We approach Raphael's Agony in the Garden or Fra Angelico's Crucifixion for their beauty and not primarily to learn about fifteenth-century fashion or even to decode the iconography. Yet the many books on the Song of Songs, whether they try to read the book as an ancient Near Eastern love song or a Christian allegory, miss the main point of this book: its aesthetic elements. "Aesthetics" is the appreciation of beauty. Aesthetics examines literary form as a response to content, the way poetics works with contents, the use of loaded semantic terms, even the sound created by words and what cognitive science tells us it does to listeners. This book uses the commentary format to accompany an individual's reading of the Song of Songs, focusing on these neglected aspects of the text. It both reads the book as it is meant to be read and opens up a new vista on this magnificent biblical text.
