In 1978, Phyllis Trible wrote that the Song of Songs “redeems a love story gone awry.” She argues this in her book God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality by placing the Song alongside Genesis 2−3 and finding a textual dialogue that restores the relational balance lost in the tragic creation myth. Havilah Dharamraj's new book, Altogether Lovely: A Thematic and Intertextual Reading of the Song of Songs, likewise sets the Song of Songs in dialogue with texts from other parts of the canon. Specifically, she turns to prophetic passages that use the marriage metaphor to describe God's relationship with Israel, and she discovers there resonant themes that can enrich our reading not only of the Song of Songs but also of Hosea, Isaiah, and Ezekiel.

Dharamraj identifies her methodology as intertextual, and more specifically, as “reception-centered, synchronic, and literary.” Thus, she does not ask historical questions of the texts that she puts in conversation, instead focusing on thematic resonances with an eye toward the way in which these texts have been received in their afterlife. Dharamraj structures the book according to four themes, namely “Love in Separation,” “In Praise of the Beloved,” “Gardens,” and “Love-and-Its-Jealousy.” In each unit, she offers a detailed exegesis of a Song passage, an analysis of a prophetic text that shares this theme, and a comparison between the two. Her exegesis is rigorous, and the footnotes reveal her impressive knowledge of a wide range of sources from the ancient Near East as well as the history of biblical interpretation.

Dharamraj's book, at times, seems like a reclamation project akin to Trible's, an attempt to contextualize troubling (even hideous) prophetic accounts of sexuality and relationships according to a canonical conversation that ultimately creates an alternative imagination in a feminist key. Not only does she offer novel ways of understanding the prophetic marriage metaphor, she also enhances our understanding of the Song by forcing readers to step outside the insularity of the world that the erotic text itself creates. Ultimately, Dharamraj argues that a richer picture of romance, both human and human-divine, emerges when the Song is read with the prophetic marriage metaphor, that when “all taken together, make up something lovely” (253).

While Dharamraj insightfully draws out the affirmative dimensions of canonical dialogue, there exists a tension between her feminist readings and some of her conclusions about the prophetic texts that she analyzes. Her comparison of the Song's woman to the men of these prophetic texts carries certain dangers. For example, she aligns the Song's female with Hosea's male (chapter 2) in their “persistence” amid social constraints; she finds “overlaps” in the way in which the woman of the Song and the man of Ezekiel 16 conceptualize the beauty of the one they love. One wonders if this comparison is altogether fair to the expressive and complex agent who is the Song's woman. Moreover, one wonders if the voiceless women victimized by their male counterparts in texts such as Ezekiel 16 get lost here yet again. It is possible that this canonical conversation, despite its feminist implications, unjustly ameliorates the “terror” that texts such as Ezekiel 16 evoke (and must evoke). No doubt Dharamraj herself acknowledges this tension without fully exploring it, arguing that her juxtaposition of texts also creates an “intercanonical critique” that exposes the “tragedy of marriage” as it appears in these prophetic passages.

Due to the technical nature of her exegesis, Dharamraj's book will be most helpful to motivated undergraduates with a particular interest in the subject matter. Otherwise, it will more valuably rest in the hands of graduate students, preachers, and scholars who wish to think more deeply about the Song of Songs and wrestle with the ever-present questions that arise in relation to passages such as Ezekiel 23, which no doubt remains a “text of terror” even when placed in conversation with the “altogether lovely” Song of Songs.