The Song of Songs

Paul Griffiths Songs of Songs The Song of Songs is the dancer in the temple, the sensualist’s page tucked into the holy book, a love song accepted as scriptural in Jewish and Christian traditions from times before reckoning. It is a song of mutual adoration, voiced by two people – though their voices are not distinguished in the text, perhaps because, in the ecstasy of this shining, blazing regard that each fixes on the other, that holds them face to face, they are one. Certainly their language is one, a rich language of metaphor in which the human body is the universe and the beloved’s qualities and possessions are all elevated.