The Bible contains a book of frank love poetry, and rabbis argued over it
Nestled in the Hebrew Bible is a poem in which two lovers trade compliments, chase each other through city streets at night and invite one another into a garden of fruits. God is never its subject on the surface. So how did the Song of Songs become scripture, and even be hailed as its holiest writing?
The book is unlike anything else in the Tanakh. A woman and her lover speak in turns, with the women of Jerusalem acting as a chorus, and she repeatedly warns them not to awaken love before its time. The imagery is lush and specific: eyes like doves, hair like a flock of goats, a neck like the Tower of David, a beloved described as a locked garden. Near the end, love is set against death itself as something no force can put out. Modern scholars generally think the lovers are unmarried and read the work as erotic poetry rather than an elaborate metaphor.
Its title uses a Hebrew construction marking something as the finest of its kind, as in Holy of Holies. Tradition credits Solomon, but the language, heavy with late vocabulary and idiom, points to a date centuries after him; estimates range from the 10th to the 2nd century BCE, with linguistic evidence favouring about the 3rd. It echoes Egyptian and Mesopotamian love songs and the pastoral poems of the Greek writer Theocritus. Whether it is one poem or an anthology remains unresolved, and no agreed structure has emerged.
Its place in the canon depended on reading it as an allegory of God's love for Israel, a view that dominated for more than a thousand years; Christians later read it as Christ and his Church. Some ancient rabbis were uneasy about including it at all. Rabbi Akiva, in the first and second centuries, banned singing it in taverns as a bawdy song, yet defended it fiercely, calling it the holiest of all the Writings. Many Jews still read it at Passover, a custom first recorded in 8th-century Palestine.
Interpretations keep multiplying. Marvin Pope linked it to fertility cult liturgy and sacred marriage rites, while Jennifer Andruska and Katharine Dell see features of wisdom literature, teaching a model of wise love. It has inspired artists from Marc Chagall and Carl Theodor Dreyer to Toni Morrison and Neil Diamond.
Source: Song of Songs
