Yair Zakovitch – författare

The Hebrew Bible is religious literature, the fundamental interest of which lies in the relations between humankind, especially the people of Israel, and God. The Song of Songs, on the other hand, is interested in the relations between men and women. In this volume Yair Zakovitch examines the presence of the Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible, and questions how this enigmatic collection of poetic writings came to be within the Bible.Zakovitch poses and addresses a range of enticing questions in the eight chapters of this volume, including: what does this erotic poetry have to do with Israel’s formative texts? What do the poems tell us about gender relations in those years, and about early Israel’s attitudes towards beauty, love, women, and sex? Do we finally get to hear women’s voices in the Song, where the rest of the Bible gives a male perspective? How, despite our astonishment, is the Song of Songs nonetheless intrinsically biblical? What does it have in common with the Bible’s other books? Was the allegorical interpretation of the Song just an excuse in order to include the book in Scripture?

The Hebrew Bible is religious literature, the fundamental interest of which lies in the relations between humankind, especially the people of Israel, and God. The Song of Songs, on the other hand, is interested in the relations between men and women. In this volume Yair Zakovitch examines the presence of the Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible, and questions how this enigmatic collection of poetic writings came to be within the Bible.Zakovitch poses and addresses a range of enticing questions in the eight chapters of this volume, including: what does this erotic poetry have to do with Israel’s formative texts? What do the poems tell us about gender relations in those years, and about early Israel’s attitudes towards beauty, love, women, and sex? Do we finally get to hear women’s voices in the Song, where the rest of the Bible gives a male perspective? How, despite our astonishment, is the Song of Songs nonetheless intrinsically biblical? What does it have in common with the Bible’s other books? Was the allegorical interpretation of the Song just an excuse in order to include the book in Scripture?

The ancient Israelites believed things that the writers of the Bible wanted them to forget: myths and legends from a pre-biblical world that the new monotheist order needed to bury, hide, or reinterpret. Ancient Israel was rich in such literary traditions before the Bible reached the final form that we have today. These traditions were not lost but continued, passed down through the ages. Many managed to reach us in post-biblical sources: rabbinic literature, Jewish Hellenistic writings, the writings of the Dead Sea sect, the Aramaic, Greek, Latin, and other ancient translations of the Bible, and even outside the ancient Jewish world in Christian and Islamic texts. The Bible itself sometimes alludes to these traditions, often in surprising contexts. Written in clear and accessible language, this volume presents thirty such traditions. It voyages behind the veil of the written Bible to reconstruct what was told and retold among the ancient Israelites, even if it is "not what the Bible tells us."