Song of Songs.

• Author: Holm, Tawny L.
• Position: Book review

Song of Songs. By J. CHERYL EXUM. The Old Testament Library. Louisville: WESTMINSTER JOHN KNOX PRESS, 2005. Pp. xxiii + 263. $39.95.

For such a small book, the Song of Songs has always received a prodigious amount of attention, and 2005 was a lively year again for the production of major studies of it. In addition to Exum's book under review here, there were also: Richard S. Hess, Song of Songs (Baker Commentary on the Old Testament Wisdom and Psalms; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005); P. W. T. Stoop-van Paridon, The Song of Songs: A Philological Analysis of the Hebrew Book Sir hassirim (Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Supplement 17; Louvain: Peeters, 2005); and a collected volume of papers to which Exum also contributed: Perspectives on the Song of Songs = Perspektiven der Hoheliedauslegung, ed. Anselm C. Hagedorn (BZAW 346; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005). However, Exum's book stands out as a judicious commentary in many respects, and is one of the more insightful and poetically sensitive in terms of translation and interpretation of the biblical text. She also pays more attention than any previous commentator to gender differences in how the male and female voices in the Song describe love.

The volume includes a seven-part introduction that takes up about a third of the book, followed by translation and commentary of the biblical text divided into ten units. The book has a select bibliography, but, unfortunately, no indices. Exum defines the genre of the Song as a "long lyric poem about erotic love and sexual desire," without linear progression, although there is poetic development in spite of the poem's circularity (pp. 1, 5). She disagrees with those who would read the Song for plot or take it as a realistic or historical drama. She understands the Song of Songs as a unified composition rather than a collection of poems, and sees it as essentially two long speeches each by the female and the male lover, with an introductory and concluding dialogue between the lovers about love. She draws no conclusions regarding the identity of the author or the author's gender (although she believes it more likely that the author was male), and seems to agree that the Song was perhaps written "late" (on this, see now W. F. Dobbs-Allsopp, "Late Linguistic Features in Song of Songs," in Perspectives on the Song of Songs, 27-77). One of the over-arching themes of the Song, even though it is only directly mentioned once (8:6: "love is strong as death"), is that the main...