It is tempting, therefore, to say that the Song is an anthology, an assemblage of love poems of one sort or another, whose collector was the first to try to set them in some reasonable order and introduced a distinctive feature of the text, its dialogue form. The late-medieval Christian interpreter Nicholas of Lyra, while not ignoring the dialogical character of the Song, insisted that the Bridegroom and Bride represent—at the “literal” level—God and God’s people, and therefore that one must divide