Divine and Human Love: Franz Rosenzweig's History of the Song of Songs

Abstract

On the surface, the Song of Songs is a simple, though no doubt exquisitely beautiful, love poem. Its meaning has always been disputed by commentators. But Franz Rosenzweig, the great German-Jewish philosopher, claimed that study of the course of the dispute's modern phase disclosed an important theological message. One of Rosenzweig's central aims in his epoch-making work The Star of Redemption (1921) is, indeed, to save the Song of Songs, so central to the Western tradition and in particular to Jewish and Christian theological speculation, from the secularizing work of modern culture. And one of the major ways he does so, in fact the way he begins, is by exposing the poem's interpretive fate over time.