Chapter 7 “Therefore do Maidens Love You”: Passion and Pluralism in Jewish and Christian Song of Songs Commentaries
In: A Companion to Comparative TheologySearch for other papers by Devorah Schoenfeld in
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Abstract
The Song of Songs is the book of the Bible that both Jewish and Christian classical and medieval exegetes go to to figure out what it means to love God. It is also a complex and multivocal text with different characters and settings. This multiplicity finds its way into classical and medieval Jewish and Christian exegetes (such as Midrash Rabbah, Rashi, Origen and Nicholas of Lyra) as a way of thinking about pluralism and different ways of relating to God. What emerges from these texts is two different models of pluralism. In one there are different relationships with God that different peoples can have. In the other there is one complex relationship with God that encompasses multiple peoples. These differences are similarly reflected in the thought of Abraham Joshua Heschel and Joseph Ratzinger.