am my beloved's and my beloved is mine. --Song of Solomon (6:3) AM BELOVED and she is mine. --Toni Morrison, Beloved love is as strong as death; jealousy is as cruel as grave; ... many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown --Song of Solomon (8:6-7) At least three recent critical works recognize Toni Morrison's reference and revision of Biblical passages in her 1987 novel Beloved.(1) To date, however, no one has mentioned most developed of her Scriptural allusions, namely her revisionist narration involving Old Testament texts, especially Song of Solomon. Although Morrison, winner of 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature, drew upon a Biblical passage for title her 1977 novel Song of Solomon, she waited for ten years develop, in Beloved, deeper implications of a reference Solomon's Song. Allusions this most poignant and erotic passage of Old Testament not only inform relationships between Morrison's characters, but also contribute her consideration of relationship between black and white communities in mid-nineteenth century United States. I will argue that Morrison's allegorical revision of Song of Solomon and Biblical passages constitutes what Stephen A. Barney, in Allegories of History, Allegories of Love, terms other-speech, a type of minority discourse related to, but not symptomatic of, dynamics of religious and/or cultural othering. The dynamics of religious othering, especially those which conflate Christianity and the white man's burden, closely parallel and are often intertwined with what Edward Said terms a process whereby powerful Western nations for centuries terms of interaction with their African and Asian colonies, and even with non-Western nations, as a Manichean struggle between light and dark, good and bad, enlightened self and irreconcilable other. This othering process applies equally relationships in United States between dominant culture and those groups and individuals who have at various times been as than American ideal, an ideal historically characterized as WASP--white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant.(2) As Said observes in Orientalism, Since White Man, like Orientalist, lived very close line of tension keeping coloreds at bay, he felt it incumbent on him readily define and redefine domain he surveyed (228). In keeping with this dominating strategy, white slaveholder schoolteacher in Morrison's Beloved instructs his nephews study black slaves on ironically named Sweet Home plantation in order catalog their animal and human characteristics. Moreover, he severely beats Sixo, a slave who dares challenge slaveholder's authority, not so much for stealing and eating a pig, but more to show him that definitions belonged definers--not defined (190). From Sixo's treatment, we can see that political power use physical force with impunity against another person is inherently linked power determine what individuals and groups get as other in first place. Given Sixo's initial treatment and his ultimate death at hands of slaveholders, it would appear that other is often, if not always, powerless in face of those with power define; however, I will suggest that very nature of otherness, as term applies both groups and discourse of alterity, bestows hidden powers in form of other-speech. The physical and psychological pain that forces marginalized persons recognize themselves as other, also provides entry into a minority discourse community.(3) Although minority discourse has historically been dismissed as irrelevant by those with power choose which narratives get published and circulated as authoritative, that very dismissal may allow an unpoliced space in which other-speech can develop relatively unchecked into what becomes--in effect--subversive language. …