Book Comment: A Song for Lovers

A Song for Lovers, by S. Craig Glickman, is a new take on The Song of Solomon. There were over 500 known commentaries written before 1700 Ad/CE and no one has stopped yet. In 1657, The Westminster Assembly said that all the commentaries served mainly to increase the cloud of obscurity surrounding the book. Glickman says that this may be because most of the commentaries work overtime to avoid a literal reading of the book, which would provide a Biblical affirmation of sex.

The interpretations include:
1. The book is a collection of unconnected love poems, with no coherent story or moral teaching.
2. The book is a liturgy for an unknown fertility cult.
3. The book is a piece of dramatic fiction about Shulamith's faithfulness to her shepherd lover in spite of Solomon's advances..
4. The book is a spiritual allegory with God as the groom and Israel as the bride; this is the traditional view of Orthodox judaism. Christian versions of this view substitute the Church, the New Israel as the bride. A few have said that the book is a pagan allegory about the deities Baal and Astarte.
5. The Syrian Wedding Feast Theory says the book is a collection of wedding songs for a seven-day festival. One objection to this idea is that the groom is crowned but the supposed queen is not.

Glickman prepared a new interpretation of the Hebrew text and noted especially that that Hebrew has a clearly defined male "you" and a female "you" so that it is possible to tell who is speaking to whom. He says it shows a chaste but intense courtship, a marriage ceremony, and a consummation, described enthusiastically and without flinching.

As Howard G. Hendricks, a professor of Christian Education at the Dallas Theological Seminary says in his introduction to the book, "Sensuous love with erotic overtones is God's intent for the marriage relationship.'

So, is The Song of Solomon an affirmation of chaste but highly sexual married love or is it an allegorical description of the relationship between God and His people?
Maybe it is both. God's ways are not our ways and His mind dwarfs ours. Regular readers of this blog know that, while not convinced, I am at least open to the possibility of the existence of the Bible Codes in, at least, the Torah. This would require a mind able to imbed phrases in seemingly unrelated material using complex mathematical formulae which can best be discovered using super computers. Perhaps God thinks on multiple levels at once. I would be willing to say He does.