My Perfect One Typology and Early Rabbinic Interpretation of Song of Songs

Most studies of the history of interpretation of the Song of Songs focus on its interpretation from late antiquity to modernity. InMy Perfect One, Kaplan maps the landscape of earlier rabinnic interpretation by investigating an underappreciated collection of interpretations of the Book found in rabbinic or Tannaitic literature from the first few centuries of the Common Era, known as the Halachic Midrashim. Kaplan advances two major claims: First, in a departure from earlier scholarship that too quickly classifies rabbinic interpretation of the Song of Songs as allegorical, he advocates a more nuanced reading of the approach of the early sages, who read the Song through a mode of typological interpretation concerned with the correspondence between Scripture and ideal events in history. Second, Kaplan contends that the early rabbinic approach to the text analyzes it using strategies similar to those used in reading epic poetry in antiquity. Throughout the book Kaplan explores ways in which this portrayal helped shape early rabbinic piety in the wake of the destruction, dislocation, and loss the Jewish community in the first two centuries of the Common Era, and how it provided the language to convey an important rabbinic theological idea--that despite the catastrophes of 70 C.E. and 135 C.E., God still loves Israel in a surpassing way and will right the catastrophe in his own time.