Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

April 6, 2026

Why the Song of Songs Became Part of the Passover Liturgy

An Aramaic text turned the book into a historical romance.

While the Haggadah is the text most associated with Passover, there are others—among them the Song of Songs, which many Ashkenazi congregations recited this past Sabbath. To understand this collection of love songs, replete with erotic overtones, as a sacred conceit for the relationship between the human and the divine, one must have access to allegorical readings. Sheila Tuller Keiter argues that one particular interpretive work paved the way for the book’s incorporation into the liturgy:

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