SOURCE: "Contexts, Themes, and Motifs," Love Lyrics from the Bible, HarperCollins, 1990, 137-61.

In the following essay, revised from an original 1982 publication, Falk addresses issues of setting, theme, and motif in the Song of Songs that have arisen from her translation of the work. She finds the Song "extraordinarily rich with sensual imagery."

Woven into the tapestry of the Song are recurrent patterns that suggest the presence of literary conventions, analogous in some ways to the Petrarchan conventions of Renaissance poetry. To uncover and illuminate recurrent material in the Song may draw us closer to the distant cultural source of this poetry, while also deepening our appreciation of the individual poems and of the collection as a whole. The following discussions are intended to reveal patterns in the text by illuminating settings and ambiance (which I call "contexts"), underlying premises and ideas ("themes"), and repeated images and symbols ("motifs...