Two fundamental questions surround the Song of Songs. Did Solomon actually write it, as Jewish tradition claims? And was the poem intended from the beginning as a metaphor for the love between God and Israel? Both questions are complicated by the tension between the book’s traditional interpretation and what the text itself actually says.
Was the Song of Songs Intended as a Metaphor for God and Israel?
According to the Talmud, Midrash, and the overwhelming majority of traditional Jewish commentators, the Song of Songs is a metaphor for the relationship between God and Israel. This interpretation is already well established in rabbinic literature and remained dominant in Jewish interpretation for centuries.[1] The idea itself is certainly consistent with the Hebrew Bible. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Hosea all use marriage, romantic love, and sexual infidelity as metaphors for the relationship between God and His people. Israel is the unfaithful wife; God is the husband; idolatry is adultery; and restoration to God is the restoration of the marriage.[2]
But there is a striking difference between those passages and the Song of Songs. In the prophetic books, the metaphor is explicitly identified. Hosea tells us that his marriage represents Israel’s relationship with God. Ezekiel explicitly develops Jerusalem as a woman whom God marries and who later becomes unfaithful. Isaiah similarly describes Zion as God’s wife. The reader is therefore given the key needed to understand the metaphor.
The Song of Songs gives us no such key. Despite being considerably longer than these individual prophetic passages, it never explicitly identifies God or Israel as the subjects of the relationship. There is no mention of God, the covenant, the Torah, the Exodus, Sinai, idolatry, sin, repentance, exile, or redemption. Israel is never explicitly identified as a nation or as God’s people. There is no explicit prophetic language explaining that the lovers represent God and Israel. Instead, the poem presents itself as a series of intensely personal love poems centered on the desire, pursuit, separation, physical attraction, and union of two human lovers.
This raises an important question: if the Song was originally intended as an allegory of God and Israel, why does it provide no explanation of the allegory? There is no introduction telling us that the man represents God and the woman represents Israel. There is no passage explaining what the various characters and objects symbolize. There is no equivalent of Hosea’s marriage, where the correspondence between the prophet and God, his wife and Israel, and adultery and idolatry is explicitly established.
There Is No Consistent Allegorical System
One of the strongest arguments against the claim that the Song of Songs was originally written as a detailed allegory of God and Israel is that it does not appear to contain a consistent one-to-one allegorical system. In biblical passages where marriage clearly functions as an extended metaphor for the relationship between God and Israel, the basic correspondences are relatively coherent. In Hosea, for example, Hosea’s marriage to an unfaithful woman represents God’s relationship with an unfaithful Israel: the husband corresponds to God, the wife to Israel, adultery to idolatry, and the eventual restoration of the marriage to Israel’s restoration. Ezekiel 16 operates similarly. The reader is given enough information to understand the underlying metaphor and follow it throughout the passage.
The Song of Songs provides nothing comparable. If the male lover represents God and the woman represents Israel, what precisely do the individual elements of their relationship represent? What do the kisses represent? What are the king’s chambers? What is the woman’s vineyard? Who are her mother’s sons? Who are the “daughters of Jerusalem”? What do the sixty queens and eighty concubines represent? What is the significance of the garden into which the beloved enters? The text never establishes an interpretive key that allows these questions to be answered consistently. One can certainly propose theological interpretations for individual images, and Jewish commentators have done so for centuries, but the fact that an image can be given an allegorical meaning does not demonstrate that the author originally intended that meaning.
The problem becomes even clearer when the same imagery appears in contexts where its literal meaning is unmistakably erotic. The Song repeatedly speaks of vineyards, gardens, breasts, kisses, bodily beauty, embraces, and sexual desire. A vineyard can certainly evoke Israel because of the famous vineyard imagery of Isaiah 5, but in the Song the woman’s “vineyard” also functions naturally as an image of her own sexuality. Likewise, the garden can evoke biblical ideas such as Eden, Israel, or the Temple while simultaneously functioning as an unmistakably erotic image of the beloved’s body. If every occurrence were intended to encode a specific theological reality, the poem would require a complicated system of shifting symbols for which the text gives us no instructions.
This does not mean that the Song has no theological significance, or that the traditional Jewish interpretation is arbitrary. Quite the opposite. The Hebrew Bible had already established a powerful conceptual framework in which God is portrayed as Israel’s husband and Israel or Jerusalem as His beloved wife. The Song’s language of longing, separation, searching, exclusive love, union, faithfulness, and reconciliation can therefore resonate very naturally with that relationship. The more defensible claim may be that the Song’s erotic love poetry can function as a profound symbol of divine love, rather than that every character, object, and erotic episode was deliberately designed by the author as a coded reference to a particular theological reality later read into the text.
The Moral Meaning May Be in the Literal Poem
If the Song is not necessarily an allegory, this raises another question: what moral or religious value does it have as a literal love poem? The answer may be found precisely in the relationship that the poem actually describes.
The Song presents romantic love as something involving mutual affection, admiration, exclusivity, emotional intimacy, and sexual desire. Both lovers actively express their longing for one another and delight in each other’s physical and personal qualities. Sexual desire is not presented as merely physical gratification, but as part of a relationship of genuine affection and devotion. The woman declares, “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine” (6:3), expressing the mutual belonging that characterizes their relationship.
This provides an important lesson about marriage. A husband and wife should not allow their relationship to become merely functional or defined only by obligation, family responsibilities, or companionship. The Song openly celebrates the beauty of desiring one’s spouse, admiring one’s spouse’s body, pursuing romance, and maintaining passion within a committed relationship. Sexual intimacy, when joined to genuine affection and devotion, is not something shameful or merely tolerated; it can be an important and beautiful part of married life. The Song’s famous conclusion captures the depth of this ideal: “For love is strong as death” (8:6).[3]
In this sense, the Song does not need to be secretly about God and Israel in order to have profound religious significance. Its lesson can be much more straightforward: marriage should contain love, desire, intimacy, and joy—not merely duty. The biblical canon can therefore be understood as giving dignity to romantic and sexual love between husband and wife and affirming that cultivating such love is itself something worthy and meaningful.
Was Solomon Really the Author?
The traditional attribution to Solomon is not necessarily evidence that Solomon himself wrote the Song. The Hebrew heading, אֲשֶׁר לִשְׁלֹמֹה (‘asher lishlomoh), most naturally means “which is by Solomon,” and the construction is commonly used in biblical poetic superscriptions to indicate authorship. The same type of construction appears frequently in the Psalms. Thus, taken on its own, the Hebrew heading does present the work as Solomonic.
But biblical superscriptions are not necessarily reliable historical statements of authorship. The Psalms contain numerous examples where titles and attributions have been understood as later additions or traditions rather than necessarily being written by the person named in the title. Psalm 142, for example, has a superscription referring to David in the third person, even though the poem itself speaks in the first person. Psalm 122 is also attributed to David, despite the content of the psalm clearly depicting a post-First Temple perspective. These examples do not prove that the attribution to Solomon is false, but they demonstrate that a biblical superscription cannot by itself settle the historical question of authorship.
The vocabulary presents difficulties for a straightforward tenth-century date. In Song 4:13, the word פַּרְדֵּס (pardes), meaning “garden” or “orchard,” is understood by linguasits to be a Persian loanword derived from Old Iranian paridaida. The word אֱגוֹז (egoz), “nut,” in 6:11 has likewise been regarded as a Persian loanword. Persian loanwords are absent from early Hebrew and begin appearing only after the Persian Empire established its rule in the region, beginning in the fifth century BCE. Their presence in the Song of Songs therefore provides significant evidence against dating the entire work to the tenth century BCE.
Additionally, the Song repeatedly refers to Solomon in the third person rather than presenting him as the speaker or author. Apart from the opening superscription, Solomon is mentioned six times in the body of the Song: in 1:5, 3:7, 3:9, 3:11, and 8:11–12. He is described as “King Solomon,” his procession, his crown, his queens and concubines, and his vineyard at Baal-hamon. More strikingly, Solomon appears almost as a legendary or mythologized figure within the poem—a distant, larger-than-life king surrounded by wealth, women, soldiers, and royal splendor. This more naturally fits a later authorship rather than a Solomonic authorship.
Taken together, the evidence presents a strong challenge to the traditional claim that Solomon personally composed the Song of Songs. This does not mean that every part of the Song must be late or that no material could preserve older poetry. But it does mean that Solomonic attribution should not be confused with Solomonic authorship. The evidence strongly suggests that the Song, as we have it, reached its present form substantially later than Solomon and that the attribution to Solomon reflects a literary tradition rather than reliable evidence that Solomon himself wrote the book.
Could the Song Preserve Older Material?
At the same time, rejecting complete Solomonic authorship does not require us to conclude that everything in the Song is late. In fact, there are intriguing reasons to think that the book may preserve older poetic material.
One of the most interesting examples is the reference to Tirzah in Song 6:4:
“You are beautiful, my love, as Tirzah, lovely as Jerusalem.”
Tirzah was the royal capital of the northern kingdom of Israel before Omri moved the capital to Samaria, while Jerusalem was the capital of Judah. If the pairing of Tirzah and Jerusalem reflects the two great royal centers of Israel, the passage could fit particularly well in an early period, when Tirzah was still an active capital. On this reading, the reference to Tirzah is not evidence that the entire Song must have been written after Solomon. It may instead preserve an older poetic tradition dating to a period when Tirzah was a prominent royal city.
There are, however, significant counterarguments. The verse itself never identifies Tirzah as a capital or makes any political reference; it simply uses Tirzah and Jerusalem as comparisons for beauty. Tirzah may have been known as a beautiful or pleasant city, and a later poet could have continued to use it as a literary or historical reference long after it ceased to be the capital. Thus, the reference cannot securely date the passage. Moreover, even if the Tirzah passage originated in an early period, that would establish only that an older element exists within the Song, not that the entire book was composed at that time.
In conclusion, the evidence suggests that the Song of Songs was originally a celebration of human romantic and sexual love, rather than a poem deliberately written as an allegory of God and Israel. The traditional Jewish allegorical interpretation is ancient and deeply rooted in the biblical image of God as Israel’s husband, but the Song itself never identifies God or Israel or provides a clear allegorical system. Likewise, the evidence raises serious doubts that Solomon personally wrote the Song in its present form: its Persian vocabulary, its portrayal of Solomon in the third person, and other linguistic and textual evidence point to a later composition or compilation, while references such as Tirzah leave open the possibility that older material was preserved.
- Barry Dov Walfish, “Song of Songs: The Emergence of Peshat Interpretation,” TheTorah.com. Walfish notes that the rabbinic tradition read the Song allegorically as the relationship between God and the Jewish people, a reading that dominated Jewish interpretation for the first millennium.
https://www.thetorah.com/article/song-of-songs-the-emergence-of-peshat-interpretation ↑
- See Hosea 1–3; Isaiah 50:1; 54:4–8; 62:4–5; Jeremiah 2:2–3; and Ezekiel 16. ↑
- Michael V. Fox, “A Moral Value in the Song of Songs: Reading Shir HaShirim in Its Original Sense,” TheTorah.com. Fox argues that the Song’s moral value lies in its celebration of ideal human love and draws attention to the parallel in Proverbs 5:15–19, which encourages sexual delight in one’s wife.
https://www.thetorah.com/article/a-moral-value-in-the-song-of-songs ↑
