Commentary Compass

The Song of Songs has attracted some of the most imaginative interpretation in the history of the Bible. That makes “insightful” a particularly important—but also dangerous—criterion. An unusual interpretation is not automatically a good one. The Song has generated more than enough ingenious reconstructions, hidden allegories, speculative sexual identifications, and historical theories that explain the book only by asking the reader to supply what the text never actually says.

When I describe a commentary as insightful, I mean something more demanding. I am looking for works that repeatedly notice things I would otherwise miss and then make those observations pay exegetical dividends. The insight may be literary, philological, historical, theological, canonical, or methodological. What matters is that it materially improves my reading of the Song.

This also means that agreement is not the controlling criterion. I disagree with substantial parts of Marvin Pope’s reconstruction and would not follow every theological extension made by Ellen Davis. Adele Berlin’s Hellenistic thesis is stronger in some passages than others. Yet all three remain among the most insightful works I have read because they bring evidence and perspectives to the Song that cannot easily be replaced by another commentary.

Using that combination of originality, usefulness, reliability, and interpretive payoff, these are the commentaries I would rank highest.

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

Rating: 5/5

Exum remains my first choice because her originality arises primarily from unusually attentive reading of the poetry rather than from imposing an ingenious theory upon it. Her great strength is showing how repetition, voice, memory, anticipation, presence and absence create the Song’s world of desire. She takes the book’s literary coherence seriously without needing to reconstruct a continuous drama in which every poem occupies a fixed chronological place. Recurring images, situations and verbal echoes create unity even when the Song refuses to behave like a conventional narrative.

One of Exum’s most important insights is that desire in the Song is sustained by incompleteness. The lovers meet, separate, seek, remember, imagine and meet again. Fulfilment never simply abolishes longing. This becomes especially significant at 8:14. Rather than regarding the woman’s final summons for the beloved to flee like a gazelle as an unsatisfactory ending, Exum sees it as perfectly consistent with the Song’s poetic logic: separation reopens desire and potentially sends the reader back into the cycle again. The Song ends without extinguishing the erotic energy that has animated it.

She is also exceptionally good on the body descriptions. Exum understands that their metaphors are not puzzles in which every tower, flock, fruit or landscape feature needs to be converted into anatomical prose. Their power lies partly in the imaginative worlds they create around the beloved. Her attention to the woman’s voice, agency and desire similarly corrects interpretations that unconsciously make the male lover the normative observer while treating the woman mainly as an object of admiration.

I do not follow every feminist or literary-theoretical conclusion Exum draws, and readers seeking a developed Christian canonical theology will need another commentary alongside her. But those are limitations of scope rather than failures of exegesis. Again and again she helps me understand why the poetry has the effect it does. For the best overall balance of originality and usefulness, Exum remains the commentary I would start with.

2. Adele Berlin — Song of Songs — Hermeneia

Rating: 5/5

Berlin’s 2025 Hermeneia commentary is the strongest recent addition to Song of Songs scholarship and comes very close to displacing Exum at the top. Its most distinctive contribution is Berlin’s sustained argument that the Song should be understood as a Jewish-Hellenistic literary work: unmistakably Jewish in language, scriptural allusion and sensibility, yet also participating in a wider Greek literary and cultural environment.

What makes this genuinely useful rather than merely novel is the way Berlin employs Greek comparison. She does not simply place Greek love poems beside the Song and assume direct borrowing. Instead, Greek forms, motifs and conventions become comparative tools for clarifying particular features of the Song. At her best, these comparisons explain literary phenomena that older appeals to Egyptian or Mesopotamian parallels leave less adequately illuminated. Berlin is careful, too, to notice where the Song differs from Greek erotic literature: its relative restraint about sexual acts, the absence of the more explicit display of male anatomy common in Greek art and poetry, its different tone, and the way foreign forms are absorbed into recognisably Jewish idiom.

Berlin is equally strong when no Greek comparison is involved. Her attention to wordplay, ambiguity, sound, metaphor, double entendre and scriptural echo makes the commentary rewarding at the level of individual lines. She is comfortable treating the Song as a collection of poems rather than forcing a continuous plot, which often allows the language itself to determine interpretation.

My main reservation is the weight placed on the Hellenistic hypothesis. The late dating and degree of Greek influence remain arguments rather than established facts, and I would not allow the model to become the explanation of every distinctive feature in the book. Yet the commentary survives that reservation remarkably well because so many of Berlin’s local observations remain useful even if the historical reconstruction is modified.

For readers wanting the best current technical commentary—especially one combining Hebrew literary analysis with genuinely fresh comparative work—Berlin is outstanding.

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

Rating: 5/5

Fishbane gives me something no other major commentary on the Song quite provides: a sustained encounter with the book as Jewish Scripture across multiple levels of interpretation. His use of the traditional categories of peshat, derash, remez, and sod allows plain-sense interpretation, rabbinic and covenantal reading, spiritual interpretation, and Jewish mysticism to coexist within the commentary rather than being relegated to a detached reception-history appendix.

That structure is far more than an organisational novelty. It shows why the Song has been able to function so powerfully within Judaism without requiring the modern reader to pretend that all earlier interpretations were claims about the original historical sense. The erotic poetry can be read as human love; the same words can participate in Israel’s covenantal imagination; they can give language to the soul’s desire for God; and in mystical traditions they can become symbols of divine realities and relationships.

Fishbane’s own command of Hebrew and Jewish literary tradition prevents this plurality from becoming arbitrary. He is not simply collecting colourful quotations from the past. He retrieves recurring interpretive concerns and reformulates them in a modern commentary, showing how different readings arise from features of the text and from the theological world in which the Song has been received.

For purely grammatical or text-critical questions, I would normally turn first to Murphy, Berlin or Exum. Fishbane is also not designed to offer a Christian canonical reading, and readers unfamiliar with Jewish interpretive traditions may need time to learn the categories through which he works. But these limitations actually clarify his unique value.

No serious understanding of the Song’s interpretive history should proceed as though the centuries of Jewish reading were merely an unfortunate allegorical detour before modern criticism discovered the real book. Fishbane demonstrates instead how intellectually and spiritually fertile that history has been. For readers wanting to understand not only what the Song may have meant in antiquity but what it has become as Jewish Scripture, this commentary is indispensable.

4. Roland E. Murphy — The Song of Songs — Hermeneia

Rating: 5/5

Murphy’s commentary is less flamboyantly original than Exum, Berlin or Fishbane, but few commentaries are more consistently insightful because few exercise better exegetical judgment. Murphy is particularly valuable in a book where interpreters are repeatedly tempted to know more than the poetry actually tells them.

His strength lies in disciplined control of the evidence. Hebrew philology, textual criticism, poetic structure, comparative literature and the history of interpretation all matter, but none is allowed to generate certainty where the Song remains ambiguous. This restraint is especially important in the body descriptions. Murphy understands that the metaphors may have erotic referents while still functioning poetically: they evoke beauty, movement, abundance, status and desire rather than behaving like an anatomical codebook.

His handling of the Song’s unity is similarly balanced. Individual lyrics and uncertain transitions do not require the conclusion that the final book is accidental or incoherent. Recurring motifs and rhetorical patterns create meaningful literary coherence without forcing a detailed drama upon the text.

Murphy is particularly strong at 8:6–7. The statement that love is “as strong as death” does not mean that love has already defeated death; rather, love resembles death in its relentless and inescapable claim. That distinction protects the poetry from theological conclusions it does not itself state. Likewise, the possible “flame of Yah” permits religious resonance without converting the whole book into an allegory of divine love.

The commentary’s age inevitably means that newer literary and comparative work—especially Berlin’s Greek material—is absent. Murphy also does not offer the sustained theological imagination of Davis or Jenson. Yet his judgments have aged exceptionally well.

If I wanted one commentary beside me when testing whether a particularly attractive interpretation is actually supported by the Hebrew text, Murphy would be high on my list. His originality is the originality of consistently seeing precisely what the evidence warrants.

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

Rating: 5/5

Davis is the most insightful Christian theological reader of the Song that I have examined in this project. Her contribution is especially important because she refuses a false choice that has distorted interpretation for centuries: either the Song is about human erotic love and therefore not about God, or its sexual language must be converted into an allegorical code before it can become theological.

Davis allows several dimensions of meaning to resonate together. The lovers remain genuinely human lovers, but their language also participates in larger biblical patterns involving Eden, land, temple, covenant, desire and divine love. Sexual and religious interpretation need not eliminate one another because embodied love itself can become a source of theological knowledge.

Her reading of 4:8–5:1 is one of the clearest examples. Davis resists highly specific anatomical decoding of the garden while noticing how its vegetation, fragrances and enclosed abundance resonate with both Eden and the temple, whose own imagery evokes a restored garden. The erotic garden therefore remains erotic while also participating in a wider biblical symbolic world.

Her handling of 7:10 is equally stimulating. Against Genesis 3:16, where the woman’s desire and the man’s rule belong to the distorted relationship after the fall, the statement that the man’s desire is for the woman suggests a reversal of asymmetry and a recovery of mutuality. At 8:6–7 Davis is also careful not to claim that love is stronger than death when the poem says it is as strong as death, even while hearing genuine theological resonance in the “flame of Yah.”

I would not follow every extension she makes. At times the transition from human lover to Divine Lover becomes more suggestive than demonstrable, and some canonical associations depend on a degree of theological imagination that should not be confused with historical authorial intention. That is why I would use Davis alongside rather than instead of a technical commentary.

But as a theological companion she is unusually good: imaginative without being arbitrary, bodily without being reductionistic, and canonical without simply returning to traditional allegory.

6. Marvin H. Pope — Song of Songs — Anchor Bible

Rating: 5/5

Pope is the clearest example of why a high ranking does not mean that I accept a commentator’s controlling thesis. I do not find his attempt to relate the Song to funerary feasting, the marzēaḥ, and ancient fertility or mortuary practices convincing. Yet the commentary remains one of the most important resources ever written on the Song because the scholarship gathered around that theory is vastly more valuable than the theory itself.

Pope’s extraordinary strength is range. Hebrew and comparative Semitic philology, ancient Near Eastern texts, iconography, sexual vocabulary, religious practices, Jewish and Christian interpretation, and obscure lexical parallels appear in profusion. Later commentators who reject his reconstruction nevertheless continue to return to his notes because he often preserves data, parallels and interpretive possibilities unavailable anywhere else in comparable concentration.

The funerary hypothesis illustrates both his brilliance and his weakness. Pope sees 8:6, with its comparison of love and death, as a clue to a mortuary setting and connects other features of the Song with ritual feasting and ancient cultic practices. The problem is evidential. Neither marzēaḥ nor some of the other phenomena discussed at such length actually occurs in the Song. “Love is as strong as death” works perfectly naturally as a comparison between two inexorable powers. Foods, wine and spices in 5:1 do not become funerary simply because similar items could appear at a funeral feast.

For that reason I would never recommend Pope as the first commentary for a beginner. His sheer detail can also obscure the literary movement of the Song, and readers must constantly distinguish evidence from speculative synthesis.

For advanced research, however, Pope is extraordinarily difficult to replace. When a word, image, ancient parallel or historical interpretation requires deeper investigation, his commentary remains a treasure house. Used critically rather than obediently, it is still one of the most insightful works available.

Final Assessment

If I were beginning serious study of the Song of Songs, J. Cheryl Exum would still be my starting point. She gives me the strongest combination of literary originality and repeated passage-by-passage usefulness, and her insights tend to arise from the poetry itself rather than from a large theory imposed upon it.

Adele Berlin would be my next choice, particularly for current technical work and her fresh Jewish-Hellenistic comparisons. Michael Fishbane is irreplaceable for Jewish interpretation, while Roland Murphy supplies the disciplined exegetical control that helps keep attractive theories honest. Ellen Davis is the most rewarding Christian theological complement, and Marvin Pope remains the encyclopedic research resource I would want available even while disagreeing with his major reconstruction.

That diversity is precisely why I would not reduce the Song to one “best” approach. The book rewards literary, philological, Jewish, theological and comparative reading, and the greatest insight comes when those perspectives illuminate one another without being confused with one another.