To many modern readers, the Song of Songs is an enigma. It is a work of unabashed eroticism, with no explicit references to God or the Israelite cult, and yet it is counted among the books of the Hebrew Bible. However, the Song was not always seen as enigmatic. Jews and Christians in the ancient and medieval worlds were enthralled with this text, treating it as pressingly relevant to religious life. Ilana Pardes's history of the Song, published as part of the Lives of Great Religious Books series, offers readers a new way of making sense of the text of the Song and its many afterlives. It is a whirlwind tour from ancient Palestine to modern America, which traces out the many branches of the Song's influence. Pardes introduces us to Amoraic and Tannaitic Rabbis, medieval poets and kabbalists, cloistered monks, Enlightenment scholars, and American writers. Covering such a diversity of sources is a signal achievement. And she brings her keen literary sensibility to this material, refusing to plot the texts onto a simplistic “literal” vs. “figural” binary.

The book is written at a lively pace across five chapters—as well as an introduction and epilogue—which never fail to engage the reader. The introduction does what we might expect, introducing us to the text of the Song itself, notably its characters and the complex interrelationships between the poetic units that make up the whole. In line with recent interpreters, Pardes resists imposing a sequential narrative or “coherent line of action” on the Song (7). Given that this is a “biography” of the Song, we might have expected a substantial treatment of the possible contexts for the Song's composition, but Pardes dispenses with this question quite hastily, noting that it was “possibly” composed during Solomon's reign but bears signs of much later redaction (4).

The three chapters that open the book focus on pre-modern figural readings of the Song, both Jewish and Christian. Pardes is clear that, although all the authors she will consider over this long sweep of chapters read the Song “allegorically,” these readings occupy different registers: at times they are communal, pertaining to Israel or the church, and at others they are focused on the individual and their mystical-ecstatic relationship to the divine. She begins with the rabbis and their internal debates as to whether the Song was first sung by the Israelites at the crossing of the Red Sea or on Mt. Sinai when the law was delivered to Moses. But she also points us to signs in rabbinic exegesis of the Song of the emerging Merkabah, or chariot, mysticism that was grounded in the vision of Ezekiel 1. When she introduces us to the first major Christian exegete, Origen of Alexandria, whose incomplete Commentary on the Song of Songs influenced subsequent readers for over a millennium, she focuses on elements of dialogue with the rabbis, pointing us to the rich interaction between Jews and Christians in their interpretation of the Song.

We leap in the second chapter to medieval Spain and the emergence of Hebrew love poetry grounded in the language of the Song. She introduces the reader to Shmuel HaNagid and Yehuda HaLevi's secular love poetry before turning to the liturgical poetry, influenced by the late antique genre of the piyyutim, of HaLevi and Ibn Gabirol. HaLevi's contribution to both genres suggests the fluidity between the “secular” and “religious” spheres of Song commentary, which she skillfully draws out. She concludes with the erotic mysticism of the Zohar, which breaks with rabbinic precedent to locate the giving of the Song at the consecration of Solomon's temple—the dwelling place of the feminine Shekinah. The third chapter brings us to medieval Christian interpretation of the Song in both France and Spain, with a focus on its ascetic dimension. The authors on whom she focuses in this chapter—Bernard of Clairvaux and three late medieval Spanish mystics, including Teresa of Avila—are all renunciants. For them, the eros of the Song entirely displaces human eros, which is to be sublimated to divine ends. One may here only quibble with her assertion that Teresa is the first known “female exegete writing on the Song” (113), when the German mystic Hildegard of Bingen had glossed the Song extensively in her visionary writings Scivias and The Book of Life's Merits already in the twelfth century.

The final two chapters catapult the reader into the modern world. They cover roughly the same chronological territory but from very different perspectives. The fourth chapter is concerned with the emergence of historical-critical interpretations of the Song and the rapid turn from primarily allegorical to almost exclusively literal readings of the Song. Beginning with the famous translation and commentary of Herder, we are immersed in the world of academic biblical scholarship, running through to the influential contemporary literary scholarship of Robert Alter and the feminist hermeneutics of Phyllis Trible. The final chapter focuses exclusively on American poetry and fiction, notably the work of Walt Whitman and Toni Morrison. Pardes evocatively shows how Whitman employed the Song to provide an alternative reading of the Bible to that offered by the Puritans. And she offers a stunning account of the Song's influence (particularly 1:5) on Toni Morrison's grappling with the love of black bodies in Song of Solomon and Beloved.

As interest in the Song of Songs continues to grow, Pardes's book will be an invaluable resource for specialists and non-specialists alike as it provides readers with an unparalleled overview of the long and fascinating trajectory of the Song's influence. The book is necessarily very selective in its material, but it is perhaps too homogeneous in taking a predominantly literary approach. It is, after all, meant to be a “biography,” and yet material culture receives little attention. For example, there is no treatment of the manuscripts of the Song—the way the poem physically circulated in the world. I can imagine at least a section on the rubrication of Old Latin and Vulgate manuscripts, which quite literally transformed the text into a dialogue between Christ and the church through the insertion of headings. Still, for that lack, this is a wonderful resource that deserves a wide readership.