devotion or pleasure, or writers of commentaries—if we consider the full history of the Song’s interpretation and not just the modern period, genre is the chiefly controverted matter. That same first scholarly mention by Rabbi Aqiba was already a polemic against persons who assigned the Song to a different genre than did he—indeed, he consigned them to eternal damnation for profaning so holy a text. Moreover, we will find that interpretation of this text depends even more on the identification of genre than