"Blow upon my garden, that its spicy fragrance flows out."
The Song of Songs is a garden of earthly delights, provoking one venerable Jewish sage from antiquity to judge it God's greatest gift to Israel. Never fully hidden from a reader's eyes, its emotive sentiments can nevertheless be lost to those who do not experience them in the original Hebrew. So, it is fortunate that in this sensitive English edition, Judith Ernst's flawlessly posed artistic distillation of the Song's erotic mysteries are there to escort us into a deeper enjoyment of its poetic wonders. A bouquet for us all.
—Professor Jack Sasson, Vanderbilt University, editor of Civilizations of the Ancient Near East
5¾" x 7¾" hardcover / 12 full-color illustrations
91 pages / $21.00
With an Introduction by David James Duncan, author of God Laughs and Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right; The River Why; The Brothers K; River Teeth; and My Life as Told by Water
The Song of Songs is so unlike every other book of the Bible that it feels, at a glance, like a lost chapter from a different volume. Most of its verses are spoken by an imaginative and impassioned woman—the only such voice heard in the Bible. God is not mentioned once. Solomon passes in the distance but makes no dramatic appearance, and the male and female heroes remain anonymous. No history is set down, no prophecies, rules, or preachments given. No theological points are made. But strangest of all is the topic. . . . The subject of this book is erotic passion as expressed, alternatingly, by a woman or a man madly in love. The result is an underlying intensity of voice and purpose that Socrates once called "the erotic mania of the soul for the divine."
—David James Duncan, from the Introduction to Song of Songs
