Alter begins his introduction, “The Song of Songs stands out in its striking distinctiveness—a distinctiveness that deserves to be called wondrous. The delicate yet frank sensuality of this celebration of young love, without reference to God or covenant or Torah, has lost nothing of its immediate freshness over the centuries: these are among the most beautiful love poems that have come down to us from the whole ancient world…. Famously, the erotic nature of the Song constituted a challenge for the framers of the canon, both Jewish and Christian, and their response was to read the poems allegorically…. Both religious traditions, however fervently they clung to this allegorical vision, never succeeded in entirely blocking the erotic power of the text…. Little is known about the origin of these poems…. The book as a whole has an anthological look.”
Alter continues by discussing the poetry. “These poets are finely aware of the long tradition of Hebrew poetry, but notably there is little in the way of allusion to earlier Hebrew texts…. The formal system of parallelism between versets—that is, parts of the line—that governs Hebrew poetry from its earliest extant texts going back to around 1100 B.C.E. is still very much in evidence…. What is remarkable is how consistently the figurative language of these poems evokes the experience of physical love with a delicacy of expression that manifests the poet’s constant delight in likening one thing to another. (The Hebrew verb damah, “to be like,” is repeatedly flaunted.)”
In Song 2:2, Alter describes the simile that introduces the two lovers in these poems, “Like a lily among the thorns. This particular poem unfolds through statement and response in a lovers’ dialogue. She announces herself as a flower; he goes her one better by answering that she is like a flower among the thorns in comparison to other young women.” Next, Alter gives a bit of historical context to Song 2:11, “the winter has passed. The love poetry of the Song of Songs is preeminently poetry of the verdant world of spring. Jewish tradition fixed it to be read on the Sabbath of springtime Passover because of the allegorical interpretation in which the two lovers are identified with God and Israel celebrating their nuptials after the exodus from Egypt, which occurred in early spring.”
Alter details the use of poetic technique in Song 4:4, “Like the tower of David your neck. This simile, like a good many others in the poem, is “Oriental,” reflecting an aesthetic in which the poet pursues the momentum of the object of comparison, half forgetting the thing to which it is compared.” Alter also details the probable provenance of the composition of the book. From Song 6:5, “Your hair is like a herd of goats. This line, together with everything in verses 6 and 7, is a reprise of 4:1-3, though here 4:3a does not appear. This sort of near verbatim recurrence of lines may reflect the anthological nature of the Song of Songs, in which two or more lines of poetry might have migrated from one poem to another.”
Finally, Alter relates what has been a notable absence in this book’s themes. In Song 8:6, he points out, “a fearsome flame. The word for “flame” has the theophoric suffix yah, but this translation follows the scholarly consensus that it is used here as an intensifier, with no theological implication. This would be consistent with the rest of the Song of Songs, where God is neither mentioned nor at issue in the poems.”
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