Song of Songs: Erotic Love Poetry

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Summary: The Sacred and the Profane
Review: Judith Ernst's gorgeously illustrated volume has the potential to do for the Song of Songs what Coleman Barks did for the poetry of Rumi: popularize a sacred/profane text by (re)introducing it to an entirely new mass market that would not have thought to read a medieval Sufi poet, in the case of Rumi, or the Old Testament, in the case of The Song of Songs.
The comparison goes further: both texts are love poetry that can be interpreted as earthly or divine, sacred or erotic. Ernst's insightful commentary interprets The Song of Songs as both sacred and divine at once, emphasizing the continuuum rather than the disconnect between the two kinds of universal longing.
The shortest book of the Bible, the Song is rarely heard on the pulpit today precisely because of its ambiguous nature, and yet Ernst points out that it was once one of the most quoted chapters. Ernst's approach is original, that of an artist and a woman. Her illustrations bring the text alive as mere words cannot. She highlights the woman's voice, privileged in the text, a departure from the traditionally male voice of the Patriarchs in the other books of the Bible.
The translation is based on the King James Bible, but the illustrations are in Judith Ernst's unique style, influenced by Persian miniaturist painting as much, one suspects, as by medieval European illuminated manuscripts like the Rich Hours of the Duc de Berri.
The combination makes this book a pure pleasure for its illustrations and thought-provoking for its commentary.

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Summary: the same old song
Review: These inspired paintings, which illuminate the Song of Songs, transport the imagination into a realm where we discover the passion that never begins and never ends. Judith Ernst's beautiful new book entangles us in a puzzle we cannot (and should not try to) solve: is the Song about human or divine love? The Beloved does not appear and yet is omnipresent, demanding infinite longing and infinite patience and promising infinite bliss.

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Summary: Gorgeous Illustrations, Thought-provoking Text
Review: This book, with its luminous gouche paintings and intimate, pillow-book size, is simply a pleasure, giving a deeper understanding of the meaning of this most elusive of books from the Bible. By approaching the Song of Songs from the perspective of longing, as illustrated by a woman longing for her beloved, Ernst has shed light on the the nature of divine longing, much in the tradition of the poetry of Rumi and other Sufi poets. In her eloquent commentary (which nicely intersperses the biblical text, so that one is not flipping back and forth constantly), Ernst places the Song of Songs into a broad cultural context, which allows for a meditation on the universality of the ideas expressed in the Song. An elegant gem of a book that can be savored for a long time.