Commentary Compass

The Song of Songs is a book for which I particularly prefer commentary pairings to a single-volume solution. The reason is not simply that the book is difficult. Different commentators are often asking fundamentally different questions.

A literary commentator may be superb at tracing voice, repetition, desire and metaphor while saying relatively little about the Song as Christian Scripture. A theological interpreter may see Eden, temple and canonical patterns that a historical-critical commentary does not explore, yet occasionally move beyond what can be established from the immediate text. A modern technical commentary may illuminate the Hellenistic literary environment while leaving centuries of Jewish interpretation largely outside its central task.

For that reason, the best pairing is not automatically the two highest-ranked individual commentaries. I am looking for complementarity: two works that genuinely expand one another, whose strengths are different enough to justify owning or reading both, and whose weaknesses are at least partly corrected by the other.

Two pairings stand out.

1. J. Cheryl Exum (OTL) + Ellen F. Davis (Westminster Bible Companion)

Why the pairing works

This is the pairing I would recommend first for a reader who wants both rigorous literary interpretation and serious Christian theological engagement without allowing either to overwhelm the other.

Exum provides the exegetical and literary anchor. Her sustained attention to repetition, shifting voices, absence and presence, bodily imagery, female agency and the recurring dynamics of desire makes her the strongest overall guide to how the Song functions as poetry. She takes literary unity seriously without constructing an elaborate narrative behind the poems. Particularly valuable is her recognition that fulfilment never simply eliminates desire: the lovers repeatedly move between meeting, separation, memory, imagination and renewed longing, culminating in the deliberately open-ended summons of 8:14.

That makes Exum especially good at protecting the reader from overinterpretation. She does not need Solomon to be a romantic hero, a villainous rival, a messianic type or an ancient cult figure in order to explain the book. The poetry itself supplies enough literary structure.

Davis then asks questions Exum is not primarily trying to answer. How does the Song function within Scripture? What happens when its garden imagery is heard beside Eden and the temple? Does the striking reciprocity of desire say something about the damaged relationship of Genesis 3? Can erotic love genuinely illuminate theological language without returning to a code in which every body part secretly represents a spiritual reality?

Her reading of 4:8–5:1 is particularly valuable alongside Exum. Exum helps preserve the imagery as poetry rather than anatomy; Davis shows how the same garden imagery can remain erotic while resonating with the biblical worlds of Eden and temple. At 7:10 Davis hears a reversal of Genesis 3:16 in the man’s desire for the woman, developing a theological account of restored mutuality that grows naturally from a literary feature Exum is well equipped to establish.

The pairing is also self-correcting. Davis occasionally allows canonical or theological associations to move further than I think the immediate text warrants. Exum provides a strong literary check on those moves. Exum, meanwhile, does not attempt the kind of Christian canonical interpretation many readers eventually want; Davis shows that such interpretation need not require abandoning the literal erotic sense.

What the reader gains from both

Together, Exum and Davis allow the reader to distinguish two questions that should neither be collapsed nor separated completely:

1. What is this poem doing as erotic literature?
2. What can this erotic literature mean within the biblical canon?

Exum is stronger on the first; Davis is unusually creative on the second. Reading them together produces a fuller account of the Song than either provides alone.

Important limitations

Readers doing detailed Hebrew philology or ancient comparative work may still want Murphy, Berlin, Hess or Pope nearby. Davis is not a technical commentary, and Exum is not primarily interested in evangelical biblical theology. But for sustained interpretation across literary and theological horizons, this is the most satisfying two-volume combination I have found.

2. Adele Berlin (Hermeneia) + Michael Fishbane (JPS Bible Commentary)

Why the pairing works

Berlin and Fishbane provide two very different ways of locating the Song within the world of Jewish literature, and the contrast between them is precisely what makes the pairing so strong.

Berlin looks outward and historically. Her 2025 Hermeneia commentary argues that the Song is best understood as a Jewish-Hellenistic literary work: thoroughly Jewish yet also participating in the forms, motifs and aesthetic world of Greek erotic literature. She combines that historical proposal with close Hebrew reading, paying unusual attention to wordplay, ambiguity, double entendre, sound and literary technique.

The strength of Berlin’s comparison with Greek poetry is that it is normally attached to a specific exegetical problem. Greek literature can illuminate forms and tropes that older commentators tended to compare primarily with Egyptian or Mesopotamian texts. At the same time, Berlin is careful to observe where the Song remains distinctively Jewish and where it is noticeably more restrained than some Greek erotic writing.

Fishbane looks in a different direction—not primarily toward the cultural world around the Song, but toward the interpretive world the Song subsequently created within Judaism. His use of peshat, derash, remez, and sod allows the Song’s plain sense, covenantal interpretation, spiritual appropriation and mystical reception to remain visible simultaneously.

The result is a remarkable chronological and methodological complement. Berlin asks how a Jewish poet may have participated in the wider Hellenistic world; Fishbane asks what Jewish readers across centuries discovered in the resulting Scripture. Berlin gives the reader cultural and literary context. Fishbane gives the reader interpretive afterlife.

Their overlap is useful rather than redundant. Both take Hebrew language and Jewish literary identity seriously. Both resist the assumption that the Song can be understood adequately through later Christian interpretation alone. Yet they approach Jewishness from almost opposite directions: Berlin through composition and cultural environment, Fishbane through reception and theological tradition.

What the reader gains from both

Reading Berlin and Fishbane together prevents two reductions.

Berlin prevents reception history from becoming detached from the literary and historical particularity of the text. Fishbane prevents modern historical criticism from behaving as though the Song’s meaning ended when its composition was complete.

The reader gains a remarkable sweep: the Song as Jewish-Hellenistic poetry and the Song as one of Judaism’s most fecund sacred texts.

Important limitations

Berlin’s Hellenistic model is a substantial historical hypothesis, and I would not treat every proposed Greek influence as equally secure. Fishbane is not always the fastest guide to a difficult grammatical problem and presupposes a willingness to inhabit interpretive categories very different from modern historical criticism.

Neither volume is designed to provide a developed Christian canonical theology. A Christian reader wanting that dimension may prefer the Exum–Davis pairing.

How I Would Choose

If I were choosing only one pairing for general serious study, especially as a Christian reader, I would choose Exum + Davis. Exum gives the literary control I most trust, while Davis adds a theological dimension that genuinely complements rather than replaces it.

I would choose Berlin + Fishbane if my principal interests were Hebrew literary interpretation, Jewish studies, the cultural setting of the Song, or the history of Jewish interpretation. It is a particularly powerful pairing for anyone wanting to understand how the Song can be both a product of a specific ancient literary world and a text that generated centuries of Jewish theological imagination.

A reader who eventually owns all four will find surprisingly little wasted overlap.

Bottom Line

My first pairing is J. Cheryl Exum + Ellen F. Davis.

Exum helps me hear the Song as poetry before I ask it to carry later theological questions. Davis then demonstrates how theological and canonical interpretation can grow from rather than displace that erotic and literary meaning. The result is the best two-volume balance I have found between close reading and Christian theological interpretation.