A couple of comments on my recent post on “la pudeur” have prompted disbelief: surely I cannot be saying there is no sex in the Song of Songs! Well, let me assure you, I am not. Of course, there is sex there. But what I am strongly suggesting is that the book is not a sex manual, which fascinates our culture’s mentalité where all is devolved into technique. And as such, I am extremely dubious about attempts to find certain sexual exploits in the book. I am not convinced, for instance, that there is anything in this text about fellatio, contrary to the arguments of certain recent commentators. The verses that were used to buttress this argument were as dubious to me as John Walvoord’s pointing to Revelation 4:1 as a reference to the rapture (if the dispensationalist rapture is true it must stand on better grounds than that!).
Moreover, without necessarily adopting the rampant allegorizing of our fathers in the Faith, surely they were right to argue this book is also about Christ and his church. And to read it as primarily a “holy” sex manual surely misses one of the rich reasons it is in the canon!