Song of Songs: A Commentary

There is no other book in the Bible like the Song of Songs. It is a highly literate collection of love poems, at times intense with erotic desire and at times playful or flirtatious. This commentary draws out the tone of each poem, along with its language and literary qualities, including its metaphors, allusions, and clever use of words.

While there are correspondences between the Song and the literatures of Egypt and Mesopotamia, and they are cited in the commentary, the greatest foreign influence on the book comes from Greece. The commentary approaches the Song as a Jewish-Hellenistic work, in the full sense of that hyphenated term. It notes Greek ideas and tropes that appear throughout the book and shows how they have been adjusted and incorporated into Jewish thought and literary forms. The book’s Grecisms are dressed in ＂biblical＂ idioms and imagery. Going beyond previous studies, this volume emphasizes that the Song’s blending together of the Jewish and the Greek is part of its literary virtuosity.