Study science to fall in love with God is the message of the Song of Songs according to both Maimonides and Gersonides. Whereas Maimonides believed it was forbidden to make the hidden meaning accessible to the average person, by the time Gersonides was writing a century later, the philosophical reading of the Bible was well known. Thus, he not only explicates the text but also quotes Aristotle 49 times to make his points.
Origen (3rd century C.E.) read the Song of Songs as an allegory expressing the love between Christ and his “bride,” and many Christian interpreters followed suit. Rashi (11th century C.E.), utilizing his two-pronged method of midrash aligned with peshat, developed a consistent Jewish allegory for the Song: Israel is an exiled wife, who pines for the time of her youthful love with God. Could Rashi have been contending with the Christian interpretation?
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.
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.
Using imagery of tents, gardens, and flowing water—themes associated with love and sexuality in the Bible and the ancient Near East—Balaam blesses Israelite women with fertility. The Priestly authors, however, invert this blessing to present Balaam as the instigator of the Baal Peor incident.
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
The woman in Song of Songs wishes to know where her lover will be, asking: “Why should I be like an ʿōṭǝyâ (כְּעֹטְיָה).” Translators struggle with this phrase, and suggest meanings as disparate as “be veiled like a prostitute,” “be as a wanderer,” or even “pick at my nits.” How do scholars use ancient translation, cognate words, and content to translate a word in the Bible whose meaning is so obscure?
“Oh, let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth…” Song of Songs 1:2. Allegorical interpretation in midrash and the Zohar understand the male lover being beckoned as God, but whom is God kissing and why? And does kabbalistic interpretation leave any room for human love?
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.
“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is better than wine” (Song 1:2). The Song of Songs opens with this sudden shift in person, an ungrammatical syntactic substitution called enallage. How common is this literary device, and why is it used?
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.
Finding gender equality in the Song of Songs without compromising God and meaning.
Reading Deuteronomy in light of ancient Near Eastern treaties, we learn that the commandment to love God entails both action and affection. We further learn about the nature of God’s love for Israel, described also in the prophets and in the rabbinic reading of Song of Songs.
Reading Shir HaShirim in Its Original Sense