Song of Songs

St Thomas Aquinas is more commonly known as the leading Scholastic philosopher of the thirteenth century, and was Albertus Magnus s star pupil. Like his master and Roger Bacon, he devoted some time to the ideas behind alchemy, and is held by some to be the author of Aurora Consurgens, an alchemical reading of the Song of Songs. 

Song of Songs 2 1, Graves, 1961, p261 Ward, 1925, pi 13 Ward, 1925, ppll7-118... 

Gerson D. Cohen, The Song of Songs and the Jewish Religious Mentality, in Studies in the Variety of Rabbinic Cultures (Philadelphia The Jewish Publication Society, 1991), 6-8. 

See John B. White, A Stiufy of the Language of Love in the Song of Songs and Ancient Egyptian Poetry (sblds 38 Missoula, Mont. Scholars Press, 1978) Fox, The Song of Songs. 

Cf. also D. Garrett, Song of Songs (WBC 23B Nashville Thomas Nelson, 2004), 264- She regards 8 13 as the counterpart to 1 2-4. In the latter, the Maiden and a chorus declare their admiration for the man, corresponding to the Lover and a chorus celebrating the transformation of the heroine in the former. 

F. Tandy, Paradoxes of Paradise Identity and Difference in the Song of Songs (Bible and Literature Series, 7 Sheffield Almond Press 1983), 207. 

LaCocque regards the Lover s companions (cf. also 1 7 and 5 1) as a pendant to the theme of the daughters of Jerusalem (Romance She Wrote, 73 cf. also Exum, Song of Songs, 262). 

M.H. Pope, Song of Songs A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (ab Garden City, NY Doubleday, 1977), 695. 

Garrett, Song of Songs, 265 cf also Munro, Spikenard and Saffron, 110. 

Landy, Paradoxes of Paradise, 206-7 cf. his influence on LaCocque, Romance She Wrote, 129 and Exum, Song of Songs, 262. (Landy finds similar rhetorical effects in 5a, cf. below in this section). 

The companions are perceived as the Lover s rivals by LaCocque, Romance She Wrote, 189. Cf. the usual perception of 5 1 as central for the composition. To Tandy it represents the emotional center of Canticles, around which all the other scenes are grouped ( The Song of Songs," 116-17) the climactic center to Elliott (The Literary Unity, 119) the midpoint of the Song to Munro (Spikenard and Saffron, 115). 

C.E. Walsh, Exquisite Desire Religion, the Erotic, and the Song of Songs (Minneapolis Fortress Press, 2000), 125. 

Keel, The Song of Songs. A Continental Commentary (transl. Frederick J. Gaiser Minneapolis Fortress Press, 2005), 285. 

Landy, Paradoxes of Paradise, 206-7 and 109, cf. also Exum, Song of Songs, 262. 

Roland E. Murphy, The Song of Songs A Commentary on theBookof Canticles or the Song of Songs (Hermeneia Minneapolis Fortress Press, 1990), 200 cf. also LaCoccque, Romance She Wrote, 190. 

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