are not the beauty-curves of the thighs at rest, - the connection here requires movement. In accordance with the united idea of חל, the appos. is not מעשׂי, but (according to the Palestin.) מעשׂה (lxx, Targ., Syr., Venet.). The artist is called אמּן (ommân) (the forms אמן and אמן are also found), Syr. avmon, Jewish-Aram. אוּמן; he has, as the master of stability, a name like ימין, the right hand: the hand, and especially the right hand, is the artifex among the members.[1]
The eulogists pass from the loins to the middle part of the body. In dancing, especially in the Oriental style of dancing, which is the mimic representation of animated feeling, the breast and the body are raised, and the forms of the body appear through the clothing.
Verse 2
Sol 7:2 2 Thy navel is a well-rounded basin - Let not mixed wine be wanting to it Thy body is a heap of wheat, Set round with lilies.
In interpreting these words, Hitzig proceeds as if a “voluptuary” were here speaking. He therefore changes שׁררך into שׁררך, “thy pudenda.” But (1) it is no voluptuary who speaks here, and particularly not a man, but women who speak; certainly, above all, it is the poet, who would not, however, be so inconsiderate as to put into the mouths of women immodest words which he could use if he wished to represent the king as speaking. Moreover (2) שׁר = (Arab.) surr, secret (that which is secret; in Arab. especially referred to the pudenda, both of man and woman), is a word that is[2] foreign to the Heb. language, which has for “Geheimnis” secret the corresponding word סוד (vid., under Psa 2:2; Psa 25:14), after the root-signification of its verbal stem (viz., to be firm, pressed together); and (3) the reference - preferred by Döpke, Magnus, Hahn, and others, also without any change of punctuation - of שׁר to the interfeminium mulieris, is here excluded by the circumstance that the attractions of a woman dancing, as they unfold themselves, are here described. Like the Arab. surr, שׁר (= shurr), from שׁרר, to bind fast, denotes properly the umbilical cord, Eze 16:4, and then the umbilical scar. Thus, Pro 3:8, where most recent critics prefer, for לשׁרּך, to read, but without any proper reason, לשׁרך = לשׁארך, “to thy flesh,” the navel comes there into view as the centre of the body, - which it always is with new-born infants, and is almost so with grown-up persons in respect of the length of the body, - and as, indeed, the centre. whence the pleasurable feeling of health diffuses its rays of heat. This middle and prominent point of the