Songs of love in the ancient world

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• Investigation: The Egyptian Love Songs →Egypt's New Kingdom (c. 1300–1100 BC) has left the closest ancient parallels to the Song: love songs on papyri and pottery from Thebes and the workmen's village of Deir el-Medina. Lovers call each other "sister" and "brother," speak in alternating voices, fall sick with love, meet in gardens and compare each other to flowers, perfume and wine. This investigation describes the manuscripts and what the parallels can and cannot show.
• Song of Songs 1: Your Love Is Better Than Wine →The title calls the book "the Song of Songs, which is Solomon's" (1:1). Then, without introduction, a woman speaks: "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine" (v. 2). She longs to be drawn after him; "the king hath brought me into his chambers" (v. 4). She tells the daughters of Jerusalem she is "black, but comely" (or "dark and lovely"), darkened by the sun while her brothers made her keep the vineyards (vv. 5–6). She asks where her beloved pastures his flock (v. 7) and receives an answer (v. 8). A man praises her as a mare among Pharaoh's chariots (vv. 9–11); she answers with myrrh, henna and the vineyards of En-gedi (vv. 12–14); the two exchange praise and describe a house of cedar beams (vv. 15–17).
• Song of Songs 4: A Garden Enclosed →The man praises the woman from head to breast in a sequence of images: dove's eyes behind her veil, hair like goats streaming down Gilead, teeth like shorn ewes, lips like scarlet thread, temples like pomegranate halves, a neck like David's tower hung with shields, breasts like twin fawns; "thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee" (4:1–7). He calls her from Lebanon, Amana, Senir and Hermon, from the dens of lions (v. 8). She has "ravished" his heart with one glance (v. 9); her love is better than wine, her lips drip honey (vv. 10–11). She is "a garden inclosed… a spring shut up, a fountain sealed," an orchard of pomegranates and every spice (vv. 12–15). She answers: "Awake, O north wind… Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits" (v. 16).
• Investigation: One Drama or Many Songs? →Is the Song a single story with a plot (meeting, courtship, wedding, union), a drama with a hero and a rival, songs from a wedding week, or a collection of separate love poems? Each theory has been influential. The Hebrew gives no speaker names, scene markers or narrator; refrains and repeated images suggest design; abrupt shifts suggest collection.
• How Song of Songs Came to Us →The Song grew from a world of love songs shared across the ancient Near East; it was shaped into a Hebrew poetic sequence under Solomon's name (date debated, most likely in its present form during the Persian or early Hellenistic period); it was copied at Qumran (four manuscripts), translated literally into Greek, then into Latin, Syriac and Aramaic; defended as holy by Rabbi Akiva; read as divine love by Jews and Christians for most of its history; preserved by the Masoretes; and studied today as both poetry and Scripture.