A survey of the history of one of the most important biblical texts in the history of Christian spirituality while exploring original pathways for research.
Explore metaphors in the exquisite and enigmatic poetry of Song of Songs
One of the chief difficulties in interpreting the Song's lyrics is the unusual imagery used to depict the lovers' bodies. Why ...is the maiden's hair compared to a flock of goats (4:1), the man's cheeks likened to garden beds of spice (5:13), and the eyes of both lovers described as doves (4:1; 5:12)? While scholars speculate on the significance of these images, a systematic inquiry into the Song's body metaphors is curiously absent. Based on insights from cognitive linguistics, this study incorporates biblical and comparative data to uncover the meaning of these metaphors surveying literature in the eastern Mediterranean (and beyond) that shares a similar form (poetry) and theme (love). Gault presents an interpretation of the Song's body imagery that sheds light on the perception of beauty in Israel and its relationship to surrounding cultures.
Features
Exploration of the Song's use of universal themes and culturally specific variations
Discussion of the Song's literary structure and unity
The Way of Lovers Japhet, Sara; Walfish, Barry Dov
2017, Volume:
8
eBook
This volume provides an edition, translation and extensive study of a unique anonymous medieval peshat commentary on Song of Songs, emanating from Northern France in the late twelfth century.
The Song of Songs Pardes, Ilana
2019, 20190813, 2019-08-13, Volume:
32
eBook
An essential history of the greatest love
poem ever written
The Song of Songs has been embraced for centuries as the ultimate song of love. But the kind of love readers have found in this ancient ...poem is strikingly varied. Ilana Pardes invites us to explore the dramatic shift from readings of the Song as a poem on divine love to celebrations of its exuberant account of human love. With a refreshingly nuanced approach, she reveals how allegorical and literal interpretations are inextricably intertwined in the Song's tumultuous life. The body in all its aspects-pleasure and pain, even erotic fervor-is key to many allegorical commentaries. And although the literal, sensual Song thrives in modernity, allegory has not disappeared. New modes of allegory have emerged in modern settings, from the literary and the scholarly to the communal.
Offering rare insights into the story of this remarkable poem, Pardes traces a diverse line of passionate readers. She looks at Jewish and Christian interpreters of late antiquity who were engaged in disputes over the Song's allegorical meaning, at medieval Hebrew poets who introduced it into the opulent world of courtly banquets, and at kabbalists who used it as a springboard to the celestial spheres. She shows how feminist critics have marveled at the Song's egalitarian representation of courtship, and how it became a song of America for Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Toni Morrison. Throughout these explorations of the Song's reception, Pardes highlights the unparalleled beauty of its audacious language of love.
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.
This book is a new English translation of the two shortest, most controversial and perhaps most vibrant books in the Hebrew Old Testament - Song of Songs (Song of Solomon) and Qohelet (Ecclesiastes). ...The two books slipped into the Jewish - and eventually Christian - Canon by a series of misrepresentations. The first, Song of Songs, is linguistically the latest book along the Biblical Hebrew dialect continuum, perhaps as late as 300-100 BC to judge by its language, which closely resembles Mishnaic Hebrew (2nd Cent. AD). The book is a lush, carnal poetic account of an illicit love affair, where lusty exchanges between the female beloved and her male lover are interspersed with rustic love songs. The ultimate provenance of the text may be older than the time it was recruited into the Canon, or the time suggested by its late dialect.The second book, Qohelet, is linguistically earlier on the Biblical Hebrew dialect continuum, though still following the return from the Babylonian exile (ca. 550 BC). Unlike Song of Songs, which is linguistically coherent and bears all the marks of having been produced by a native speaker (or speakers), Qohelet is replete with non-native lexical and grammatical usage, and was most likely produced by a speaker (or speakers) of Aramaic, the lingua franca of the Persian empire and the returning exiles. Multiple English translations of the two books exist. Nonetheless, in one way or another all previous translations suffer from two main drawbacks: First, their interpretation of the grammar - and on occasion also the vocabulary - of Biblical Hebrew is sometimes questionable. And second, the poetic quality of their English leaves much to be desired, paling in comparison with the stark beauty of the Hebrew original.This book attempts to do justice to both the contents and form of these two magnificent, deliciously subversive poetic works. The Hebrew texts and their English translation are preceded by two scholarly chapters, the first about the Biblical Hebrew dialect continuum , the second about the science and art of translation.
His Hiding Place is Darkness explores the uncertainties of faith and love in a pluralistic age. In keeping with his conviction that studying multiple religious traditions intensifies rather than ...attenuates religious devotion, Francis Clooney's latest work of comparative theology seeks a way beyond today's religious and interreligious uncertainty by pairing a fresh reading of the absence of the beloved in the Biblical Song of Songs with a pioneering study of the same theme in the Holy Word of Mouth (9th century CE), a classic of Hindu mystical poetry rarely studied in the West.Remarkably, the pairing of these texts is grounded not in a general theory of religion, but in an engagement with two unexpected sources: the theopoetics, theodramatics, and theology of the 20th-century Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, and the intensely perceived and written poetry of Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham. How we read and write on religious matters is transformed by this rare combination of voices in what is surely a unique and important contribution to comparative studies and religious hermeneutics.
The book puts forward a literal interpretation of the Song of Songs which the author sees as advancing a theology of human love. From the literary angle, particular importance is awarded to the ...structure of the poem, highlighting its strongly unitary character.
