Song of Songs

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The Song of Songs is the Hebrew Bible’s book of love poetry: a sequence of lyrics between two lovers — desiring, searching, praising one another’s bodies in cascades of imagery — in which God is never plainly named and nothing is asked of the reader but attention. It is also, and for that very reason, the most allegorized book in either testament. A text this physical, canonized in scripture, demanded explanation; twenty centuries of readers have supplied it.

The poems are short and undidactic. A woman speaks, and a man, and at moments a chorus of the daughters of Jerusalem; the speakers are not always marked, and the scenes shift without transition — a vineyard, a bedchamber, a city at night, the hill country in spring. The lovers call each other brother and sister in the convention of the genre, praise each other limb by limb in the formal catalog that scholars name the wasf, and circle a single situation: desire that reaches for a body it cannot quite hold. The book takes its title from its first words, shir ha-shirim — “the song of songs,” a Hebrew superlative meaning the song surpassing all songs, as “holy of holies” means the holiest place. It carries almost no plot, no named God, no commandment. What it has instead is voice, and the voice never stops moving.

The book’s own title verse links it to Solomon — shir ha-shirim asher li-Shlomo, the Song of Songs which is Solomon’s — and tradition long counted it among his works, alongside Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, the three books the canon gives to the wisest of kings. Modern scholarship treats the attribution as honorific: the Hebrew preposition li- can mean “belonging to” or “in the manner of” as readily as “by,” and a love poetry set among gardens and litters and royal beds drew the great patron of wisdom to itself the way later psalmody drew David. The date is unsettled across much of the first millennium BCE. The strongest linguistic markers point late: the relative particle she- runs through the book where classical prose prefers asher, and the vocabulary carries demonstrable Persian-era loanwords — pardes, “orchard” or “park,” in 4:13, a word borrowed into Hebrew from Old Iranian no earlier than the Achaemenid period; appiryon, the litter or palanquin of 3:9, plausibly from Greek. The philologist Gary Rendsburg argues that many of the so-called late features are instead northern, Israelian dialect forms rather than evidence of a post-exilic hand, which would loosen the dating again. The honest result is a range, not a verdict: a poem, or a collection of poems, whose final shaping most likely belongs to the Persian or early Hellenistic centuries, attached to Solomon by reverence rather than by record.

Its place in scripture was discussed early, and not without resistance. The rabbinic test of a sacred book was whether it “rendered the hands unclean” — a paradoxical idiom by which contact with a holy text required ritual washing, so that to defile the hands was precisely to be canonical. A saying preserved in the Mishnah, in the tractate Yadayim (“Hands”), records the dispute: some weighed whether the Song and Ecclesiastes belonged among the writings that defile the hands, and Rabbi Akiva answered in the strongest language available, that all the writings are holy but the Song of Songs is the holy of holies, and that the whole world was not worth the day the Song was given to Israel. The Tosefta attaches to him a sharper warning: whoever trills the Song in the banquet halls, treating it as a common love song, forfeits his share in the world to come. The two sayings belong together. Akiva did not deny that the book sounded like a wedding song; he insisted it must not be heard as one. The defense set the pattern for everything that followed — the Song was holiest precisely where it looked least holy, and the reading that secured its holiness was not its plain sense.

That reading was allegorical, and it arrived in two great traditions, each coherent from within. Jewish interpretation heard the lovers as God and Israel: the courtship, the estrangement, the searching through the night streets, the reconciliation, read as the history of a people with its Lord from the Exodus to the age to come. The Aramaic Targum of the Song lays this out as a continuous national narrative, verse mapped to era; the midrashic compilation Shir ha-Shirim Rabbah, gathered in the land of Israel by about the sixth or seventh century, multiplies the same key across the whole book; and the liturgical placement seals it — the Song is read in many communities at Passover, the festival of the going-out from Egypt, so that the love poem becomes the wedding song of the redemption. On this reading the bride’s longing is exile and her satisfaction is return, and the most erotic verses become the most theological.

Christianity received the method and changed the cast. The bridegroom became Christ, the bride the Church — and then, in the tradition’s most inward turn, the individual soul. The pivot was Origen of Alexandria, who in the third century built the foundational Christian commentary on the book, surviving in the Latin of Rufinus and in two homilies rendered by Jerome. His prologue did two things at once. It placed the Song at the summit of a curriculum: Solomon, Origen argued, wrote three books in ascending order — Proverbs for ethics, Ecclesiastes for the study of nature, and the Song for the highest, contemplative science, the inspective knowledge of God, to which the soul comes only when the lower studies have purified it. And it fixed the double reference of the bride as either the Church or the soul made in God’s image, burning with heavenly love for the Word who is her bridegroom. Origen also gave the tradition its most enduring image. Reading the verse in which the woman says she is sick with love, he heard the soul pierced by the dart of the Word — wounded into longing, in love with a wound. The wound of love, the night search, the kiss: the central figures of later mysticism are already his.

Nine centuries on, Bernard of Clairvaux gave the bridal reading its definitive monastic form. Beginning in Advent of 1135 and continuing until his death in 1153, the Cistercian abbot preached eighty-six sermons on the Song to the choir monks of Clairvaux — and reached only the opening verses of the third chapter. The unfinished cycle, the Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, is his mystical masterpiece. Its method is experiential before it is exegetical: Bernard tells his monks that the meaning of the song of love is opened not by argument but by experientia, by the testimony of those who have loved, so that only the practiced heart can hear it. His governing figure is the kiss of the opening line. He reads the ascent of the soul as a sequence of three kisses — the kiss of the feet, which is penitence and the conversion of life; the kiss of the hand, which is progress in virtue; and at last the kiss of the mouth, the unreserved contemplative union, the gift of only a few of the more perfect. The bride is the soul and also the Church; the bridegroom is the Word, who comes and withdraws and comes again, and the whole drama of the spiritual life is staged as the alternation of his presence and absence. Bernard’s union is a unitas spiritus, a union of wills in a single act of love, never a fusion of substance: the creature does not become God, but is made one spirit with him. His English readers can follow the sermons in Samuel Eales’s 1895 translation, where the three kisses are laid out as he preached them. After his death his cycle was continued — by Gilbert of Hoyland, and then by John of Ford to the end of the Song — making one of the longest sermon-commentaries the Middle Ages produced.

By then the Song had become the central text of Christian bridal mysticism, the language in which the soul’s union with God could be spoken about at all. Its vocabulary — union, the kiss, the wound of love, the bride and the bridegroom, the search for the beloved through the night — passed, lifted whole, into the writers who came after. Hildegard of Bingen set the nuptial imagery to her own visionary music; the Rhineland and Flemish women’s traditions and the Spanish Carmelites built their accounts of the dark night and the spiritual marriage on its frame; and in the quietist controversy of the seventeenth century Madame Guyon read the Song as the chart of the soul’s annihilation in pure love, a reading that helped bring Quietism under condemnation. Where Christian mystics needed words for the encounter that exceeds speech, they reached for this book, and the reaching was not accidental: no other scripture had so thoroughly mapped the grammar of longing.

The mystics of the Kabbalah prized it no less, and read it through their own architecture. For the theosophical Jewish mystics, the lovers’ union figured the union within the divine itself — the hidden flow between the sefirot, and above all the reunion of the masculine divine with the Shekhinah, the indwelling Presence imagined as the divine Bride in exile with her people. In the Gerona circle, Ezra ben Solomon wrote a kabbalistic commentary on the Song that reads its drama as the ascent of the soul and the movement of the divine potencies, a text so authoritative it circulated for centuries under the name of his more famous contemporary Nahmanides — the milieu in which the early Kabbalists of Gerona systematized their doctrine of emanation. A generation of systematizers later, in sixteenth-century Safed, Moses Cordovero folded the Zohar’s reading of the Song into his vast commentary Or Yakar; the Song’s nuptial imagery, by his time, was load-bearing structure in the kabbalistic account of how the one God is internally many and how the broken world is rejoined. The bride seeking the bridegroom had become, in this tradition, the cosmos seeking its own repair.

Reading the Song as poetry

A countercurrent of plain-sense reading never wholly disappeared. Medieval Jewish commentators distinguished the book’s peshat, its literal surface, from the derash layered over it, even while affirming the allegory; and from the eighteenth century onward critical scholarship has largely read the Song as what it appears to be — love poetry, very possibly a collection rather than a single composition, with close relatives in the love songs of the wider ancient Near East. The most important comparison is Egyptian. Michael V. Fox’s study The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs (1985) sets the biblical poems beside the New Kingdom love lyrics of the Egyptian papyri — the cycles of Papyrus Chester Beatty I, Papyrus Harris 500, the Cairo and Turin songs — and finds the same conventions: the lovers as brother and sister, the descriptive praise of the body, the garden as the place of meeting, the lovesickness, the alternation of male and female voice. The parallels do not make the Song Egyptian; they make it a member of a genre with a long ancestry, the surviving Hebrew instance of a poetry of desire that the whole region wrote.

The standard critical commentaries pursue the book on those terms. Marvin Pope’s monumental Anchor Bible volume of 1977 reads the Song against ancient Near Eastern fertility cult and the funeral feast, pressing the link the book itself draws between love and death — love strong as death, jealousy hard as the grave. J. Cheryl Exum’s commentary of 2005 attends instead to the poem as poem, to the way the Song renders desire from the woman’s side and the man’s and refuses to resolve the difference. Both register the fact that has driven the whole history of reading: God is never named in the Song. With Esther it is one of the two books of the Hebrew Bible in which the divine name does not appear — unless one counts the single charged word in the climactic oath, where the flame of love is called, in a form many take for a divine superlative, the very flame of the Lord. On the critical reading the allegories are receptions rather than recoveries: the poem meant desire, and was made to mean God. The older traditions answer that scripture means what it is read to mean in the assembly that keeps it, and that no book teaches the grammar of longing better. The public-domain Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 already lays both positions side by side, noting that the allegorical reading was probably what secured the book’s place in the first instance — that the hidden sense did not follow canonization but enabled it.

It may be the only book of the Bible whose plain sense was the scandal and whose hidden sense was the orthodoxy. What is not in dispute is the trajectory: a poem that never names God became the West’s primary text about loving him. The Song itself, characteristically, keeps its own counsel — it ends not with a moral but with the beloved still in motion, like a gazelle on the mountains of spices.

→ Related: Mysteries Of The Rosary · Bible · Tanakh · Christian Mysticism · Bernard Of Clairvaux · Origen · Kabbalah · Moses Cordovero · Ancient Egypt