something about the way the tower of David was built, said in praise of a woman's neck: the exact sense is lost, and rows of stone, an armory for weapons, and sheer height are the leading guesses
This word appears exactly once in the whole Hebrew Bible, in a love poem praising a woman's neck: it is "like the tower of David, built letalpiyyot, with a thousand shields hanging on it" (Song of Songs 4:4). Every other word in the line is clear. This one is not, and it has not been clear for a very long time. The ancient Greek translators simply spelled the Hebrew sounds out in Greek letters, as if the word were the name of a place, which is the surest sign that no working understanding of it survived even then.
Three explanations are alive among scholars today, and none of them has won the field:
- built in courses or rows of stone, the sense carried plainly by טוּר, picturing a neck as long and evenly tiered as fine masonry, or ringed by many rows of beads
- built as an armory, a place for storing and displaying weaponry (נֶשֶׁק), a reading taken from the thousand shields in the very next line
- built up to the heights (מָרוֹם), so that the tower, and the neck compared to it, is admired for sheer stature
Each of the three rests on a proposed link to a word in some neighboring ancient language, and every one of those links is disputed.
What stays steady underneath the guesswork is the picture. The tower of David was a landmark of height and strength, hung about with the shields of fighting men, and the poem sets a woman's neck beside it: tall, adorned, dignified, and not easily approached. The other comparisons in the same poem work the same way, giving an impression rather than a portrait. Whichever guess is right, the compliment does not change.
Disputed
What תַּלְפִּיּוֹת means in Song 4:4. The word is a hapax legomenon with no secure cognate, so each proposal reconstructs a different root, and none of them commands the field.
- contestedAn architectural sense: the tower was built in courses, rows, or layers of stone, from a root taken to mean arranging in order, compared with Akkadian lapû (surround, enclose), Arabic laffa (wrap, envelop), and Aramaic lpp (interlace, plait). This is the reading behind most modern English versions and most recent commentators, who often connect it to a many-stranded necklace wrapping the neck like masonry, but its defenders concede the etymology is not secure.; HALOT, s.v. תלפיות; A. M. Honeyman, Journal of Theological Studies 50 (1949), on the taqtîlat formation from לפי; Marvin H. Pope, Song of Songs (Anchor Bible 7C); Tremper Longman III, Song of Songs (NICOT); Richard S. Hess, Song of Songs (Baker Commentary on the Old Testament Wisdom and Psalms)
- contestedAn armory or arsenal: the tower was built to hold and display weapons, a reading prompted by the thousand shields and warriors' bucklers hung on it in the following line. Ibn Ezra reached it by redividing the consonants and taking the second element as the edges of swords; Haupt sought support in Akkadian fortification vocabulary and argued for siege-towers. The comparative Akkadian evidence is now generally judged phonologically strained.; Ibn Ezra, Commentary on the Song of Songs; Paul Haupt, "Heb. talpi'ot, Siege-Towers," Journal of Biblical Literature 38 (1919)
- contestedHeights: a noun formed with a prefixed taw on a root attested in Modern South Arabian meaning to climb easily, so that the phrase says the tower was built up to the heights, with the rare word chosen to alliterate with אֶלֶף and תָּלוּי in the same verse. This revives the sense Symmachus guessed in antiquity (εἰς ὕψη) and denies that the root means arranging in courses in either Aramaic or Arabic.; Gary A. Rendsburg, "Talpiyyôt (Song 4:4)," Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages 20/1 (1994): 13-19; Scott B. Noegel and Gary A. Rendsburg, Solomon's Vineyard: Literary and Linguistic Studies in the Song of Songs
- contestedThe sense is not recoverable: the versional spread and the absence of any cognate mean every rendering is a reasoned guess, and the responsible course is to translate cautiously and mark the Hebrew as uncertain rather than adopt any etymology.; Ernest Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language for Readers of English, s.v. תלפיות; Ariel Bloch and Chana Bloch, The Song of Songs: A New Translation with an Introduction and Commentary; J. Cheryl Exum, Song of Songs (Old Testament Library); Roland E. Murphy, The Song of Songs (Hermeneia)