The Song of Songs: love poetry at the heart of the Bible

Among the books of the Hebrew Bible there is one in which God is never explicitly named and which speaks, line after line, of desire between a woman and a man. The Song of Songs, in Hebrew Shir ha-Shirim, is a collection of love poems attributed by tradition to King Solomon. The title, built as a superlative in the Hebrew manner, means the song above all songs.

Author, date and structure

The attribution to Solomon derives from the title and from some mentions of the king within the text, but scholars regard it as traditional. The language shows late features, including some words probably of Persian origin, and for this reason many place the final redaction in the post-exilic period, while allowing that individual songs may be older. A precise date, on present knowledge, is not possible.

The eight chapters alternate the voices of a woman, a man and a chorus of daughters of Jerusalem. There is no linear plot, but a sequence of meetings, night-time searches, absences and reunions. Some scholars read it as a drama, others as an anthology of wedding songs; the question remains open and the text seems deliberately to escape any rigid scheme.

The language of the senses

The Song is a triumph of sensory imagery. The lovers' bodies are described through comparisons drawn from nature and landscape: goats coming down the mountain, towers, pomegranates, lilies, doves, vines in flower. These portraits built from metaphors have parallels in the love poetry of ancient Egypt, which shared a similar taste for listing the beloved's beauties and for setting love in a garden.

The woman speaks in the first person more often than the man: she seeks her beloved, calls him, describes herself. In Jerome's Latin translation, the Vulgate, one of her sentences would become famous: «Nigra sum sed formosa», I am dark but beautiful. Perfume, wine, the enclosed garden and the sealed fountain are recurring symbols of an intimacy that is awaited, desired and guarded.

Strong as death

Towards the end of the book comes the most famous passage. The woman asks to be set as a seal upon the man's heart and arm, because, the text says, «love is strong as death». In the ancient Near East the seal was the personal mark with which documents were authenticated: to ask to become one is to ask for a total and recognisable belonging.

The text goes on to say that many waters cannot quench love nor rivers drown it, and that anyone who offered all the wealth of his house in exchange for love would be met only with scorn. It is one of the loftiest definitions of the feeling to have come down from antiquity, and it is no accident that it is still read today at weddings in many traditions.

The Song's entry into the canon of Scripture was not a foregone conclusion. The Mishnah records a debate among the rabbis and the intervention of Rabbi Akiva, who called it the holy of holies among the writings. In Jewish liturgy the book is read at Passover and is one of the five scrolls, the Megillot. Its survival is also owed to the allegorical readings that made it a spiritual text.