In the first century B.C., when the Song of Songs got into the biblical canon by one vote, everybody interpreted the book as symbolic of the love of God for Israel and for his bride, the church. Just one person, Theodore of Mopsuestia (around 4 A.D.), read it as erotic, and nobody paid any attention to him for another 1,100 years, until 15th-century Italian humanists dropped the allegory and read it straight. Renaissance poets paraphrased the Song, luxuriating in the voices going back and forth from she to he to chorus. Musicians set parts of it for soloists, chorus, and orchestra.

Seventeenth-century sermons and treatises from New Hampshire and Boston were still interpreting the book as a sign of God's love. Though the Song of Songs is traditionally part of the writings, these 17th-century American clerics interpreted it prophetically: The beloved, the Rose of Sharon, is the congregation of God being led to safety in the new land.

But surely, such a prolonged tradition in an allegorical and mystical vein must have some fundamental appeal. Perhaps it speaks to a need to make desire a sign for life against death, speaks to this need because direct eroticism is frowned upon wherever asceticism and virginity are prized. If you wanted to keep that poem available within the Bible, where it had landed, you had to translate it into yearnings that might only be shadowed by flesh.

Modern readers jaded by obligatory sex, commodified sex, sex as sport might find the Song of Songs exotic and purifying, a poetry whose symbols are both natural (a countryside full of orchards and vineyards) and artificial (the city and the temple). It has the freshness of things that are ancient. But I am interested in two things: the Song's appeal to exiles, refugees, people who have been deprived of contact and intimacy; and in the moral imagination of the poet who sang the greatest song of all--the lovers' call to joy.