The Song of Songs: A Biography (Lives of Great Religious Books)
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
The Song of Songs has been embraced for centuries as the ultimate song of love. But the kind of love readers have found in this ancient poem is strikingly varied. Ilana Pardes invites us to explore the dramatic shift from readings of the Song as a poem on divine love to celebrations of its exuberant account of human love. With a refreshingly nuanced approach, she reveals how allegorical and literal interpretations are inextricably intertwined in the Song’s tumultuous life. The body in all its aspects—pleasure and pain, even erotic fervor—is key to many allegorical commentaries. And although the literal, sensual Song thrives in modernity, allegory has not disappeared. New modes of allegory have emerged in modern settings, from the literary and the scholarly to the communal.
Offering rare insights into the story of this remarkable poem, Pardes traces a diverse line of passionate readers. She looks at Jewish and Christian interpreters of late antiquity who were engaged in disputes over the Song’s allegorical meaning, at medieval Hebrew poets who introduced it into the opulent world of courtly banquets, and at kabbalists who used it as a springboard to the celestial spheres. She shows how feminist critics have marveled at the Song’s egalitarian representation of courtship, and how it became a song of America for Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Toni Morrison. Throughout these explorations of the Song’s reception, Pardes highlights the unparalleled beauty of its audacious language of love.
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This luminous study is a rare combination of finely perceptive literary readings with a sweeping historical overview. Perhaps the chief of the gifts it offers is the demonstration, by means of multiple examples throughout the book, that the distinction between literal and allegorical is intrinsically ambiguous. In lucid and lively prose, Ilana Pardes shows the remarkable life of a great work through the ages.
—Robert Alter, author of The Art of Bible Translation
Pardes deftly demonstrates how the biblical past can furnish us with a common storehouse of images, to be rediscovered or recast.
—Benjamin Balint, Wall Street Journal
Pardes deftly weaves her way through the interpretive transition from the allegorical to the literal and then shows how they are intertwined and inseparable. Pardes’ work is erudite and academic yet highly readable. She does not attach herself to any specific agenda and does not attempt to sway the reader to any definitive conclusion. Rather, she presents the Song’s interpretations through the millennia inside a well-crafted, historical overview.
—Brad Pruitt, Christian Chronicle
- Title: The Song of Songs: A Biography
- Author: Ilana Pardes
- Series: Lives of Great Religious Books
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Print Publication Date: 2019
- Pages: 296
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
- Resource ID: LLS:SNGSNGSBGRPHY
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-06-18T15:39:21Z