The Song of Songs is short enough to read in one sitting and difficult enough to generate centuries of disagreement about almost everything that matters: who is speaking, whether the poems form a continuous story, how literally the imagery should be taken, whether Solomon is a lover or a foil, whether the Song is primarily about human sexuality or divine love, how its garden imagery relates to Eden, and what Christians should do with the enormous allegorical tradition that grew around it. Reading widely across the commentaries has convinced me that the best insights rarely come from a single interpretive system. They emerge where careful Hebrew exegesis, literary sensitivity, ancient Near Eastern comparison, biblical theology, and reception history illuminate one another without allowing any one of them to overwhelm the poetry.

The recently examined volumes sharpen that conclusion. Robert D. Miller II’s Finding Beauty in the Bible asks a question most commentaries only partially address: not merely what the Song’s beautiful images mean, but how the poem makes beauty happen to the reader through sound, rhythm, smell, taste, movement, metaphor, and imaginative participation. Roland Murphy’s earlier FOTL treatment, meanwhile, provides a useful reminder that individual passages belong to recognisable kinds of ancient love poetry even while repetition, catchwords, refrains, and editorial shaping create a meaningful final book. Read alongside Exum, Berlin, Fishbane, Murphy’s later Hermeneia, Davis, Pope, Webb, Hess, Longman, Garrett, Estes, and others, these additions lead me to the following twelve insights.

1. The Song is first about human erotic love—and taking that seriously is the beginning, not the end, of theological interpretation

The single most important interpretive decision is also the one centuries of readers found hardest to make: the man and woman really are attracted to one another, really desire one another’s bodies, really speak about kissing, fragrance, breasts, gardens, fruit, embraces, arousal, and lovemaking, and the poetry expects us to recognise that. Murphy, Exum, Berlin, Longman, Hess, Estes, and most modern commentators are right to resist the assumption that the lovers must primarily represent God and Israel, Christ and the church, or the soul and God. Murphy’s concise formulation in his earlier FOTL work remains valuable: the Song’s primary intention concerns the experience, delights, and power of human sexual love. That reading does not make the book less spiritual; it prevents us from making spirituality dependent upon escaping embodiment.

This is particularly important because the Song offers something surprisingly rare within Scripture: sustained delight in sexuality without making sex primarily a problem. Desire can certainly be dangerous, mistimed, frustrated, or overwhelming, which helps explain the recurring warnings about awakening love, but desire itself is not treated as dirty. The lovers enjoy one another, praise one another, long for one another, and inhabit a creation overflowing with sensory abundance. Theologically, therefore, the first lesson of the Song may be simpler and more radical than allegory: bodies, attraction, beauty, pleasure, and mutual desire belong within the goodness of created life. A Christian theology of the Song should begin there and then ask what human love means within the larger canon, rather than replacing human love with something supposedly more religious before the poem has been allowed to speak.

2. The woman is not merely the object of desire; she is one of the Bible’s strongest speaking subjects of desire

Exum has done more than almost anyone to make readers notice how remarkable the woman’s voice is. She speaks first, speaks often, seeks the man, praises his body, imagines intimacy, initiates movement into the countryside, describes what she wants, reflects on the power of love, and repeatedly addresses the daughters of Jerusalem. Even the famous body descriptions are reciprocal: the man describes the woman, but the woman also constructs an elaborate wasf of the man in 5:10–16. The poetry therefore does not simply display a woman for a male gaze. It gives the female lover rhetorical agency and makes her desire central to the book’s imaginative world.

This matters particularly when Song 7:11 is placed beside Genesis 3:16. In Genesis, the woman’s desire and the man’s rule appear within the fractured world outside Eden; in the Song, the woman says that she belongs to her beloved and his desire is toward her. Davis and Trible understandably see this as a significant reversal, and Miller strengthens the observation by locating it within a wider pattern: fruit without death, cultivated abundance without the sweat of toil, unclothed intimacy without shame, a woman who can name and summon her lover, and desire flowing toward her rather than being dominated by male rule. One should resist constructing from this a complete political theory of gender, but the literary contrast is difficult to miss. The Song imagines erotic mutuality not as one person possessing another but as two speaking subjects delighting in being desired by each other.

3. The Song is wisdom about love, not a diary from which we must reconstruct one couple’s biography

Commentators have expended enormous energy reconstructing a story: Solomon and a Shulamite, Solomon versus a shepherd, courtship followed by wedding followed by marital conflict, or some other sequence of events. Yet much of the poetry stubbornly refuses to behave like continuous narrative. Locations change suddenly, speakers are sometimes uncertain, dreamlike scenes interrupt praise poems, repetitions do not always represent chronological recurrence, and images function more associatively than narratively. Murphy’s FOTL treatment is useful precisely because he identifies different kinds of love songs—songs of yearning, admiration, self-description, wasfs, invitations, descriptions of experience, boasts—rather than forcing every unit into a reconstructed plot.

At the same time, calling the Song love poetry does not mean it teaches nothing. Murphy already suggested that its preservation among Israel’s sages makes good sense because the Song explores values central to wisdom: the power of desire, the recognition of beauty, the timing of love, fidelity, mutuality, self-possession, and the fact that love cannot be purchased. Miller similarly sees the Solomonic framing as placing the work within the world of wisdom and points particularly to the reflective character of chapter 8. Estes is especially helpful here: the Song’s idealisation of love encourages reflection on the nature of intimacy itself rather than merely inviting curiosity about an ancient couple. We therefore read the book better when we ask, “What does this poetry teach us to perceive about love?” rather than endlessly asking, “What exactly happened next?”

4. Beauty is not merely something the Song talks about; beauty is something the Song performs

This is the new insight Miller makes impossible to overlook. Commentaries frequently explain why particular lovers are called beautiful or decode individual metaphors, but Finding Beauty in the Bible asks what linguistic features cause readers or hearers to experience the poem as beautiful. Sound matters. Rhyme, consonantal repetition, alliteration, syntactical rhythm, verbal pacing, recurring phonemes, and changes in line length influence how speech feels when heard. Scent matters. Myrrh, nard, henna, balsam, frankincense, cinnamon, aloes, gardens, wine, milk, honey, fruit, and flowers do not function merely as dictionary entries waiting for identification. They create an imagined sensory environment. Sight matters, but so do taste, touch, hearing, bodily movement, temperature, colour, and memory.

This means that interpretation can fail even while correctly paraphrasing the content. If a commentator tells us that wine represents pleasure and a garden represents sexuality but leaves us unable to feel anything of intoxication, abundance, fragrance, secrecy, freshness, and invitation, something essential has been lost. Miller’s strongest contribution is his insistence that form and meaning cannot finally be separated in poetry. The Song does not first formulate propositions about love and then decorate them with flowers and perfume. Its luxuriant verbal world is part of what it says about love. The beloved feels inexhaustibly beautiful because ordinary description gives way to a cascade of sensations and associations that continually exceed literal representation. Reading the Song well therefore requires not only interpretation but attention, imagination, and willingness to experience the poem.

5. The strange body metaphors are not primitive anatomical descriptions; they are imaginative acts of praise

The wasfs provide some of the Song’s most memorable and most easily misunderstood poetry. Hair like goats, teeth like sheep, cheeks like pomegranates, a neck like a tower, breasts like gazelle fawns, a nose like the tower of Lebanon, thighs like jewellery, a belly like wheat, and legs like alabaster columns can sound bizarre when treated as attempts at visual likeness. Miller makes an especially helpful refinement here: many of these images are not primarily pictures of what the beloved literally looks like. They evoke movement, vitality, abundance, colour, fragrance, luxury, rarity, strength, fertility, texture, association, and emotional response. Metaphor can communicate more than accurate physical description precisely because it refuses to reduce the beloved to anatomical data.

This helps explain why the lovers’ bodies seem to merge with the entire world. Lebanon, Carmel, Tirzah, Jerusalem, vineyards, gardens, towers, wildlife, precious metals, gemstones, spices, water, fruit, milk, and honey all become resources for praising another person. The effect is not that the woman literally looks like a landscape or that the man literally resembles architecture. Rather, the lovers discover that the world’s beauty provides the vocabulary needed to speak about each other—and even that vocabulary repeatedly proves insufficient. Exum, Berlin, Longman, Miller, and others therefore help us see that a wasf is less like a photograph and more like an aesthetic event. The point is not to reconstruct the lover’s appearance from the similes but to feel something of the delighted imagination that can look at another human being and discover the whole creation summoned into praise.

6. Desire in the Song is intensified by movement between presence and absence, not resolved by permanent possession

One of Exum’s most important contributions is her sensitivity to the repetitive rhythm of seeking, finding, approaching, losing, calling, opening, fleeing, and returning. The woman searches through the city and finds the one she loves in chapter 3; in chapter 5 she again searches, but this time the lover is gone and the watchmen assault her. The man repeatedly appears like a gazelle and then must depart or be summoned again. The Song’s final command is itself a variation of that movement: the woman calls upon her beloved to hurry away like a gazelle over the mountains. If we expect a conventional romance to conclude with stable possession, this ending can seem frustrating. Within the Song’s poetic logic, however, love remains alive precisely because desire is not converted into static ownership.

The insight has pastoral and theological implications. Love is not depicted as the elimination of longing but as a relationship in which delight and desire continually renew one another. Even consummation at 4:16–5:1 does not finish the Song; immediately afterward comes another scene of missed encounter. This is one reason overly rigid narrative reconstructions struggle. The poem is less interested in chronological progression than in exploring the phenomenology of desire—what it feels like to long for another, to imagine another, to possess another, to lose another, to search again, and to discover that love remains more powerful than any one moment of fulfilment. The ending therefore protects the mystery of another person from being exhausted by possession.

7. The Song is neither a random anthology nor a tightly plotted drama: its unity is poetic, cumulative, and probably final-form

Murphy’s earlier FOTL commentary sets out the problem well. Individual passages often behave like discrete love songs, and abrupt transitions make it difficult to believe that every piece originated as part of one continuous narrative. Yet complete atomisation is equally unsatisfactory because refrains, repeated images, recurring phrases, the daughters of Jerusalem, the evolving statements of mutual belonging, gardens, vineyards, mountains, gazelles, searching scenes, and repeated adjurations create extraordinary homogeneity. Murphy therefore recognises the possibility of originally independent material while also acknowledging deliberate movement toward literary unity.

Exum moves further toward final unity, arguing that the Song is best appreciated as a complete poetic composition rather than a pile of unrelated lyrics. Miller similarly speaks of secondary unity, allowing that some originally separate poems may have been incorporated into a coherent final composition. This middle position makes better sense than either extreme. We need not prove that one author composed every line at one sitting, nor need we imagine an editor randomly gathering erotic fragments. The final form asks us to remember earlier language when we reach later passages: “my beloved is mine” changes into “I am my beloved’s,” repeated awakenings acquire new significance, the two seeking scenes mirror and transform each other, and the final reflections on love gather themes that have accumulated throughout the book. The unity therefore lies less in plot than in resonance.

8. Ancient Near Eastern love poetry helps us understand the Song’s conventions without explaining the Song away

Murphy’s FOTL treatment remains especially valuable here. Egyptian love poetry contains striking analogues to alternating male and female speakers, descriptions of lovers’ bodies, sickness from love, gazelles, gardens, trees, kissing, fragrances, public embarrassment, longing, brother-sister terms of affection, and playful role reversals in which ordinary lovers can speak of one another as kings, queens, shepherds, or servants. These parallels help us recognise that many puzzling Song expressions belong to a wider repertoire of ancient love language rather than requiring symbolic theological decoding. Hess, Pope, Fox, and others expand the comparative field considerably, while Miller includes Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Hellenistic, Arabic, and later poetic analogues in his aesthetic analysis.

The crucial point is methodological restraint. Similarity does not automatically prove direct literary dependence, and even stronger parallels do not mean the Song is simply an Israelite copy of Egyptian poetry. Nor do ancient fertility texts justify reconstructing the Song as a script for sacred-sex ritual; Murphy rightly notes that the cultic interpretation creates more problems than it solves. Comparative texts are most useful when they restore the range of possibilities available to ancient poets. They tell us, for instance, that lovers could use extravagant nature imagery without intending allegory and that “sister” could be an ordinary term of romantic intimacy. The result should be a richer reading of the Song itself, not replacement of the Song by the background material.

9. The Song creates an Eden-like world, but it is more interesting to speak of transformation than simple return

The garden imagery naturally invites comparison with Genesis 2–3. Trees, fruit, water, animals, fertility, nakedness, human desire, and the lovers’ delight in one another all evoke the creation narratives, and several verbal connections make the relationship more than merely atmospheric. Trible famously described the Song as redeeming the love story that goes wrong in Genesis, while Davis develops the connection into a restoration of relationships between woman and man, humanity and earth, and potentially humanity and God. Miller accepts the importance of Eden but introduces a useful qualification: the Song does not simply transport the lovers backward into Genesis 2 as though Genesis 3 never occurred. It imaginatively constructs a world in which motifs associated with the fallen world can be transformed.

That distinction is worth preserving. The lovers inhabit a world where fruit produces delight rather than death, gardens invite rather than exclude, bodies can be exposed without shame, desire can become reciprocal rather than hierarchical, the earth gives abundant produce without becoming a scene of exhausting toil, and the man’s desire in 7:11 moves toward the woman rather than the woman’s desire being followed by male rule. Yet danger has not disappeared: city watchmen can be violent, separation hurts, jealousy is fierce, and death remains the great rival of love. The Song is therefore not naïve paradise regained. It is an artistic world in which love imagines what human embodiment can become even east of Eden.

10. Erotic and sacred language repeatedly overlap, but that is not the same thing as saying the Song is an allegory

Miller’s commentary is particularly helpful in showing how often ordinary erotic language carries associations already familiar from Israel’s sacred vocabulary. Gardens recall Genesis. Vineyards can recall Israel. “The one whom my whole being loves” can sound in the vicinity of Deuteronomy’s language of loving God. Shepherd imagery can echo prophetic texts. Cedar, pomegranates, blossoms, columns, gold, spices, incense, myrrh, frankincense, and other imagery can recall the temple. “My beloved is mine and I am his” sounds remarkably close to covenant formulae about God and his people. The wilderness, pillars of smoke, Lebanon, Jerusalem, and the luxuriant language of land and sanctuary all contribute to a world in which erotic and sacred associations are difficult to keep hermetically separate.

The interpretive mistake would be to move from “this language can evoke temple, covenant, or Israel” to “therefore the woman represents Israel and the man represents God.” Poetry can activate multiple fields of association without turning every image into a code. This is one place where Fishbane’s reception-sensitive approach is especially helpful: the Song’s primary human sense and its later theological resonances need not be rivals, provided we know which interpretive operation we are performing. Davis sometimes pushes the canonical resonances farther than the text securely supports, while Miller deliberately stops before systematic theological interpretation. The best synthesis lies between them. The Song can remain genuinely erotic while its biblical vocabulary makes the reader think beyond eroticism, not because human love is a disguise for divine love but because Scripture does not inhabit a universe in which creation and sacred meaning are neatly separated.

11. Solomon works better as a counterpoint to the Song’s ideal of love than as the male romantic hero

Many traditional readings identify Solomon with the male lover, but the book itself makes that surprisingly difficult. The lovers’ world is marked by mutual belonging and intense exclusivity: to each of them the other becomes incomparable. The biblical Solomon, by contrast, is remembered for royal accumulation, wealth, political marriages, wives, and concubines. Longman therefore argues persuasively that the canonical Solomon is an unlikely embodiment of the kind of exclusive love celebrated in the poems. Miller likewise warns against assuming that every “king” is literally Solomon; royal language belongs naturally to the imaginative play of love poetry, just as ancient lovers elsewhere could elevate one another through courtly titles.

The contrast becomes especially interesting near the end. Solomon owns a vineyard and receives its economic yield, whereas the woman insists upon possession of her own vineyard. Love itself cannot be bought even by all the wealth of a house. Whatever precisely 8:11–12 means, the proximity of commercial valuation, Solomon, vineyard imagery, bodily self-possession, and the declaration that genuine love is beyond purchase invites comparison between royal acquisition and freely given mutual love. The Song may therefore be “Solomonic” in a far more sophisticated sense than simple authorship: it belongs in the wisdom world associated with Solomon while simultaneously exposing how riches, status, and multiplication of partners fall short of the love it celebrates. The richest king cannot purchase what two lovers freely give one another.

12. Song 8:6–7 is the interpretive summit: love confronts death, cannot be bought, and may finally open the poem explicitly toward God

The climactic claim that love is strong as death and passion or jealousy fierce as Sheol gathers the whole Song into a few lines. Throughout the poems desire has appeared powerful enough to disorient, sicken, move bodies across landscapes, overwhelm the gaze, rearrange speech, and make the beloved incomparable. Now love encounters its ultimate rival: death. Many waters cannot extinguish it, rivers cannot sweep it away, and wealth cannot purchase it. Love is simultaneously uncontrollable and uncommodifiable. One may cultivate a relationship, wait for desire, give oneself, or refuse oneself, but love cannot be reduced to possession, technique, social status, or financial exchange.

Miller adds an especially interesting caution to triumphant interpretations. The Hebrew says love is as strong as death, not necessarily stronger than death. If the mythic resonance of Mot, Yamm, and Nahar is heard in the surrounding vocabulary, the lines imagine love standing against the great powers of death and chaos without pretending that human erotic love has already abolished mortality. That makes the possible phrase “flame of Yah” even more intriguing. If the final word of 8:6 indeed contains the divine name, the Song’s most elevated statement about human love explicitly identifies its fire with God at precisely the point where love confronts death.

This does not suddenly turn the previous seven chapters into allegory. It does something more theologically interesting: it suggests that intensely human love can be human all the way down and nevertheless bear a divine signature. The Song’s canonical significance therefore grows from rather than cancels its literal sense. Christians can subsequently bring this poetry into conversation with the God whose love proves stronger than death in the larger biblical story, but that later movement should preserve the remarkable claim the Song itself has already made: embodied human love, freely given and impossible to buy, belongs so profoundly to God’s created world that its fiercest flame may appropriately be called a flame of Yah.

What the newly added volumes contribute

Robert D. Miller II — Finding Beauty in the Bible: An Aesthetic Commentary on the Song of Songs

Miller substantially improves this synthesis because he asks a question that even several excellent literary commentators leave comparatively undeveloped: why does the Song feel beautiful? His answer ranges across phonology, syntax, rhythm, sensory perception, metaphor, geographical imagination, colour, scent, taste, ancient literary cognates, readerly participation, and translation. This makes his commentary especially useful for Insights 4 and 5 above. He repeatedly reminds us that identifying a flower, perfume, animal, stone, or place-name does not exhaust the interpretive task; the reader must ask what associations and sensations the image carries and how the poem arranges those sensations over time. His treatment of wasf imagery is particularly important because it prevents readers from reducing the beloved’s body to an implausible composite portrait.

Miller also strengthens Insights 7, 9, 10, and 12. He sees the final Song as possessing secondary unity even where earlier poems may have been incorporated, takes Genesis 2–3 connections seriously without simply calling the Song “Eden restored,” traces sacred and erotic intertexts without turning them into allegorical equivalences, and develops a striking reading of 8:6–7 against ancient death-and-chaos imagery. Some individual proposals are inevitably more suggestive than demonstrable, especially when precise emotional effects are assigned to phonemes, rhythms, colours, or scents. The commentary can also wander widely through aesthetic theory and world literature, which makes it less efficient than Berlin, Exum, or Murphy when one simply needs a decision on a difficult Hebrew phrase. Yet that expansiveness is precisely why Miller adds something real to the commentary library: he makes us notice that the Song is not merely an object to decipher but a poem designed to be heard, imagined, savoured, and experienced.

Roland E. Murphy — Wisdom Literature (Forms of the Old Testament Literature), Canticles section

Murphy’s earlier FOTL treatment is now overshadowed by his much fuller Hermeneia commentary, but it remains useful because its methodological narrowness brings several issues into unusually sharp focus. Murphy systematically analyses units according to structure, genre, setting, and intention, identifying a repertoire of yearning songs, admiration songs, wasfs, self-descriptions, invitations, experiential descriptions, boasts, and related forms. His discussion of Egyptian love poetry is especially instructive because he demonstrates that many apparently exotic features of the Song belong naturally within ancient love-song conventions. Lovers can call one another king, shepherd, brother, sister, gazelle, dove, or other seemingly strange terms without forcing us into either literal biography or religious allegory. The comparative evidence makes the Song more historically intelligible while preserving its artistic individuality.

The earlier Murphy is also helpful on the unity question. He does not think the evidence requires us to imagine that the entire book was written originally as one continuous poem, yet he resists atomising the work into unrelated fragments because repetitions, refrains, catchwords, motifs, and overall homogeneity indicate purposeful shaping. That position looks increasingly sensible beside Exum’s stronger final-form emphasis and Miller’s idea of secondary unity. Murphy’s limitation is exactly what the FOTL series announces: this is not a comprehensive exegetical commentary, so philology, theology, reception history, and verse-by-verse interpretation appear primarily where they affect form-critical analysis. For that reason his later Hermeneia remains far more important overall. Nevertheless, the FOTL treatment still contributes something distinctive to the twelve insights by reminding us that before the Song became a theological battleground, it was recognisably and artfully composed love poetry.

Reading the Song differently after these insights

Taken together, these insights suggest a way of reading the Song that avoids several false choices. We do not have to choose between sexuality and theology, because the goodness of embodied love can itself be theological. We do not have to choose between independent poems and literary unity, because inherited love songs can be shaped into a final composition whose repetitions create cumulative meaning. We do not have to choose between literalism and allegory, because metaphor and intertextual resonance can enlarge meaning without turning characters into ciphers. We do not have to choose between ancient context and contemporary experience, because recognising ancient conventions can actually make the emotional world of the Song more accessible rather than more remote.

Most importantly, we should not approach the Song only by asking what every line “stands for.” The poem asks us to learn how love sees. The lovers look at another human being and discover gardens, mountains, animals, cities, jewels, perfumes, fountains, fruit, towers, vineyards, wilderness, springtime, fire, water, and ultimately death itself drawn into the language of desire. Their speech creates a world expansive enough for bodies to become landscapes and landscapes to become expressions of love. The Song’s genius lies not merely in telling us that love is good, but in making the world look different when seen through the eyes of people who love.

That may be the deepest contribution of Miller’s aesthetic emphasis when joined to the best of Exum, Berlin, Fishbane, Murphy, Davis, Webb, and the rest. The Song does not simply explain love; it trains perception. It teaches readers to recognise beauty, to attend to another person, to understand desire as powerful but not purchasable, to respect love’s timing, to delight in mutuality rather than domination, and to perceive created beauty as capable of bearing more theological weight than either prudishness or allegory has often allowed. Its final achievement is therefore both literary and theological: the Song makes embodied love sufficiently beautiful that, at its highest intensity, Scripture can dare to place beside it the name of Yah.