a female gazelle: the doe of the small, swift, graceful antelope of the open hills
This is the feminine form of the ordinary Hebrew word for the gazelle (צְבִי), so it names the female of that animal, a doe. The gazelle was the common wild game of the hill country of Israel: small, fast, and famous for its grace. Older English Bibles called it a "roe," borrowing the name of a European deer that never lived in the land; the animal meant is the gazelle. The identification is secure, and the neatest proof is a name. The Aramaic form of this same word is Tabitha, and when the New Testament introduces a woman by that name in Acts 9:36 it translates it with the Greek word for gazelle (Δορκάς).
Both times the word appears it is doing the same job, in a line of love poetry that the Song of Songs says twice: your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle. Naming the mother is what makes the picture work. Twin fawns of one doe are a matched pair, alike in size and coloring and moving together, and that pairing is the point of the comparison. The first of the two lines adds that the fawns are grazing among the lilies; the second leaves the picture bare.
What the image conveys is softness, liveliness, and delight in what the speaker sees. Gazelles were a stock image of ancient love song, and Egyptian and Mesopotamian poets reached for them the same way, so the line would have sounded familiar rather than startling to its first hearers. How much more it carries is argued. In the religious art of Syria and Canaan the young gazelle belongs with the goddess of love and fertility, and some scholars hear that resonance behind the simile, while others read a plain pastoral comparison drawn from the shared stock of love poetry. Both sides agree the line is admiring and openly erotic.
Disputed
What the gazelle image in the Song's twin-fawn simile (Song 4:5; 7:3, Hebrew 7:4) is meant to carry: a conventional poetic comparison, or the associations the young gazelle held in the religious art and myth of the surrounding cultures.
- majorityA conventional simile drawn from the shared stock of ancient love poetry, Egyptian and Mesopotamian included. The gazelle fawns convey grace, softness, symmetry, liveliness and desirability, and nothing more religiously loaded is in view.; M. V. Fox, The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); T. Longman III, Song of Songs (NICOT, Eerdmans, 2001); D. A. Garrett, Song of Songs (WBC 23B, Nelson, 2004); A. Bloch and C. Bloch, The Song of Songs: A New Translation (Random House, 1995)
- minorityA live image still carrying what the young gazelle meant in the art of Syria and Canaan, where it belongs with the goddess of love and fertility, so the simile lends the woman's body something of the power and awe that love held in that world.; O. Keel, The Song of Songs (Continental Commentary, Fortress, 1994); M. H. Pope, Song of Songs (Anchor Bible 7C, Doubleday, 1977)