The Song of Songs, composed probably in the third century bce , is one of the most influential poems in the Western erotic and mystical traditions, by virtue of its appearing in the Bible. It is a dialogue between two lovers in an idyllic pastoral landscape, seemingly without relation to the rest of the sacred text. It is, however, a critique of the biblical tradition, whose implicit question is: what was it all worth? For the Song, the answer is that love alone guarantees an ambiguous immortality. It is thus a tacit counter to Ecclesiastes' refrain that everything is illusory. I discuss the instability of gender in the Song and its questioning of patriarchy, to create a vulnerable maternal space for lovers' intimacy. This space is that of the poetic imagination, which is more real than the everyday world. The metaphors coalescence with the sound patterns of the Song to generate a synthesis of the body, the landscape, history, and the fauna and flora of ancient Israel.

This essay consists of four sections, interwoven with a dilatory commentary on the first few verses of Isaiah. They are concerned with the metaphors of vision and voice in Isaiah, as they relate to the problem of metaphoricity in general, and the ever-presence of death in the book. Vision and voice are metaphors for each other, and opposed terms. If vision suggests clarity and exteriority, voice evokes the interiority of the person, and an intimation beyond the horizon. Both terms are contradicted, and paradoxically enriched, by the injunction not to see or hear in Isaiah, and its transmutations through the book. What is seen and heard is a language, which perhaps is not understood or realized, and which is in any case impossibly difficult. The third section turns to the problem of metaphor in the book; it adduces the theories of Jakobson and Kristeva, and proposes that metaphor may be an instrument of disintegration in the book, of the dissolution and disillusion of the poetic world. The last section treats the encompassing schema of death, as announced in the superscription, in the context of the initial metaphor of filiation. It concludes with the ethical problem of the prophet, and critic, in producing and encountering this text.

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is one of the most disturbingly brilliant and paradoxical of biblical critics, a poet, gifted with astonishing literary sensitivity, who recoils from its exercise, who writes with compelling passion and detached irony. The Idea of Biblical Poetry is a pleasure to read and was obviously fun to write, a book which reminds us, through its mastery of critical rhetoric and immense learning, of the playfulness of being a scholar, a consummate craftsman, and thus undermines its own importance; one feels that for Kugel writing about the fallacies of interpretation and the phenomonology of remote texts is a pastime (and bread and butter), compared to the vital business of finding words for himself. The argument, to summarize it briefly, is that each generation has projected its own conventions and concept of poetry onto the Bible, which admits no such category; this further reduces the authority of the interpreter, including Kugel himself, since he too is implicated in the exposure. The last pages are a plea for such awareness. For example, wittingly or not, it is a masterpiece of deconstruction, the fashionable sado-masochistic genre whose ultimate victim is the practitioner himself, created by the illusions he unravels. The other side of this, however, is religious, and therein lies the book's mystery and urgency. For the critic is writing about the source of his tradition, the poet about the roots of his words. The text has an otherness, infinitely generative of interpretation, for which the book is quest-the Torah behind its seventy facesl-which is yet

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