Reviewed by: Song of Songs David Carr Song of Songs, by Tremper Longman III. New International Commentary on the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001. 238 pp. $35.00. This is a very solid, balanced, and thorough commentary on the Song of Songs. Though it appears in a Christian evangelical series, the New International Commentary on the Old Testament, the author is widely read and non-dogmatic in his approach to key issues surrounding authorship and translation. The primary focus is on translation and explanation of the Hebrew text, though the introduction treats a range of broader issues. The book’s introduction is one of its best features. Over the course of approximately 70 pages Longman surveys issues such as authorship and date, history of interpretation, structure, ancient Near Eastern comparative materials, and the overall significance of the Song. He denies Solomonic authorship, is agnostic on dating, and considers the Song a sort of “erotic psalter.” Striking a middle ground, Longman argues that the Song, though loosely joined by elements like refrains and consistency in charac ter, also draws on many poems that were originally independent. He gives a relatively sympathetic reading of the history of interpretation of the Song, using the Targum, Gersonides, Origen, Jerome, and Bernhard of Clairvaux to illustrate central trends in its pre-modern reception. Overall, he understands the Song to be primarily about human love, but he sees it as having a broader significance when considered in its canonical context. Not only can its celebration of human connectedness serve as a crucial balance to the conclusion of the Eden garden, but it also can be read in relation to the prophets as an indirect instruction about the character and claims of divine-human love. [End Page 162] The commentary proper features Longman’s translation of the Song and verse-by-verse commentary. The translation is good, though sadly Longman does not appear to have used Ariel and Chana Bloch’s book The Song of Songs: A New Translation with an Introduction and Commentary (New York: Random House, 1995). Despite the initial focus on poetry and the significance of the Song in the introduction, the commentary itself rarely focuses on specific poetic movement, nor on the significance of the text for today. Instead, it walks through the poems, explicating unclear terms and relating versets to their broader context. One of the strongest discussions is his treatment of Song of Songs 1:5–6, where there is considerable debate about whether 1:5a should be rendered “I am black and beautiful” or “black, but beautiful.” In his commentary on this text Longman notes the tendency of translators to prefer the former translation for “fear of the appearance of racism,” yet goes on to show how this text was not originally about race at all. These points have been made before, but Longman’s treatment is one of the best brief discussions available anywhere. The commentary integrates a remarkable range of much excellent work on the Song done by Fox, Keel, Murphy, Pope, and others. Particularly because of the extraordinary range of the coverage, it is striking that Longman does not mention Renita Weems’ work on the Song at all (especially her “Song of Songs” in C. Newsom and S. Ringe, eds., The Women’s Bible Commentary [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1992], pp. 156–60) and makes only passing reference to Robert Alter’s excellent contributions on the poetry of the Song (“Afterword” in Bloch and Bloch, Song of Songs, pp. 122–127 and Art of Biblical Poetry [New York: Basic Books, 1985], pp. 185–203). Otherwise, however, Longman provides a good entry to a wide range of secondary literature on the Song. Like many commentators working in Christian contexts, Longman tends to make the sexuality of the Song more orthodox than the poetry itself would suggest. Though Longman is right in rejecting the idea that the Song promotes “free love,” he is probably wrong in asserting that the Song—considered “in light of the canon as a whole”—celebrates erotic love in the context of marriage (pp. 59–60). Here there is a tension between the rhetoric of the Song itself and the emphases of the broader...