The Song of Songs: love poem, allegory, or both?

What the text actually contains

The Song is poetry about desire between a man and a woman. The female voice has more than half the verses, which makes it unusual among ancient Near Eastern texts. The two lovers describe each other's bodies in extended praise sequences (the wasf, an Arabic term used by modern scholars for the head-to-foot descriptive poem found in 4:1-7, 5:10-16, 6:4-10, and 7:1-9). They meet in vineyards, gardens, and bedchambers. They are separated and reunited. The chorus of the daughters of Jerusalem comments and asks questions. A refrain ('I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please') punctuates the book three times.

Two features make the book a problem for reading. First, the name of God never appears in the text. Once at 8:6 there is the phrase shalhevetyah, 'a flame of Yah,' which could be a short form of the divine name embedded in a compound word or could be an idiomatic intensifier. Apart from that one possible occurrence, the book has no religious vocabulary. Second, the eroticism is unhedged. The lovers describe each other's mouths, hair, breasts, navel, thighs, and the act of going in to one another. There is no marriage ceremony narrated in the book and no clear narrative resolution. Modern translations sometimes soften the language, but the Hebrew does not.

The book is also linked to Solomon. The title at 1:1 reads 'the song of songs, which is Solomon's' (asher li-Shlomoh, which can mean by, for, about, or in the manner of Solomon). Solomon is named at 1:5, 3:7-11, and 8:11-12. The last reference is the one most often cited, because it sets the speaker's own vineyard against Solomon's vineyard at Baal-hamon and concludes that the speaker's vineyard is his own. Some readers take that as the lover's voice contrasting himself with the king. Others read it as the woman declining the king's offer. The Solomon attribution has been read as historical authorship, as a literary persona, and as a genre marker for royal-court love poetry.

How the four positions handle the four hard features

The Egyptian love songs

The closest literary parallels to the Song outside the Bible are Egyptian. The Chester Beatty I papyrus (c. 1300-1100 BCE) contains three love-song cycles. Papyrus Harris 500 (also Ramesside) contains two more. The Cairo Love Songs and the Turin Love Songs round out the corpus. The texts are dated to the New Kingdom, several centuries before any plausible date for the Song, and they are unmistakably the same literary genre. They alternate male and female voices. The lovers describe each other's bodies. They meet in gardens and vineyards. They use terms like 'my sister' and 'my brother' as endearments, the same usage that appears in the Song at 4:9-12 and 5:1-2.

The parallel does not by itself force any one reading. What it does is locate the Song inside a known genre that existed in the ancient Near East as straight love poetry. That existence is what the love-poetry reading uses as its main external evidence. The allegorical readings can accept the genre identification and then argue that Israelite reception of the genre is what produced the canonical Song. The dramatic reading uses the parallels as evidence for the alternating-voice structure of the book. Each position has to take the Egyptian material into account; none of them denies the parallels.

The timeline of interpretation

How readers actually combine the positions

The four positions look cleaner in a list than they do in practice. Few major commentators have held only one. Origen used the dramatic reading as the literary form and the Christ-Church allegory as the meaning, and he also accepted that the literal sense was human love. Bernard of Clairvaux's eighty-six sermons assume the human-love sense and then move through it into the soul-Christ allegory. Maimonides reads the human-love language as the figure that teaches the soul how to long for God. The Targum on Canticles preserves the surface narrative and overlays the covenant decoding on top.

Modern commentaries tend to do the same. Provan's NIVAC reads the Song as love poetry that simultaneously functions as wisdom literature about the goodness of human love, and that the Christian reader can read in light of Paul's Ephesians 5 framework. Garrett's NAC defends the human-love sense as the primary reading and treats the allegorical layer as a secondary canonical reading available to the church. Mitchell's Concordia Commentary defends the Christ-Church allegory while accepting that the human-love sense is the surface meaning the writer wrote.

The sharp form of the debate is between two extremes: the position that the human-love sense is the only legitimate reading (the modern strict literalists), and the position that the allegorical sense is the only spiritually serious reading (some classical patristic and medieval traditions). Most readers in the long history of the book have sat somewhere between these extremes, holding the surface and the spiritual together.

What each position has to account for

The God-Israel allegory has to account for the lack of explicit covenant vocabulary in the text. The covenant story has to be supplied from outside (the Targum's identifications, the prophets' marriage metaphor, the wisdom-king Solomon as figure of the LORD). The strength of the position is the Akiva tradition and the prophetic precedent. The weakness is the gap between what the Song says and what the allegory makes it say.

The Christ-Church / soul-Christ allegory has to account for the same gap, plus the additional question of how a Christian reading recovers something the Hebrew text does not announce. The strength is the depth and breadth of patristic and medieval Christian commentary and the Pauline marriage figure in Ephesians 5. The weakness is that the reading works inside the Christian canon but is not derivable from the Song alone.

The love-poetry reading has to account for the book's canonization and for two thousand years of allegorical reception. The strength is that it takes the Hebrew at face value and is supported by the Egyptian and Mesopotamian love-poetry corpus. The weakness is that it has to explain why a book of straight erotic poetry ended up in scripture and what canonical work that book is doing.

The dramatic reading has to assign voices that the text does not label, and most defenders combine the reading with one of the other three to supply the meaning of the drama. The strength is the formal observation that the text has alternating voices, a chorus, and a refrain. The weakness is that the reading by itself is a literary description rather than an interpretation, and the dramatic reconstructions disagree with each other.