What’s this Erotic Poem doing in my Bible?

The Bible’s Epic Love Poem, Song of Songs

As you’re making your way through the Old Testament, you’ll come across a lot of poetry. There’s the Psalms, for one. There’s also Proverbs, which is usually rendered as a series of shorter poems. Large segments of the Prophets are rendered in verse, and poems like the Song of Deborah pop in to otherwise lengthy prose sections of the Bible like Judges. Ancient people liked poetry. Ancient scribes liked to show off by writing it. Ancient orators used it as a way to showcase their skill with language. While there are plenty of emotional moments in Biblical Prose, poetry remained the premier way to express intense emotions of joy, grief, anger, and love.

And Love is what concerns us today, because if you’re flipping around the so-called Wisdom Books in your Bible, you probably hit on Song of Songs, which is quite different from anything else in scripture. It’s an eight chapter erotic poem, reaching out to us from over two millennia ago. It’s about yearning, desire, separation, and coming together again.

A lot of people believe it’s an extended metaphor for God’s love for humanity, or that it’s a model marriage for the faithful. I’m not so convinced. The question of what the Song of Songs was “really” about lingered for a long time. It wasn’t canonized in…