The Book the Rabbis Argued Over Keeping

Song of Songs' canonical status was genuinely debated among early rabbis in a way few other biblical books were, precisely because its frank eroticism and total silence about God made its scriptural status less self-evident than a law code or a prophecy. The Mishnah preserves the memory of that debate and its resolution, attributing to Rabbi Akiva, active around 100 CE, the forceful defense that settled the question in the book's favor: "the whole world is not worth the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the Writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the holy of holies." That defense rested on reading the book allegorically as God's covenant love for Israel rather than as literal erotic poetry, an interpretive move Christian tradition later mirrored by reading it as Christ's love for the church or the individual soul, an approach that shaped centuries of Christian mystical writing, including major commentaries by Origen and Bernard of Clairvaux.

Its traditional attribution to Solomon situates it as one of three books, alongside Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, Jewish tradition associates with him at different life stages, while its later Hebrew vocabulary, including apparent Persian and Greek loanwords, leads most modern critical scholars to treat the Solomonic heading as a literary dedication rather than a genuine claim of authorship by the historical king.