The Song of the Valiant Woman (Prov 31:10-31): A pattern in the History of Interpretation (to 1600)

Abstract

The thesis traces the history of the interpretation of the Song of the Valiant Woman, the concluding pericope of the book of Proverbs, from the earliest records to 1600 A.D. It is shown that, for the first fifteen centuries of that history, there is a remarkable parallelism between the Jewish and the Christian traditions of interpretation, even though there was little interaction between them. Each began with a ' literal interpretation of the Song, taking the Valiant Woman to represent a God-fearing Israelite woman, continued with a variety of allegorical readings, and ended in the Middle Ages with a standard allegorical interpretation: the Valiant Woman representing the Torah among the Jews, and the Church among the Christians. From the time of the Talmud and the early Christian church fathers, the interpretation of the Song was overwhelmingly allegorical. This allegorical consensus was broken by the sixteenth-century Reformation in Europe, when Protestant interpreters unanimously returned to a literal interpretation of the Song. The beginning of this new hermeneutical approach can be pinpointed with some accuracy: it arose in Wittenberg in the 1520's, probably initiated by Philip Melanchthon, but soon taken over by his colleague Martin Luther. All Protestant expositors of the sixteenth century, both popular and academic, followed their lead.</p> <p>It is shown that the history of interpretation of this single pericope reflects the broader periods and movements of biblical hermeneutics. The tradition of allegorical interpretation reflects the influence of the Alexandrians Philo and Origen, the persistence of allegory in the Latin West reflects both a Scholastic respect for tradition and a sophisticated definition of the nhistorical n sense, and the Protestant return to a literal reading reflects both the hermeneutical rejection of allegory and Luther's doctrine of Beruf or "calling" applied to the Valiant Woman. Along the way, many unnoticed details of textual history, exegesis, translation, lexicography and intellectual filiation are brought to the fore.