Song of Songs (The Old Testament Library | OTL)

by J. Cheryl Exum

Publisher:

Westminster John Knox

, 2005

Overview

This original commentary highlights the poetic genius of the Song of Songs, one of the most elusive texts of the Hebrew Bible. J. Cheryl Exum illustrates that genius in the way the song demonstrates to its readers that love is as strong as death. She shows how the song immortalizes love, offering a mature sensitivity to how being in love is different for the woman and the man. Many long–standing conundrums in the interpretation of the book are given persuasive solutions in Exum’s verse–by–verse exegesis.

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Contents

Top Highlights

“The Song’s lovers are archetypal lovers—composite figures, types of lovers rather than any specific lovers” (Page 8)

“He is not the lover in the poem, nor one of the speakers. The Song is not ‘about’ him, and yet he casts his shadow over it.” (Page 90)

“Most commentators tend to date the Song in or around the Hellenistic period, primarily on linguistic grounds” (Page 67)

“relies exclusively on dialogue, so that we learn about love through what lovers say about it” (Page 1)

“Romance transforms the way lovers look at the world around them; suddenly the whole world becomes more beautiful, more vibrant, more wonderful. This is what happens to the Song of Songs lovers.” (Page 13)

Product Details

• Title: Song of Songs
• Author: J. Cheryl Exum
• Series: Old Testament Library Series
• Publisher: Westminster John Knox
• Publication Date: 2005
• Pages: 288
• Christian Group: Reformed
• Resource Type: Commentaries
• Topic: 1 Kings and 2 Kings

About J. Cheryl Exum

J. Cheryl Exum (Ph.D.) is professor of biblical studies at the University of Sheffield. She received her BA, summa cum laude, from Wake Forest University in North Carolina, and her MA and PhD, with distinction, from Columbia University in New York. As a doctoral student, she spent a year studying theology and German literature at the University of Göttingen. Before her appointment to a personal chair in Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield in 1993, she taught at Yale University (1975-77) and Boston College (1977-1993). She has done research in Israel (first as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research and later as a Visiting Research Associate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and in Germany (as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in Göttingen and in Heidelberg).

From 2003 to 2005 she was Director of the University of Sheffield’s Centre for the Study of the Bible in the Modern World. In 2004, with two Sheffield colleagues, David J.A. Clines and Keith W. Whitelam, she founded Sheffield Phoenix Press, now a leading publisher in the field of Biblical Studies.The author of numerous scholarly works on the Hebrew Bible, her books include Tragedy and Biblical Narrative, Fragmented Women: Feminist (Sub)versions of Biblical Narratives as well as Fragmented Women: Feminist (Sub)versions of Biblical Narratives. She is executive editor of the journal Biblical Interpretation and a director of Sheffield Phoenix Press.