Lynell Zogbo

Count God In

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“Over millennia, the Song of Songs’ place and role in the canon has been seriously questioned, and its interpretation in Jewish and Christian contexts subject to even hotter debates. . . . While giving full credence to the text’s sexual references, Bliese, basing his conclusions on numerical letter counts of lemmas in the original Hebrew text, argues strongly for the latter. Certainly, this analysis, which pushes the numerical approach of the Song further than any other published study to date, is bound to lead to controversy and even some skepticism. But Bliese’s line-by-line analyses of the Song and his careful attention to literary devices, including the Song’s numerous chiasms, and more significantly, the placement of primary and second peaks in the Hebrew text, can be of great interest to exegetes, translators, and scholars interested in biblical poetry. For those who are really passionate about the Song, Bliese’s well-referenced work, while at times a little hard going, provides intriguing insights and hypotheses on a most enigmatic book.”