Biblical Views: Love Is Strong as Death—but Don’t Spend the Family’s Wealth

Home > Magazines > BAR > January/February 2017

The Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon) from the Hebrew Bible is a love song beyond compare—although it has been compared to everything. Some have deemed it ancient pornography. Others have sung its praise. In the second century C.E., Rabbi Akiva called it the “holy of holies.”a Saadia Gaon, a prodigious tenth-century scholar and rabbi, observed that Song of Songs resembles a locked door to which the key is missing. However, I believe that the key to understanding the Song is near at hand: 6 Set me as a seal upon your heart, As a seal upon your […]

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Footnotes

Richard S. Hess, “Song of Songs: Not Just a Dirty Book,” Bible Review 21:05; Jack M. Sasson, “Unlocking the Poetry of Love in the Song of Songs,” Bible Review 01:01.

Endnotes

The New Jewish Publication Society translation also reads “fierce.”

Aren M. Wilson-Wright, “Love Conquers All: Song of Songs 8:6b–7a as a Reflex of the Northwest Semitic Combat Myth,” Journal of Biblical Literature 134 (2015), pp. 333–345.

S.D. Goitein, “The Song of Songs: A Female Composition,” in Athalya Brenner, ed., A Feminist Companion to the Song of Songs (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), pp. 58–66.