Allegory makes the Song of Songs Weird

In and of itself, the Song of Solomon is not particularly weird. It's a wholesome erotic poem, mostly told as a dialogue between two young lovers. Sure, some of it sounds odd to modern ears. The man sees some analogy between fawns and his girlfriend's breasts, and he apparently thinks this is terribly sexy. But I have faith it made sense at the time. Will your steamy texts make sense in three thousand years? This text only seems weird because it made its way into the Bible. The Bible is not where most of us would go looking for erotic poetry, especially not about premarital sex.1 More popular parts of the Bible would disapprove of such things. Many exegetes do too, and this creates a problem. They cannot let the Song of Songs be what its author intended it to be, or at least not just that. There must be some deeper meaning which negates the plain sense of the text. Typically, this means interpreting the text as an allegory about Christ's love for the church.2 And this is where the…