The Song of Songs is an anthology of poems of love and desire between two lovers, a universal mystery as old as time itself. This aspect of human nature has changed little over millennia, and contemporary readers easily identify their own craving for intimacy in this ancient text.
Yet, Song of Songs is mysterious in its own right and it is something of an outlier in the overall corpus that makes up the Bible. It does not teach the laws, codes or morals of the Israelites, and God is notably absent from the text that seems to celebrate earthly lovers as an expression of a more natural divinity. The unknown author or editor gave women a prominent voice, offering some compensation for the disappearance of female deities in monotheism. Like other Biblical texts, it carries more layers of meaning. It can be read literally, as an allegory, and even as a dialogue with the more explicit works of the literary genre in Mesopotamia and Greece of the time.
I celebrated this unique book of the Bible in black and gold.

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