The Song of Songs is a fascinating text. Read as an allegory of God’s love for Israel, the Church, or individual believers, it became one of the most influential texts from the Bible. This volume includes twenty-three essays that cover the Song’s reception history from antiquity to the present. They illuminate the richness of this reception history, paying attention to diverse interpretations in commentaries, sermons, and other literature, as well as the Song’s impact on spirituality, theological and intellectual debates, and the arts.

The thesis shows that the Song of Songs can be read as a circular sequence of sub-poems, that follow logically from one another if they are understood as contributing to two main points, made in a woman's voice. The woman urges men to take romantic initiative to be committed exclusively and for life, and urges women three times to wait until they are approached by such men. If this reading is the best explanation of the text of the Song, then the Song is a unified work centered on a woman singing about human romantic love from a woman's perspective.

This past summer, five days before Lorrie's mother passed on to heaven, the Holy Spirit led her to a time of intimacy in the Song of Solomon. She was drawn into a deep personal intimacy with the Lord who ministered to her heart the healing balm of Gilead. At the leading of the Holy Spirit, she recorded in her journal her intimate times with Jesus each morning. The book you hold in your hands contains some of these precious, personal times with Jesus. Here, in this book, Lorrie pens alongside the truth of Scripture, our completeness in Christ Jesus, and our value as His beautiful bride. Come away and commune with Jesus. Marnie Bergman's great gift of poetry within the Song of Solomon adds a similarly precious dimension with our Lord that will delight your heart and lead you to a greater understanding of the passages. * * * * * While reading "Morning Reflections" the Lord inspired me to write a few poetic prayers. Hopefully, you will take the time to read, meditate and maybe even sing some of the poetic prayers to yourself and others. Thank you, Lorrie, for the privilege of partnering with you in this adventure in the Song of Solomon. Linking arms with fellow believers and enjoying God's Word together will be a wonderful way to begin your day!

The volume is a Festschrift offered to Charles Kannengiesser on the occasion of his 80th birthday and honours him for his numerous scholarly accomplishments. Its twenty-five contributions discuss some of the major issues pertaining to the reception and interpretation of the Bible in late antique Christianity and Judaism. They focus on the ways in which communities and individuals understood the Bible and interpreted its traditions to address their historical, social, and theological requirements. Since the Bible was by far the most important book during these centuries, a discussion of its influence in such contexts will illuminate significant aspects of the formation of western civilisation.

Murphy offers a representative sounding in the major periods of the Song's exegetical history. Attention is given to the hermeneutical principles operative in the development of Jewish and Christian exposition. Murphy examines the literary character and structure of the Song, aspects of its composition and style, and its meaning and theological significance.

The Song of Songs, a lyric cycle of love scenes without a narrative plot, has often been considered as the Bible’s most beautiful and enigmatic book. The present study questions the still dominant exegetical convention that merges all of the Song’s voices into the dialogue of a single couple, its composite heroine Shulamit being a projection screen for norms of womanhood. An alternative socio-spatial reading, starting with the Hebrew text’s strophic patterns and its references to historical realia, explores the poem’s artful alternation between courtly, urban, rural, and pastoral scenes with their distinct characters. The literary construction of social difference juxtaposes class-specific patterns of consumption, mobility, emotion, power structures, and gender relations. This new image of the cycle as a detailed poetic frieze of ancient society eventually leads to a precise hypothesis concerning its literary and religious context in the Hellenistic age, as well as its geographical origins in the multiethnic borderland east of the Jordan. In a Jewish echo of anthropological skepticism, the poem emphasizes the plurality and relativity of the human condition while praising the communicative powers of pleasure, fantasy, and multifarious Eros.

"Shir ha-Shirim" -- Top of the title page.