The Song of Songs: Interpreted by Early Christian and Medieval Commentators

Abstract

The Christian church has a long tradition of biblical interpretation. In the first eight hundred years of Christian history the fathers of the faith produced a nearly inexhaustible library of commentaries and homilies on the Bible. The Church's Bible series seeks to recover this largely lost source of profound theology and spiritual wisdom for today's church. In The Song of Songs, the inaugural volume of this extraordinary new commentary series, Richard A. Norris Jr. uses commentary and sermons written during the first six centuries and in the Latin Middle Ages to illustrate the original Christian reading of Solomon's beautiful love poem. In recent times, the Song of Songs has been more a focus of literary than of religious interest, but Norris's work shows that for early Christians, this poem was counted, with the Psalms and the Gospels, among those scriptures that touched most deeply on the believer's relation to God. In a concise manner Norris selects passages from representative early Christian interpreters, translates them into idiomatic English, and arranges them as verse-by-verse comments on the biblical text itself. The Christian voices gathered here include Origen, Gregory the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Bernard of Clairvaux, Ambrose of Milan, William of St. Thierry, Bede the Venerable, Augustine of Hippo, Cyril of Alexandria, and many more. Together their stirring reflections on the Song of Songs aptly acquaint contemporary readers with the church's traditional way of discerning in this text a guide to the character of Christian belief and life. Amid the many commentary series available today, The Church's Bible is both unique and original. It will soon become a standard reference work on Holy Scripture. Series: The Church's Bible Series Editors: Robert Louis Wilken (general editor) The Church's Bible presents Scripture as it was understood during the first millennium of Christian history. Compiled, translated, and edited by leading scholars, these volumes return to early and medieval commentaries on key books of the Bible, recovering anew the church's rich classical tradition of scriptural interpretation for clergy, teachers, and all serious readers of the Bible. Titles in this Series: The Song of Songs: Interpreted by Early Christian and Medieval Commentators