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The JPS Bible Commentary: Song of Songs is unavailable, but you can change that!

Song of Songs is a wondrous collection of love lyrics nestled in the heart of the Hebrew Bible—songs of passion and praise between a young maiden and her beloved. It is religious lyric par excellence. But what is its true meaning? Is it an expression of human love and passion, pure and simple? A celebration of the covenant between God and Israel? Or something else? The latest volume in the...

Song’s language and the Torah. To establish these links and new meanings, the words of the Song are often broken down into new components, and then related to historical or theological concerns not stated directly in the text. The literary figures in the Song are thus deemed allegories of topics suggested or depicted in the Torah. The task of exegesis is to make this explicit. Inevitably, different sages understood the Song’s intentions or possibilities differently. Thus the derash interpretation
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