The title “Song of Songs” is a superlative in Hebrew, like the “Holy of Holies,” often rendered as “Most Holy Place.”  Most Songlike Song or Greatest Song captures the sense.  That certainly was how medieval commentators regarded the Song.

Scheper again: “The modern oblivion of the book has tended to blind us to the really crucial position it holds in exegetic history, not only for the question of allegory but for the central matter of the relation of divine to profane love, and in fact, as Ruth Wallerstein has said, the Song involved for the Middle Ages and Renaissance the whole question of the place of the senses in the spiritual life and helped ‘to shape man’s ideas of symbolism and of the function of the imagination.’ This helps explain the prodigious exegetic history of the book; the number of commentaries is astounding. The early catalogs and bibliographies tend to list more commentaries on the Song than on any other biblical book save the Psalms, all of Paul’s epistles taken together, and the Gospels. My own checklist of commentaries through the seventeenth century totals 500 and is still far from complete. There are over a score of printed commentaries by English Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including monumental compilations like the Puritan John Collinges’ two volumes on just the first two chapters of the Song (a total of almost 1,500 pages). I t has seemed to previous historians of exegesis absolutely distinctive of the High Middle Ages that it was preoccupied with the Song of Songs and that it was then regarded in some ways as the pinnacle of Scripture-and indeed there are sixty or seventy extant commentaries from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries alone. But the data for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would indicate a similar ‘preoccupation’ among the Reformers.  Again and again the Reformers, like the medieval Cistercian monks, express their highest regard for the Song, for nowhere else, they say, is Christ’s divine love better taught.”