This solid new ‘devotional’ on the enigmatic Old Testament writing that is also known as >I>The Song of Songs will, I’m sure, be a help to many Christian readers who seek to benefit from one of the loveliest books in the Bible. My problem is that Malcolm Maclean takes an out-and-out allegorical approach to the Song. ‘Personally,’ he writes, ‘I think it describes Christ and his people… The Song of Solomon gives to believers an answer to a very important question: ‘What is it like to have contact with Jesus Christ?’ He lays on this allegorical interpretation with a trowel. ‘The king depicts Jesus, and I take the woman to be a believer and the daughters of Jerusalem to be her fellow believers.’ Maybe, as Maclean says, the Church did allegorise the Song for much of its history, but that is just not how we read it today, and I actually found it tiresome to be told page after page that the Song is about Jesus. Sometimes the search for an allegorical equivalent can even have a result that seems absurd, such as when Maclean interprets the ‘watchmen’ (3.3) as the rulers of the church, the elders (see page 121). By all means, read this book for a devotional purpose. But don’t treat it as a commentary. For that, you would do better to use something like Robert Davidson’s commentary on Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon in the Daily Study Bible Series.