The purpose of a commentary pairing is different from simply selecting the two highest-ranked individual commentaries. Two excellent books may make a poor pair if they repeatedly answer the same questions in similar ways, while a somewhat lower-ranked volume can become exceptionally valuable when placed beside a commentary whose blind spots it fills. For Commentary Compass, I therefore look for maximum interpretive coverage with minimum unnecessary duplication: one volume should make the other better, challenge its assumptions, or take the reader somewhere the first book cannot easily go.

Song of Songs makes this especially important because no single commentary handles equally well its Hebrew poetry, literary dynamics, ancient Near Eastern context, erotic subject matter, canonical setting, Jewish and Christian reception, and theological significance. Some of the finest literary commentaries deliberately say little about theology, while some of the richest theological treatments move beyond what can confidently be demonstrated as the poem’s immediate sense. The strongest pairing therefore needs both depth and productive tension. After incorporating the recently examined Robert D. Miller II and Roland Murphy’s earlier FOTL treatment, I would retain the same two primary pairings but refine the reasons for choosing them.

#1 J. Cheryl Exum + Ellen F. Davis

J. Cheryl Exum — Song of Songs (Old Testament Library)

Exum is the strongest foundation for this pairing because she keeps the reader firmly inside the poetry before wider theological claims are made. Her great strength is not merely identifying literary devices but explaining how desire is created through them. Repetition, searching and finding, presence and absence, seeing and being seen, remembered encounters, imaginative scenes, reciprocal praise, and recurring departures become part of the meaning of the Song rather than decorative features surrounding it. Her reading of the final command in 8:14 is particularly important because she does not force the poem to end with conventional romantic closure; desire remains alive through movement and renewed longing.

She is also exceptionally attentive to the woman as a speaking and desiring subject. The woman does not merely receive male admiration but speaks first, searches for her lover, summons him, praises his body, imagines erotic encounters, commands attention, and articulates some of the Song’s most memorable reflections on love. Exum’s sensitivity to female agency helps correct readings that unconsciously turn the Song into a male-authored catalogue of female beauty. Yet she generally allows these observations to emerge from close literary analysis rather than forcing the text into a contemporary ideological programme.

Exum’s other major contribution is her account of literary unity. She recognises smaller poetic units but finds that attempts to isolate them as independent songs increasingly fail to explain the network of repetitions and transformations that binds the book together. The Song behaves less like a conventional narrative than like a sustained poetic world in which motifs recur with altered emotional force. For the purposes of a pairing, this gives Davis something indispensable: a rigorous literary foundation against which theological proposals can be tested. Exum repeatedly asks what the poem itself is doing before asking what it might become within a larger Christian canonical reading.

Ellen F. Davis — Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs

Davis takes the reader almost exactly where Exum normally stops. Her interest lies in how the Song’s celebration of embodied human love resonates within the wider scriptural world of creation, Eden, land, temple, Israel, sexuality, and relationship with God. Her treatment of the Song alongside Genesis 2–3 is particularly fruitful. The lush gardens, animals, fruit, water, nakedness without shame, mutual delight, and especially the reversal of the direction of desire in Song 7:11 make it possible to hear the Song as an imaginative counterpoint to the fractures introduced in Genesis 3.

She also sees connections between the Song’s imagery and Israel’s sacred vocabulary that narrowly literary readings can miss. Vineyards, gardens, pomegranates, cedar, water, fragrances, architectural imagery, land, and temple associations sometimes create a biblical density greater than their immediate erotic function. Davis therefore asks whether the poem’s world of human desire participates in a larger vision of reconciled creation. Even when I would stop short of some of her conclusions, she consistently asks theologically worthwhile questions that Exum has deliberately left open.

This is also why Davis should not normally be read alone. At times the connections among human love, God’s love, Eden, Israel, land, temple, and the soul’s relationship with God become so closely intertwined that resonance risks becoming identification. Some associations are strongly grounded in textual correspondence; others depend more heavily upon canonical imagination. Exum supplies exactly the discipline Davis needs because her sustained attention to the Song’s literary dynamics keeps human erotic love from disappearing underneath theological symbolism.

Why this remains the best pairing

The brilliance of Exum + Davis lies in the fact that their differences are productive rather than merely contradictory. Exum repeatedly asks, “What is this poetry doing as poetry of human desire?” Davis asks, “What becomes visible when this poetry is heard inside Israel’s Scriptures and Christian theology?” Reading Davis after Exum allows the theological imagination to expand without losing its textual anchor, while reading Exum after Davis prevents canonical theology from becoming so cautious that the Song’s connections with Genesis, creation, land, sacred space, and theological anthropology are never explored.

The newly added Miller commentary does not displace Davis in this pair because Miller and Exum, for all their important differences, operate predominantly on the literary-aesthetic side of the bridge. Miller would greatly deepen Exum’s attention to sound, scent, sensory experience, and aesthetic effect, but the combined pair would leave considerably more of the canonical and theological task to the reader. Davis gives Exum the kind of complementary interpretive pressure a pairing needs. If I could own only two books on Song of Songs and wanted the richest combined journey from poetry into theology, Exum and Davis would still be my first choice.

#2 Adele Berlin + Michael Fishbane

Adele Berlin — Song of Songs (Hermeneia)

Berlin provides the exegetical anchor for the second pairing. Her long experience with biblical poetry makes her particularly strong on the interaction of Hebrew diction, repetition, figurative language, ambiguity, speaker changes, literary convention, and the cumulative effect of poetic structure. Rather than forcing every unusual construction into a reconstructed plot, she often explains why ambiguity is intrinsic to the literary experience of the Song. This is particularly valuable in passages where confident identifications of speakers or narrative settings exceed the evidence.

Her commentary also benefits from its recency. Berlin can engage several decades of scholarship on gender, poetry, Hellenistic literature, linguistic dating, textual history, ancient love poetry, and literary theory that earlier major commentators could not fully incorporate. Yet the volume does not feel like a survey of recent academic fashions. Berlin’s strongest observations normally return the reader to the Hebrew text and ask how individual linguistic choices create poetic effects.

Another advantage is Berlin’s awareness of the Greek and wider ancient environment of the Song. Comparisons with Hellenistic literature allow her to situate the Song more broadly without reducing it to a derivative product of another culture. This makes her particularly valuable for readers who want historically serious literary interpretation without the speculative fertility-cult reconstructions that sometimes dominate older comparative work. As the first member of this pair, Berlin gives Fishbane a highly disciplined account of the poem before the reader enters the enormous world of later Jewish interpretation.

Michael Fishbane — Song of Songs

Fishbane complements Berlin almost perfectly because he asks what happens after the plain literary sense becomes Scripture within a living interpretive community. His commentary famously works with four traditional levels—peshat, derash, remez, and sod—allowing readers to distinguish the Song’s human love poetry from the covenantal, devotional, mystical, and theological meanings Jewish readers subsequently discovered within it. These levels are not thrown together as though every interpretation had the same historical status. Fishbane shows how one text can generate different kinds of meaning without requiring the later meanings to become claims about what an original poet consciously intended.

This is extraordinarily valuable for Song of Songs because its reception history is not an incidental appendix. The book has been read for centuries as language of Israel and God, individual devotion, mystical longing, liturgy, and divine-human communion. Simply declaring all such interpretation “wrong because the Song is about human love” explains neither why the imagery proved so generative nor what it means for a canonical community to reread Scripture. Fishbane lets the reader understand those traditions from within rather than treating them as embarrassing relics of premodern exegesis.

At the same time, Fishbane never requires us to abandon the erotic poetry. Indeed, the entire method works because peshat remains real. Human love is not merely a disposable shell hiding a spiritual meaning. Instead, the qualities of human longing, beauty, exclusivity, searching, delight, and desire become the imaginative resources through which later Jewish tradition can speak about covenantal and divine love. That layered approach makes Fishbane an ideal companion to Berlin’s historical-literary discipline.

Why this remains the second pairing

Berlin + Fishbane gives a different kind of comprehensiveness from Exum + Davis. Berlin supplies current critical exegesis, Hebrew poetic sensitivity, literary context, and disciplined historical judgment. Fishbane opens the door into Jewish reception, canonical rereading, rabbinic interpretation, spirituality, and mysticism. Together they allow the reader to move from what the Song says as ancient Hebrew love poetry to what the Song became within Jewish Scripture without pretending that the two questions are identical.

This pairing is particularly valuable because both books arise from Jewish interpretation yet differ radically in method. Berlin is largely concerned with explaining the ancient literary text; Fishbane is equally interested in the life of that text across centuries of interpretation. Their combination therefore provides both diachronic depth and methodological clarity. Readers interested in the history of interpretation, Jewish exegesis, or the distinction between original literary sense and canonical reception may actually prefer this pairing to Exum + Davis.

What Robert D. Miller II changes — and why he does not replace either main pairing

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

Miller is the most serious challenger to the existing pairings because he contributes something genuinely unusual rather than simply offering another competent commentary. His governing concern is aesthetic experience: why does the Song not merely tell us that the lovers are beautiful but actually make beauty perceptible? He explores the combined effects of sound, rhyme, alliteration, syntax, rhythm, visual imagery, scent, taste, touch, colour, geography, bodily movement, literary associations, and the emotional possibilities created by metaphor. In passages filled with perfumes or body imagery, this produces observations that almost no traditional verse-by-verse commentary supplies.

His treatment of the wasfs illustrates the value of the approach particularly well. Images such as goats, sheep, pomegranates, towers, gazelles, jewels, ivory, and date palms should not be assembled into an imaginary visual portrait as though the poet were giving anatomical measurements. The images evoke qualities—movement, colour, strength, warmth, abundance, luxury, fertility, wildness, vitality, fragrance—and their cumulative effect attempts to reproduce something of the lover’s experience of beauty. Miller therefore helps recover the poetry from the very explanatory habits that can make commentaries flatten it.

Miller is also alert to biblical intertexts involving Eden, temple, covenant, land, shepherd imagery, wilderness, and sacred fragrance. Importantly, he resists turning those correspondences into a straightforward allegory in which every lover or object “stands for” something theological. He recognises instead that biblical language arrives already carrying associations, so erotic poetry can resonate with sacred discourse without ceasing to be erotic poetry. That is a particularly valuable middle path between theological reduction and secularising reduction.

Why, then, does Miller not enter one of the two official pairings? The answer is complementarity rather than quality. Paired with Exum, the result would be an extraordinary literary-aesthetic library, but both books concentrate primarily on how the poetry itself works and neither provides the sustained theological counterpoint Davis offers. Paired with Berlin, Miller would again strengthen poetics and aesthetics enormously while sacrificing Fishbane’s largely non-overlapping contribution of Jewish reception and interpretive history. Miller is therefore one of the first additional books I would add after purchasing either primary pairing, and for a reader whose overriding interest is poetry and aesthetics rather than theology or reception history, Berlin + Miller would be an exceptionally strong specialist combination.

What Roland Murphy’s FOTL commentary changes — and why it remains supplementary

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

Murphy’s 1981 FOTL treatment should be distinguished from his later and much fuller Hermeneia commentary. Its methodological focus is deliberately narrow: structure, genre, setting, and intention. That concentration allows Murphy to identify the Song’s various forms of love poetry—yearning songs, self-description, admiration songs, wasfs, descriptions of experience, boasts, invitations, and related forms—and to show why abrupt transitions need not be explained by inventing unseen narrative events. The poems often change because one kind of love song has given way to another.

His sustained comparison with Egyptian love poetry is especially useful. Alternating male and female speakers, gardens, fragrances, love sickness, gazelles, descriptions of bodies, brother-sister terminology, embraces, public kissing, and the imaginative portrayal of lovers as kings, shepherds, or servants all have meaningful parallels. This helps make the Song historically intelligible without reducing it to borrowed Egyptian literature. Murphy is similarly cautious about the old sacred-marriage interpretation, recognising general cultural contact without claiming that the Song originated as a fertility-cult liturgy.

The volume is also perceptive about unity. Murphy considers it unlikely that the entire book originated as one continuous narrative poem, yet he rejects extreme atomisation because recurring language, refrains, catchwords, speakers, and motifs indicate meaningful editorial shaping. This anticipates in simpler form the later positions developed by Exum and Miller: originally independent material and final literary coherence are not mutually exclusive possibilities.

Nevertheless, the FOTL treatment does not create a new primary pairing because Murphy himself subsequently produced the far more comprehensive Hermeneia commentary. Pairing the earlier Murphy with one of the major modern commentaries would sacrifice too much breadth for a methodology whose best results can largely be retained while using the later Murphy. The FOTL volume is therefore best regarded as a specialist supplementary resource, particularly valuable when questions of genre, ancient love-song convention, or the original settings of individual poems become important.

Which pairing should you choose?

For the broadest and most stimulating literary-to-theological journey, I would choose Exum + Davis. Exum establishes what the Song does as poetry of embodied human desire, while Davis asks how that poetry participates in the larger biblical worlds of creation, Eden, land, sacred space, and theological anthropology. The tension between them is a feature rather than a problem because Davis pushes interpretation outward and Exum repeatedly calls it back to the literary text.

For the strongest critical-exegetical plus Jewish-reception combination, I would choose Berlin + Fishbane. Berlin offers the more comprehensive contemporary account of the Hebrew poem and its ancient literary setting, while Fishbane shows how that poem generated covenantal, devotional, mystical, and theological interpretation within Judaism. Their methodological distinction is unusually clear, making the pair particularly good for readers who want to understand not only the Song but also how Scripture acquires interpretive afterlives.

The newly added volumes strengthen rather than overturn these recommendations. Miller becomes perhaps the most attractive third book because neither primary pairing explores the poem’s sensory and aesthetic operation as systematically as he does. Murphy’s FOTL treatment is more specialised but remains valuable for understanding why the Song can simultaneously consist of recognisable ancient love-song forms and function as a coherent final literary work.

The deeper principle behind the pairings remains important. No reader benefits from owning two commentaries merely because both are highly ranked. The best pairing lets one interpreter hear what the other is inclined to miss. In Song of Songs, where human sexuality, poetic beauty, biblical imagery, history of interpretation, and theology have been entangled for more than two millennia, deliberately pairing different kinds of readers is one of the best ways to prevent any single interpretive method from turning the Song into something smaller than it is.