Song of Songs

The Song of Songs (Biblical Hebrew: שִׁיר הַשִּׁירִים‎, romanized: Šīr hašŠīrīm), also called the Canticle of Canticles or the Song of Solomon, is a biblical poem, one of the five megillot ("scrolls") in the Ketuvim ('writings'), the last section of the Tanakh. Unlike other books in the Hebrew Bible, it is erotic poetry; lovers express passionate desire, exchange compliments, and invite one another to enjoy. The poem narrates an intense, poetic love story between a woman and her lover through a series of sensual dialogues, dreams, metaphors, and warnings to the “daughters of Jerusalem” not to awaken love before its time.

Modern scholarship tends to hold that the lovers in the Song are unmarried, which accords with its ancient Near East context. The women of Jerusalem form a chorus to the lovers, functioning as an audience whose participation in the lovers' erotic encounters facilitates the participation of the reader.

Most scholars view the Song of Songs as erotic poetry celebrating human love, not divine metaphor, with some seeing influences from fertility cults and wisdom literature. Its authorship, date, and origins remain uncertain, with scholars debating its unity, structure, and possible influences from Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greek love poetry.

In modern Judaism, the Song is read on the Sabbath during the Passover, which marks both the beginning of the grain-harvest and the commemoration of the Exodus from Egypt. Jewish tradition interprets it as an allegory of the relationship between God and Israel. In Christianity, it is viewed as an allegory of Christ and his bride, the Church. The Song of Songs has inspired diverse works in art, film, theater, and literature, including pieces by Marc Chagall, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Toni Morrison, and John Steinbeck.

There is widespread consensus that, although the book has no plot, it does have what can be called a framework, indicated by the links between its beginning and end. Beyond this, however, there appears to be little agreement: attempts to find a chiastic structure have not found acceptance, and analyses dividing the book into units have employed various methods, yielding diverse conclusions.

The following indicative schema is from Kugler and Hartin's An Introduction to The Bible:

The introduction calls the poem "the song of songs", a phrase that follows an idiomatic construction commonly found in Scriptural Hebrew to indicate the object's status as the greatest and most beautiful of its class (as in Holy of Holies). The work is also referred to as the "Song of Solomon", meaning the song 'of', 'by', 'for', or '[dedicated] to' Solomon.

The poem proper begins with the woman's expression of desire for her lover and her self-description to the "daughters of Jerusalem": she insists on her sun-born blackness, likening it to the "tents of Kedar" (nomads) and the "curtains of Solomon". A dialogue between the lovers follows: the woman asks the man to meet; he replies with a lightly teasing tone. The two compete in offering flattering compliments ("my beloved is to me as a cluster of henna blossoms in the vineyards of En Gedi", "an apple tree among the trees of the wood", "a lily among brambles", while the bed they share is like a forest canopy). The section closes with the woman telling the daughters of Jerusalem not to stir up love such as hers until it is ready.