ABSTRACT
The sages who compiled Song of Songs Rabbah, a verse-by-verse reading of the Song of Songs (a.k.a. the Song of Solomon), read the poetry as a sequence of emotional expressions of the urgent love that joins God and Israel, the holy people. How the sages convey the intensity of Israel’s love of God forms the point of special interest in this document. For it is not in propositions that they choose to speak, but through the medium of symbols. They set forth sequences of words that connote meanings, elicit emotions, stand for events, form the verbal equivalent of pictures or music or dance or poetry. And through the repertoire of these verbal symbols and their arrangement and rearrangement, the message our authors wish to convey emerges: not in so many words, but through words nonetheless.
