Abstract
The Song of Songs has often been seen as a literary outlier within the canon and attempts to classify it alongside other literature have had limited success, more convincing parallels being found in ancient Near Eastern material than in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament itself. However, as Francis Landy puts it ‘no text is isolated, self-sufficient; none can be understood without reference to others’ (‘The Song of Songs in the Garden of Eden’, p. 516). I discuss the eligibility of the Song for a Solomonic wisdom corpus in Chapter 3. In this chapter I focus on a more thematic intertextual approach, starting with the Song of Songs but moving both within and outside the ‘Solomonic corpus’ in the imagery of garden and water. The garden, as typified in mythical terms by the garden of Eden (but not exclusively relating to this garden alone), is also called the ‘garden of the LORD’ in various texts. Then there is water that is so essential to the growth and maintenance of a garden and to all life. A thematic intertextuality seeks to find links primarily through themes, images, or metaphors used—in this case, gardens and water and echoes of an ideal Eden.
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