasting and gift-giving are survivals of offerings to the dead. The avoidance of the name of the God of Israel in the Book of Esther was explained as due to this original connection with the cult of the dead. It is of interest in this connection that Esther and the Canticle are the only biblical books which make no mention of the ineffable name.

The unique term "house of wine" in Song of Songs 2:4 is manifestly an elliptical expression for "house of the drinking of wine," as in Esther 7:8, since a musty wine cellar would hardly be an appropriate setting for the activity envisaged:

He brought me into the wine house,
His intent toward me Love.

Other details of the Canticle also are suggestive of orgiastic revelry. The lady requests stimulants to renew her jaded desire, 2:5,

Sustain me with raisin cakes,
Brace me with apples,
For faint from love am 1.

These raisin cakes survive today in Purim pastries called Hamantaschen (corrupted from German Mohntaschen, "poppy pockets," from the practice of stuffing them with poppy seeds). These cuneiform tarts have nothing to do with Haman's three-cornered hat or his ears, but probably originally represented the pubes of Queen Esther=Ishtar, Queen of Heaven. The mandrakes mentioned in 7:14[13E] give further hint of interest in stimulation. The repeated adjuration, 2:7, 3:5, 8:4, relating to the arousal of love when it is willing, suggests protracted and repeated amative activity. The reference in 7:10[9E] to the fine wine gliding over the lips of sleepers (if one follows MT against the versions) is understandable on the supposition that one could continue to imbibe even in sleep, or while unconscious, by means of a drinking tube or with an attendant to dribble the wine through the lips In competitive drinking, contestants may recline and drink through tubes for maximum intake and effect. The dead too were provided with drink through tubes leading into the tombs. Thus the "sleepers" over whose lips the wine drips may refer to the funerary libation. It is striking, and perhaps no accident, that this verse evoked for the rabbis the image of deceased scholars whose lips move in the grave whenever a saying is cited in their name.

The references to myrrh, spice, honey, wine, and milk in a single verse of the Canticle, 5:1, are suggestive of the funeral feast since all these elements are associated with funerary rites and sacrifices. Myrrh and spices were used in anointing the corpse for burial. Spices were also used as condiments in the savory stew for the funeral meal. Ezek 24:10 mentions the mixing of spices in the preparation of the pottage symbolic of Babylon's evil:

Heap the wood,
Kindle the fire,
Prepare the meat,
Mix the spices,
Let the bones cook.

(The emendation of weharqah hammerqahah, "mix the spices," on the basis of LXX kai elattothe ho zomos, "and let the liquor be boiled away," is a dubious procedure.) Libations for the dead in Homeric times included honey wine, and milk, as when Ulysses poured to the congregation of the dead libations of honey and milk and sweet wine (Odyssey xi 28f) and Achilles laid beside Patroclus' bier jars of honey and oil (Iliad xxiii 172). In all parts of the Aryan world honey was a food sacred to the dead. In India the pitaras, "fathers," were supplied rice soup mixed with honey, similar to the mead of barley water and honey served by the peasants of White Russia to their ancestors. In Greece honey cakes, melitoutta, were given to the dead and were believed also to appease the infernal watchdog Cerberus. Honey cakes continue as an essential part of the commemorative funeral meal among Lithuanian and Russian peasants. Herodotus reported (i 198) that the Babylonians buried their dead in honey. The Spartans reportedly brought home the body of King Agesipolis preserved in honey and that of King Agesilaus in wax. A first-century epitaph from Crete bids the parents of three defunct brothers bring offerings of honeycomb and incense.

The open invitation of 5:1ef,

Eat, friends, drink,
Be drunk with love!

suggests the sort of climax to be expected in a thoroughly inebriated mixed group. Similar invitations are given in the Ugaritic texts, as when El says to his erstwhile spouse Asherah:

Eat, yea drink!
Eat from the tables meat,
Drink from the jars wine;
From a gold cup the blood of the vine.

Lo, the affection of King El will arouse you,
The Bull's love will excite you.

Or the invitation to the votaries in the ritual portion of the "Birth of the Beautiful Gods"

Eat of the food, Ay!
Drink of the foaming wine, Ay!
Peace. O King,
Peace, O Queen,
O entrants and archers.

These invitations recall the frescoes of the catacombs and some of the uninhibited scenes which create the impression of a cosy drinking party, as described by F. van der Meer:

Above the heads of the serving girls, who are hastening to supply the guests, stand the words: 'Agape, mix my wine! Eirene, give me some warm water!—phrases which certainly do not elevate the ladies Love and Peace to the status of heavenly allegories; incidentally these ladies make their appearance no less than four times—the painter was obviously repeating a stereotype.

Among the slogans in these scenes of Christian love feasts for the dead were the cry Refrigera bene which van der Meer rendered "Take good refreshment, eat and drink!" and eis agapen, "To the heavenly feast" (literally "to love") and above all In pace. According to van der Meer,

The people who chiselled these mystical allusions did their work in the midst of pagans and in the midst of persecution; but that reverent atmosphere is now definitely a thing of the past. The food upon the tables, once a thing so full of meaning, has achieved vestigial survival, but those at the table now have manners more suited to a pothouse, while the crude decorations represent nothing more than the husks of an ancient symbolism which now garnish the wine jugs of an ordinary, and distinctly convivial, wake!

Sepulchural gardens were common in the Graeco-Roman world, adjacent to the tombs, hence the technical term "garden tomb," kēpotafion, cepotafium. Strabo described the district west of Alexandria as containing many gardens (kēpoi) and tombs (tafai). Jocelyn M. C. Toynbee cites several inscriptions and documents referring to funerary gardens. Of particular interest is an inscription found near Rome, dating probably to the second century, set up by the parents in memory of their ten-year-old son. The text includes a prayer to Osiris to give the dead lad cool water. The parents made for the boy "an eternal bridal chamber" (aiōnion nymphōna) and for themselves in expectation of their death a garden tomb (kēpotafion). Toynbee wondered whether the "eternal bridal chamber" was "for mystic marriage with the god." Extensive evidence associating sacral sexual rites with mortuary celebrations should relieve somewhat the puzzlement at the designation of a tomb as an "eternal bridal chamber." Toynbee goes on to cite some of the very interesting Latinized versions of Greek funerary terminology. In addition to cepotafium and the diminutive cepotafiolum, there are the Latin terms hortus, horti, and hortulus. These sepulchural plots are frequently described as surrounded by an enclosure-wall (murus, maceria). The enclosed garden is reminiscent of the gan / 1 nā'ûl, the hortus conclusus, of Canticles 4:12.

In addition to the general words for buildings used in the funerary inscriptions in association with the gardens, such as edifice (aedificia) and monument (monumenta), there are words that refer specifically to the places where the funerary feasts were celebrated. There are references to dining rooms (cenacula), eating houses (tabernae), summer houses (tricliae), bars or lounges (diaetae), sun terraces (solaria), storehouses (horrea), and even, in one case, apparently, rooms to let(?) or brothels(?) (stabula and meritoria). In the sepulchural gardens were paths (itinera). Water was supplied by cisterns (cisternae), basins (piscinae), channels (canales), wells (putei), and pools (lacus). The funerary garden is variously described as a small estate (praedolium), a field (ager), or as orchards (pomaria or pomariola). One tomb was adorned with vines, fruit trees, flowers, and plants of all kinds, another with trees, vines and roses, and yet another with a vineyard and enclosure-walls. The funerary terminology is strikingly similar to certain expressions of the Canticle.

The garden-tomb setting and terminology of the Graeco-Roman mortuary cult recalls the reprimand of Second (or Third?) Isaiah, depicting Israel's God as constantly waiting and making overtures to an unresponsive people addicted to abominable rites in the funerary gardens:

I was available to those who did not ask,
Accessible to those who did not seek.
I said, "Here I am! Here I am!"
To a nation that did not call on my name.
I spread my hands all day
To a rebellious people
Who walk in a no-good way,
Following their own devices,
A people who provoke me
To my face, constantly,
Sacrificing in the gardens,
Burning incense on bricks,
Sitting in the tombs,
Spending the night in crypts,
Eating pig meat,
Carrion broth in their vessels.
They say, "Stand back;
Don't touch me, I'm holy to you."
These are smoke in my nose,
A fire that burns all day.
Lo, it is written before me:
"I will not be quiet, I will requite
I will requite in the bosom
Your crimes and your fathers' crimes
Together," says the Lord.
"Because they burned incense on the
 mountains,
Disgraced me on the hills,
I will measure out their wage
Promptly on their lap."

The Qumran Isaiah Scroll offers in 65:3d a reading radically different from MT. In place of MT's "and burning incense on the bricks," the Qumran text presents the provocative reading wynqw ydym 7 h 'bnym, "and they suck / cleanse hands upon / as well as the stones." In view of the well-attested euphemistic use of "hand" for phallus and the possibility that 7 h 'bnym in Exod 1:16 refers to genitalia in general or testicles in particular, the verb ynqw, could be connected either with ynq, "suck," or nqy, meaning "cleanse" in the factitive or D stem. Fellatio would inevitably be suggested by ynq. It is hard to imagine how cleansing hands could be bad.

An Old Babylonian text published by J. J. Finkelstein (1966) has a bearing on the present concern with mortuary meals. Finkelstein's masterly treatment of the document established its "Sitz im Leben," that is, the reason it was written and the manner in which it was used. The text lists the ancestors of Ammisaduqa, last king of the First Dynasty of Babylon, and includes collectively "the dynasties of the Amorites, the Haneans, the Gutium, the dynasty not recorded on this tablet, and the soldier(s) who fell while on perilous campaigns for their (his) lord, princes, princesses, all persons from East to West who have neither caretaker (paqidum) nor attendant (sahirum). All these are invited:

Come ye, e(a)t this, (drin)k this, (and)
Ammisaduqa, son of Ammiditana, the king of
 Babylon, bless ye.

The restorations of the imperatives aklā, "eat ye," and šityā, "drink ye," in lines 39-40 are suggested by the traces of the poorly preserved signs as well as by the unmistakable context of the whole as a kispu offering which consisted of food and drink for the dead.

The nature and function of the text as a whole is hardly open to doubt: it is the invocation to an actual memorial service to the dead, the central action of which was the offering to the etemmū—ghosts or spirits of the dead—of the kispu, which consisted of food and drink.

It is no ordinary kispu ceremony, however, of the standard sort held semi-monthly on the first and sixteenth day.

The inclusion of the spirits of other than the dead ancestors, including even the ghosts of anyone and everyone "from East to West," who otherwise has none to offer them the kispum, suggests that the occasion was an extraordinary one, but the text itself offers no clue as to what it might have been. The performance might still have been scheduled for the first or sixteenth day of the month, but this would have been coincidental with some other momentous occasion which called for a more inclusive mortuary "feast." One might think of the coronation of the new king as an occasion suitable for such an expression of royal "largesse"—when perhaps even the living population received something above their normally miserable fare. What could be more appropriate for Ammisaduqa, as the newly crowned gar misarim, than to demonstrate his concern for his people's welfare by a special food distribution to all—to the dead as well as the living?

The present writer ventures to suggest that the occasion in question was a sort of Hallowmas, a feast for All Saints and Souls.

The affirmation 8:6c, d "For Love is strong as Death, / Passion fierce as Hell," has been generally recognized as the theme and message of the Song of Songs. This is also the assurance of Paul's praise of love in I Cor 13:8: "Love never quits" (hē agapē oudepote ekpiptei). "There are three things that last, Faith, Hope, Love—and Love is the greatest." The nature of the Love (hē agapē) which Paul commended to the Corinthians had little in common with the sort of love feasts which they were wont to celebrate. Nevertheless, these pagan love feasts were also a response to death with the assertion of life in its most basic modes of expression, eating, drinking, and copulation, all requisite for the continuation of life. Mother Earth, from whom man comes and to whom he returns, she who creates, nourishes, destroys, and takes man back into her ample womb, was worshiped at the ancestral graves with love feasts and commemorative rites to ensure the continuation of life. It is no accident that tombstones and memorial stelae are sometimes distinctly phallic in form, as often with the Greek herma, and that the term yid- "hand," in Ugaritic and Hebrew is applied to the phallus and in Hebrew to a memorial stela, while the terms for "memory" and "phallus" appear to be related to the same root, ^*dkr, zkr.…

The Epistle of Jude inveighs against impious persons who had sneaked into the Christian community and had perverted the grace of God to an excuse for fornication and unnatural lust. These people are described, Jude 12, as "reefs (spilades) in your love feasts (en tads agapais humon)." In a parallel passage, II Peter 2:13, they are called "blots (spiloi) and blemishes (momoi) who revel in their love feasts" (choosing the variant agapais over apatais, "dissipations"). The charges and invectives laid on these subversives, Jude 8-26; II Peter 2:4-22, stress sexual licentiousness. The point of interest here is the explicit connection of this sort of conduct with the love feasts. Passing over the question of the relation of the Agape and the Eucharist (on which see the excellent treatment by A. J. Maclean in ERE, s.v. Agape), it will suffice to stress the original and essential character of these celebrations as mortuary meals, continuing the ancient and well-nigh universal practice of providing refreshment for the dead and sharing it with them in a communal and commemorative meal. Such celebrations from time immemorial had not infrequently featured orgiastic revelry, drunkenness, gluttony, cannibalism, incest, and sundry other excesses. In the early church the cult of the martyrs evolved quite naturally from the need to offer a tolerable substitute for these irrepressible practices.… As long as the offerings, whether to ancestors or martyrs, remained moderately decent affairs, there was no need to prohibit them. The charge that Christians offered food and wine to appease the shades of the martyrs Augustine rebutted with the argument that the altars were built to God in honor of the martyrs and not to the martyrs as if they were gods; honor was paid to the martyrs merely to encourage others to emulate them and share in their merits. It was doubtless difficult for newcomers to Christianity to appreciate the subtle difference between outwardly similar procedures in offerings to the ancestors and the martyrs. The toleration of the memorials for the martyrs was probably a concession to recent converts who were reluctant to relinquish the pleasures of the old-time revels. The trouble came when the grosser features of the pagan celebrations were carried over into the Christian love feasts, as the protests of early Christian writers attest. Augustine was tolerant toward the harmless sort of devotion to the saints and martyrs which his mother practiced, but not toward the drunken carousels carried on in some circles. When his mother Monica first came to Milan, she went to church with a basket of food and wine for the graves of the saints, as she had been accustomed to do in Africa, but was informed by the porter that this practice had been banned by the bishop. Augustine well understood the reasons for this ban imposed by Ambrose, since these meals for the saints were too much like pagan parentalia and served as an excuse for drunkenness. There were those who worshiped at the tombs, set food before the dead, drank to excess, and then attributed gluttony and drunkenness to religion. One should not judge Christianity, Augustine argued, by the behavior of the masses, who remained superstitious or were so enslaved to sensual pleasures that they forgot their promises to God. In his sermons Augustine tried to persuade the people that such excesses were pagan and did not derive from the stock and vine of justice of our patriarchs. Sir 30:18, which compares the placing of food on graves to putting dainties before a mouth that is closed, was explained as referring to a sick person who refuses food, since the Patriarchs kept no parentalia. Tobit 4:7, however, commands the deposit of food and pouring of wine on the graves of the just, but not on those of the wicked, and from this Augustine deduced that the faithful may perform this sort of memorial for their relatives provided it is done with pious intention. Those who persisted in heathen revelry, however, were blasted by Augustine: "The martyrs hate your wine jugs and cooking pots and your gluttony."

There they bring bread and wine to the grave and call the dead by name. How often after his death they must have called out the name of the wealthy glutton when they got drunk in his mausoleum, and yet not a drop fell on his parched tongue.

Similarly Zeno of Verona inveighed in the style of the prophet Amos:

God is displeased by those who run along to the gravesides, offer their lunch to stinking corpses and then in their desire to eat and drink suddenly, with pot and glass, conjure up martyrs at the most unfitting places.

The Donatists, in particular, were charged with utter wantonness, as

those gangs of vagabonds who bury their own selves upon their graves in loathsome promiscuity, seducing one another into all manner of vice.

Madden in her summation modestly concluded that

out of the pagan customs in honor of the dead, abuses developed in the festivals held to honor the memory of the martyrs. It became necessary to take measures against these abuses. The allusions to the traces of these customs relating to the honoring of the dead show that this phase of paganism had a strong hold on the hearts of the people, even after they had become Christians.

It is beyond the scope of this present effort to attempt any systematic treatment of funeral cults in the ancient world. The preceding discussion was intended merely to suggest that certain features of the Song of Songs may be understood in the light of the considerable and growing evidences that funeral feasts in the ancient Near East were love feasts celebrated with wine, women, and song. The Greek term agapē, LOVE, attached to these feasts certainly included eros as well as philia, to judge from the condemnations of drunkenness, fornication, and other excesses in the New Testament and the Church Fathers. The appearance of some of the characteristic terms of the Canticle in the Ugaritic mythological and ritual texts, especially in connection with the term ^*marzih, and in the inscriptions from Palmyra which confirm and elucidate the connection of the marzih / thiasos / symposion with the funeral feast, opens new possibilities, yet to be fully tested and exploited, for the understanding of the cultic origins of the Canticles. This approach seems capable of explaining the Canticles better than any other and is able to subsume aspects of other modes of interpretation as enfolding elements of truth. The connection of the Canticle with the funeral feast as expressive of the deepest and most constant human concern for Life and Love in the ever present face of Death adds new insight and appreciation of our pagan predecessors who responded to Death with affirmations and even gross demonstrations of the power and persistence of Life and Love:

Kî 'azzāh kammawet 'ah bāh
Hoti krataia hōs thanatos agapē
Quia fortis est ut mors dilectio

For Love is strong as Death.