Rabbi Akiba is famously reported to have said, 'Heaven forbid that any one in Israel ever disputed that the Song of Songs is holy, for the whole world is not worth the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies'. This book is an extended elaboration of Rabbi Akiba's statement. It argues that the Song is a Hellenistic composition, drawing on the resources of ancient Near Eastern erotic poetry and characterized by a complex though fragile unity. Through the metaphors, the lovers progressively see themselves reflected in each other, as well as in the world about them and the poetry of love. The poem celebrates the land of Israel in spring, an ideal humanity, and a perfected language. It culminates in the contestation of love and death, and the assertion that only love survives the exigencies of time. The pervasive ambiguity of the Song, in which one never quite knows what happens, is related to the ambivalence of beauty, which is closely related to ugliness. Hence the surrealist imagery of the Song verges upon the grotesque and stretches the resources of our imagination. Through a detailed comparison with the Garden of Eden story, Landy argues that the Song is a vision of paradise seen from the outside, through the ironic poetic gaze, in a world potentially hostile or indifferent.

This groundbreaking book, which builds on the author's earlier work in "On Gendering Texts," studies how, by what means and to what extent human love, desire and sex, and possibly even 'sexuality', are gendered in the Hebrew Bible. Following a classification and gendering of the linguistic and semantic data, the investigation looks into the construction of male and female bodies in language and ideologies; the praxis and ideology of sex, procreation and contraception; deviation from socio-sexual boundaries (e.g. incest, rape, adultery, homosexuality, prostitution); eroticism and "pornoprophetics." Finally, the work discusses some of the wider sociological and theological implications of the findings.

Tourists exult in Bahia, Brazil, as a tropical paradise infused with the black population's one-of-a-kind vitality. But the alluring images of smiling black faces and dancing black bodies masks an ugly reality of anti-black authoritarian violence. Christen A. Smith argues that the dialectic of glorified representations of black bodies and subsequent state repression reinforces Brazil's racially hierarchal society. Interpreting the violence as both institutional and performative, Smith follows a grassroots movement and social protest theater troupe in their campaigns against racial violence. As Smith reveals, economies of black pain and suffering form the backdrop for the staged, scripted, and choreographed afro-paradise that dazzles visitors. The work of grassroots organizers exposes this relationship, exploding illusions and asking unwelcome questions about the impact of state violence performed against the still-marginalized mass of Afro-Brazilians. Based on years of field work, Afro-Paradise is a passionate account of a long-overlooked struggle for life and dignity in contemporary Brazil.

The first comprehensive study of the Song of Songs' use of military metaphors Although love transcends historical and cultural boundaries, its conceptualizations, linguistic expressions, and literary representations vary from culture to culture. In this study, Danilo Verde examines love through the military imagery found throughout the Song’s eight chapters. Verde approaches the military metaphors, similes, and scenes of the Song using cognitive metaphor theory to explore the overlooked representation of love as war. Additionally, this book investigates how the Song conceptualizes both the male and the female characters, showing that the concepts of masculinity and femininity are tightly interconnected in the poem. Conquered Conquerors provides fresh insights into the Song's figurative language and the conceptualization of gender in biblical literature.

The drama that shaped today’s Iran, from the Revolution to the present day. In 1979, seemingly overnight—moving at a clip some thirty years faster than the rest of the world—Iran became the first revolutionary theocracy in modern times. Since then, the country has been largely a black box to the West, a sinister presence looming over the horizon. But inside Iran, a breathtaking drama has unfolded since then, as religious thinkers, political operatives, poets, journalists, and activists have imagined and reimagined what Iran should be. They have drawn as deeply on the traditions of the West as of the East and have acted upon their beliefs with urgency and passion, frequently staking their lives for them. With more than a decade of experience reporting on, researching, and writing about Iran, Laura Secor narrates this unprecedented history as a story of individuals caught up in the slipstream of their time, seizing and wielding ideas powerful enough to shift its course as they wrestle with their country’s apparatus of violent repression as well as its rich and often tragic history. Essential reading at this moment when the fates of our countries have never been more entwined, Children of Paradise will stand as a classic of political reporting; an indelible portrait of a nation and its people striving for change.

This edited collection offers new perspectives on perceived paradoxes in Israel’s religious heritage, with a particular focus on the Garden of Eden narrative and descriptions of Israel’s God. The chapters examine a number of themes related to these paradoxes, including (1) “knowledge” versus “life” (referencing the two Edenic trees); (2) paradoxes pertaining to knowledge in the biblical versus Socratic traditions and the Platonic “good” versus the apparent eschewing of the good-evil dichotomy in Garden of Eden; (3) difficulties implicating finitude versus infinity; (4) God’s Edenic garden versus rabbinical “orchard,” or Pardes, the traditional fourfold manner of Torah interpretation; (5) the question of the Sôd, or “secret” esoteric stratum or narrative channel within the text of the Torah; (6) the issue of idolatry; (7) the nature of Israel’s deity; (8) a comparative glimpse of the Israelite God vis-à-vis relevant Christian and Buddhist glosses on divinity; and (9) science-fictional explorations of the biblical exegesis discourse. The volume’s contributors are based in Canada; England; Poland; Israel; and the United States.

The ten essays in this volume, the majority specially written, engage with questions of voice (whose?) and interplay (what kind?) between received interpretation and resisting female reader, and venture into methodological territory familiar and unfamiliar to biblical scholars, including autobiographical criticism. Among earlier readers invoked in these pages are Jerome, Rashi and Fray Luis de LTon, who brush pages with Haitian prostitutes. The three sections of this fresh, colourful and adventurous journey into love, sex, allegory and self inside the Most Sublime Song are: Feminist Appropriations; Specific Readings: Allegories and Feminists; and The Song of Songs Personalized.