The Semantics of Love in the Song of Songs and Directions of Its Interpretation

Abstract

The literary structure of the Song of Songs shows a thematic and contextual unity that is founded on the literary structure of the dialogue between the young man and the young woman. This article focuses on poetic dialogue as the two young lovers use metaphors and other literary forms to express their longing and desire for each other. In assessing the literary structure of the Song of Songs, the specific focus is on words expressing love in the original Hebrew text and the Greek and Latin translations (Septuagint and Vulgate) -that is, the two translations that most comprehensively influenced the interpretation of the Song of Songs in Judaism and Christianity. The extensive range of interpretative directions regarding the Song of Songs and the erotic and spiritual dimensions of love allows us to pay greater attention to complementary rather than exclusive aspects. Paying greater attention to approaches that seek aspects of complementarity between erotic and spiritual love allows us to make both a more appropriate assessment of comparative analyses of the Song of Songs concerning the tradition of love poetry in the cultures of the ancient Middle East and to make a more reliable assessment of recent applications of the principle of close reading of individual texts in their literary structures. The complementarity principles and close reading are open to textual and intertextual relationships in the comparative analysis of texts from the same and different cultural and religious frameworks. The full range of textual and intertextual relationships allows for a more reliable assessment of the possibilities and limits of integrative approaches.

Future Teachers’ Spiritual Worldview Formation Factors

“…In his Confessions, Augustine [94] used food metaphors and imagery to describe spiritual hunger and intellectual satiation. He exposes his moral failings and spiritual longings personally and comes very close to the universal experience that our body's hunger can never be fully assuaged [95].…”