I. Introduction: Eros Brutalized into Allegory
The Song of Songs—שִׁיר הַשִּׁירִים (Shir HaShirim, "Song of Songs," literally "the greatest of songs"), also called שִׁיר (Shir, "Song") or שִׁיר שֶׁלֹּמֹה (Shir Shelomo, "Song of Solomon")—stands as the Hebrew Bible's most explicitly erotic text: an eight-chapter collection of sensual love poetry celebrating physical desire, sexual longing, bodily beauty, and mutual passion between a woman and her beloved. Composed possibly in the post-exilic period (fifth-fourth century BCE) though attributed to Solomon, this literary masterpiece employs sophisticated garden imagery, bold metaphors for bodies and desire, and most radically, centers a female voice who actively pursues, desires, and celebrates her lover with unashamed eroticism. Yet Christian theology—particularly in its purity culture, allegorical spiritualization, and patriarchal "biblical marriage" manifestations—has performed perhaps the most grotesque hermeneutical violence in the entire canon on this text, transforming explicit erotic poetry celebrating embodied sexual pleasure into a fucking allegory about Christ's love for the Church, weaponizing it for purity culture's sexual shame theology, colonizing the woman's voice for submissive "bride of Christ" imagery, and brutally suppressing the text's radical celebration of female sexual agency and desire.
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