SOURCE: "The Garden of Metaphor," in The Art of Biblical Poetry, Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1985, pp. 185-203.

In the following essay, Alter conducts a close formal analysis of the Song of Songs as poetry, exploring the work's imagery and metaphor. Alter finds the Song a rare instance in biblical poetry of "uninhibited self-delighting play" and "elegant aesthetic form."

The Song of Songs comprises what are surely the most exquisite poems that have come down to us from ancient Israel, but the poetic principles on which they are shaped are in several ways instructively untypical of biblical verse. When it was more the scholarly fashion to date the book late, either in the Persian period (W. F. Albright) or well into the Hellenistic period (H. L. Ginsberg), these differences might have been attributed to changing poetic practices in the last centuries of biblical literary activity. Several recent analysts, however...