Love

Leah names her sons to express her longing for Jacob’s love, but eventually abandons that hope. When her daughter is born, Leah names her Dinah—from the noun דין (din), a silent cry for “justice” after being trapped in a marriage to Jacob, who did not love her. Growing up in the shadow of her mother’s marital agony, Dinah seeks a different life for herself. In the Bible’s only story to foreground a mother–daughter connection, she ventures beyond the safety of home to explore her non-Israelite neighbors.

In sequence, Leviticus 19:17 commands: do not hate, do rebuke, and do not incur guilt. What is the relationship between these imperatives—and what do they teach us about the biblical art of rebuke?

Isaac and Rebecca’s relationship appears close and loving, except when Rebecca directs Jacob to deceive Isaac and steal the blessing meant for Esau. The sages suggest that Isaac knew all along that the man before him was Jacob, disguised as Esau. Is it possible that Isaac and Rebecca were both in on the plan from the start?

The story of Michal, King Saul’s daughter and David’s first wife—the only woman in the Bible described as being in love with a man—is framed by two window scenes. In the first, she is the spunky, loving bride who helps David escape his pursuers through her back window. In the second, embittered and depleted in spirit, she watches the triumphant David through the window with contempt. What happened in between?

The young women in the Song of Songs (2:15) repurpose a bucolic ditty to suggestively beckon young men. The key to their entendre is in the Arabic cognate for the verb לְחַבֵּל.

Hosea’s depiction of the marital relations with a promiscuous woman, as a metaphor for YHWH’s relationship with Israel, is problematic in ancient and modern terms. The structure of Hosea 2, however, suggests that we have been overlooking the prophet’s message: YHWH rejects and repudiates violence in favor of gentle persuasion and courtship.

Royal lovers, a female goatherd and male shepherd, King Solomon and his bride, an urban relationship that ends violently, and a sister and her protective brothers. Is it possible to read these episodes as a single love story?

Known by the acronym Pardes, four approaches—peshat, the literal, remez, the philosophical-allegorical, derash, the midrashic-allegorical, and sod, the mystical—can be found not only in commentaries on the Song of Songs but also in a variety of musical settings.

Shalhevetyah שַׁלְהֶבֶתְיָה, Song of Songs 8:6, a word appearing only here in the Bible, expresses the power of love by evoking the fiery destructive force of YHWH.

The book of Samuel opens with the patriarch Elkanah’s annual pilgrimage to Shiloh, but it is his barren wife, Hannah, who emerges as the key figure in the story. Through her clever negotiations with God for a son, Hannah finds a way to transcend the bounds of her role as wife and mother and carve out an honorable niche for herself in the Israelites’ sacred chronicles.

Song of Songs opens with: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for דֹּדֶיךָ (MT “your loving”) or mastoi sou (LXX “your breasts”) are better than wine.” Why does the LXX translate this way and which version is correct?

Ecclesiastes versus Song of Songs

Human perfection cannot be achieved only through intellectual and spiritual development, but requires companionship and physical intimacy.

Three descriptive poems in the Song of Songs wrestle with the experience of being in the beloved’s presence. In each case, the woman’s body is described using layered landscape imagery and complex, overlapping angles of vision. These poems ask us to consider what it means to see.

The Song of Songs is a collection of love poetry. The Rabbis read it as an allegory of the relationship between God and the Jewish people. Only in the Middle Ages, in Spain and Northern France, did scholars begin to pay attention to the plain (Peshat) meaning of the text. Some went as far as dropping the allegory altogether and treating it as love poetry, as it was originally intended.

“When morning came, there was Leah!” (Genesis 29:25). Could Jacob not tell the difference between Rachel, his beloved of seven years, and her sister Leah—for a whole night? Commentators have long tried to make sense of the story by adding extra details, but perhaps we need to rethink the nature of Jacob and Rachel’s relationship during those years.

My relationship with Torah began with the romance of mysticism but then gave way to skepticism and disillusionment. To my surprise, it was academic scholarship of the Torah that brought back the spark and helped foster a deeper, more mature relationship.

Finding gender equality in the Song of Songs without compromising God and meaning.

A Roman foundation myth is highly reminiscent of the abduction of the dancing girls in the book of Judges: A closer look at the Talmud’s description of Tu B’Av reveals a revolutionary, therapeutic recasting of the traumatic biblical story.

Reading Shir HaShirim in Its Original Sense

A surprising look at Shabbat in the Second Temple period.