Commentary Compass

Some commentaries are designed primarily to be consulted. They are invaluable when a difficult Hebrew word, textual problem, ancient parallel or interpretive dispute sends the reader searching for help, but reading hundreds of pages consecutively does not necessarily reveal much that cannot be gained by selective use.

Other commentaries are different. Their interpretation accumulates. Images recur, arguments develop, earlier observations reappear with new significance, and the reader gradually begins to see the biblical book through the commentator’s eyes. Those are the works I have in mind here.

This is therefore not another version of my overall Song of Songs ranking. Roland Murphy and Marvin Pope, for example, remain among my highest-rated resources, but I am more likely to consult them intensively than to recommend them first as cover-to-cover reading. Conversely, a shorter theological work may belong here because its value lies precisely in following one sustained vision from beginning to end.

For the Song of Songs, these are the works I think gain the most when read consecutively.

1. J. Cheryl Exum — Song of Songs — Old Testament Library

Rating: 5/5

If I were going to read only one Song of Songs commentary straight through, I would choose Exum. The reason is that her best insights are cumulative. A reader who consults her only at 4:1–7 or 8:6–7 will gain useful observations, but may miss the larger literary pattern she sees developing across the whole book.

Exum continually traces the interplay of desire, presence, absence, memory and imagination. The lovers find one another, lose one another, summon one another, describe one another, remember previous encounters and imagine future ones. Repetition is therefore never merely repetitive. Earlier scenes return altered by context, and recurring phrases become part of the erotic rhythm of the collection.

That makes consecutive reading especially rewarding. The reader gradually sees why Exum does not require either a detailed dramatic plot or a completely disconnected anthology. The Song has a coherent imaginative world in which recurring voices, situations, images and verbal patterns produce unity without conventional narrative progression.

Her interpretation of 8:14 becomes much more persuasive after the whole commentary has been read. If the Song has repeatedly generated desire through movements between union and separation, then ending with renewed distance is not a failure of closure but the culmination of its literary logic. The poem refuses to freeze love into permanent possession.

Exum is also consistently perceptive about the woman’s voice and the reciprocity of desire. Reading the commentary consecutively makes clear how unusually dominant female speech is in the Song and how much that matters for the presentation of sexuality.

I would not read Exum expecting Christian theological exposition, and some readers will find parts of her feminist or literary-theoretical discussion less compelling than her direct exegesis. But the central literary interpretation is strong enough to reward sustained reading even where individual judgments are disputed.

For readers wanting to learn how the Song works as poetry rather than simply solve isolated verses, Exum is my first choice.

2. Michael Fishbane — Song of Songs — JPS Bible Commentary

Rating: 5/5

Fishbane is particularly rewarding cover to cover because selective consultation can conceal the audacity of what he is doing. His commentary is not merely a standard verse-by-verse reading supplemented by occasional Jewish quotations. Across the whole book he allows four great modes of Jewish interpretation—peshat, derash, remez, and sod—to remain in conversation.

Read consecutively, the result is an education in how one biblical text can sustain radically different yet historically connected forms of attention. The reader first encounters the Song as human love poetry, then repeatedly sees the same language enter Israel’s covenantal imagination, become vocabulary for personal religious longing, and finally participate in mystical reflection on divine reality.

The cumulative effect matters. A single example of rabbinic or mystical interpretation can easily look arbitrary when isolated from its larger tradition. Fishbane’s commentary shows instead how recurring modes of reading develop their own internal logic. Images of lovers, gardens, fragrance, longing and union become part of an interpretive vocabulary extending across generations of Jewish thought.

The extended history-of-interpretation material is especially rewarding when read after the commentary rather than before it, because the reader has already encountered the four interpretive modes in operation. The conceptual architecture then becomes much clearer.

Fishbane is not the commentary I would read straight through if my only goal were to master textual criticism or settle every syntactical dispute. His density can also make slower reading worthwhile. But that is precisely why consecutive reading is valuable: the commentary is trying to teach a way of seeing Scripture, not merely supply answers.

For readers interested in Jewish interpretation, reception history, theological hermeneutics or the extraordinary ability of the Song to generate meaning across centuries, Fishbane is one of the most rewarding books in the entire field.

3. Ellen F. Davis — Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs — Westminster Bible Companion

Rating: 5/5

Davis’s Song of Songs commentary benefits enormously from being read as a sustained theological argument. Individual observations can certainly be consulted profitably, but her deeper contribution becomes visible only when the reader watches several biblical worlds gradually converge: human erotic love, Eden, land, temple, covenant, mutual desire and the love of God.

Her central methodological claim is that the modern interpreter need not choose between the erotic and the theological. The old allegorical tradition often lost the lovers by turning their bodies into codes; some modern literal readings react by sealing the Song off from theological interpretation altogether. Davis instead asks whether bodily love can itself become theologically revelatory.

The commentary’s garden passages are particularly rewarding within this larger movement. The imagery of enclosure, fertility, fragrance and abundance in 4:8–5:1 remains erotic, yet it also resonates with Eden and with the temple’s botanical imagery. Reading Davis consecutively makes clear that these are not isolated clever correspondences. They belong to a sustained theology in which land, body and sacred space repeatedly illuminate one another.

The movement toward 7:10 is equally important. Davis hears the man’s desire for the woman against Genesis 3:16 and interprets it as a recovery of reciprocity after the distortions of the fall. By the time the commentary reaches 8:6–7, love can be treated both as an overwhelming human reality and as language carrying genuine theological resonance.

I would still keep a technical commentary nearby. Some of Davis’s intertextual suggestions move from plausible echo to theological construction more quickly than I would, and the Divine Lover occasionally becomes more explicit than the immediate text seems to warrant.

But that reservation is easier to evaluate after reading the whole argument. Davis is not scattering allegorical guesses across the Song; she is developing a coherent account of embodied love within Scripture. Readers interested in Christian theology, theological interpretation and the relation between creation and sexuality will gain much more from reading her straight through than from consulting isolated pages.

4. Barry G. Webb — Five Festal Garments — New Studies in Biblical Theology

Rating: 4.5/5

Webb’s treatment is shorter than a conventional commentary, but that makes it particularly suitable for consecutive reading. His Song of Songs chapter is best experienced as a complete biblical-theological argument rather than mined for isolated observations.

The great strength of Webb’s method is sequencing. He allows the Song to establish its own voice before asking larger canonical questions. Human sexual love is not merely a shell that has to be cracked open to reveal Christ. The bodily goodness of one-flesh union matters within creation, and the Song’s presentation of mutual delight deserves to be heard as such.

Only after establishing that does Webb widen the lens to the rest of the Old Testament and finally to the New Testament. The movement toward Eden is especially important. The Song gives a partial picture of restored human intimacy in a world still marked by fallenness. Yet marriage and sexuality are not themselves the ultimate biblical horizon. Webb moves from the Song’s celebration of embodied love toward the final restoration of creation and the New Testament’s bride imagery without pretending that every erotic metaphor secretly referred to Christ from the beginning.

His emphasis on 8:5–7 as the climax is particularly effective when the chapter is read as a whole. Much of the Song enacts love poetically; here the book finally reflects explicitly upon love’s power, exclusivity and pricelessness. That observation provides a natural bridge into biblical theology.

Some details of Webb’s literary structure are more debatable, and because this is a chapter within a work on the Five Scrolls it cannot supply sustained Hebrew exegesis. Readers looking for answers to individual lexical problems will need another resource.

For pastors, theologians and readers interested in how to move responsibly from the Song’s own meaning to Christian biblical theology, however, Webb is one of the best short works to read in a single sustained sitting.

5. Iain Provan — Ecclesiastes/Song of Songs — NIV Application Commentary

Rating: 4.5/5

Provan is worth reading cover to cover because his interpretation depends on a cumulative vision of the Song as a coherent dramatic and theological whole. Even where I remain unconvinced by parts of the dramatic reconstruction, following the argument from beginning to end allows the reader to see why his conclusions about love, freedom, Genesis and divine-human relationship fit together.

One of Provan’s strongest themes is the recovery of something like Edenic intimacy. The woman is strikingly active: she speaks, seeks, desires, invites and evaluates. Provan sees this mutuality against Genesis 1–3 and describes the Song as presenting a form of restored or “democratic” intimacy in which domination does not define the relationship.

His broader theological method is also worth following. Provan does not simply revive traditional allegory. Instead, he treats human love as capable of functioning parabolically. The relationship between the lovers can open imaginative space for speaking about God’s love and God’s desire for relationship without requiring each poetic detail to possess a second theological referent.

The main difficulty is the storyline. Provan’s distinction between the woman’s true beloved and royal attraction gives the book a moral drama of fidelity, but the text does not clearly identify all the characters or transitions needed to make that reconstruction certain. Read selectively, individual conclusions can therefore look stronger than their narrative foundations really are. Reading the whole commentary actually helps the reader evaluate that weakness more fairly.

For readers interested in literary unity, Genesis, mutuality, canonical theology and contemporary application, Provan remains stimulating. I would read him after a less speculative literary commentary so that the dramatic reconstruction can be tested rather than simply inherited.

6. Robert W. Jenson — Song of Songs — Interpretation

Rating: 4.5/5

Jenson is a natural cover-to-cover choice because his volume is fundamentally an exercise in sustained theological interpretation. It is much less useful if treated as a reference work from which the reader extracts isolated solutions to Hebrew difficulties. Its value lies in following one major question consistently: what happens when Christians read the Song not only as ancient erotic poetry but as canonical Scripture?

Jenson takes seriously the long theological history in which human love became an analogue for the relationship between God and Israel and, within Christian Scripture, Christ and the church. He does not simply return to the most fanciful forms of medieval allegory, but neither does he accept the modern assumption that the literal sense must be exhausted by the lovers considered in isolation from the canon.

Reading him consecutively reveals how closely embodiment and theology belong together in his interpretation. Erotic love matters precisely because bodily human love can become a truthful analogue of divine-human communion. The theological meaning therefore need not depend upon denying the human one.

I would not follow Jenson whenever canonical theology appears to settle an exegetical question that Hebrew grammar or literary context leaves unresolved. He is also not a substitute for Exum, Berlin, Murphy or Hess when the problem is philological or historical. Readers expecting a conventional commentary may therefore find the volume frustrating.

But as a sustained theological reading, the book is much more interesting than its usefulness as a reference work would suggest. The reader who follows Jenson from beginning to end encounters a coherent argument about canon, embodiment, Israel, Christ and the church that deserves serious engagement even where one ultimately disagrees.

For theologians, pastors and readers interested in the recovery of theological interpretation after modern historical criticism, Jenson is well worth reading straight through.

Which One Would I Read First?

If I were reading only one Song of Songs commentary consecutively, I would choose J. Cheryl Exum. Her interpretation accumulates without depending on a fragile reconstructed plot, and the recurring themes of desire, presence, absence and repetition become increasingly illuminating as the commentary progresses.

For a second cover-to-cover read, I would choose according to purpose:

• Fishbane for Jewish interpretation and reception;
• Davis for Christian theological and canonical reading;
• Webb for a concise biblical-theological synthesis;
• Provan for an integrated literary and applicational vision;
• Jenson for sustained theological interpretation.

The key distinction is that each of these books rewards the reader for following an argument, not merely looking up a verse.