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The first comprehensive study of the Song of Songs’ use of military metaphors

Although love transcends historical and cultural boundaries, its conceptualizations, linguistic expressions, and literary representations vary from culture to culture. In this study, Danilo Verde examines love through the military imagery found throughout the Song’s eight chapters. Verde approaches the military metaphors, similes, and scenes of the Song using cognitive metaphor theory to explore the overlooked representation of love as war. Additionally, this book investigates how the Song conceptualizes both the male and the female characters, showing that the concepts of masculinity and femininity are tightly interconnected in the poem. Conquered Conquerors provides fresh insights into the Song’s figurative language and the conceptualization of gender in biblical literature.

Danilo Verde is a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) in the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, where he is a member of the Biblical Studies Research Unit. He coedited the volume Networks of Metaphors in the Hebrew Bible (2020).

This is Ancient Israel and Its Literature 41. See more available volumes in the AIL series.