Sex and the City, TV's 'Song of Songs'

Six years ago, HBO's risqué series "Sex and the City" set out to answer once and for all the question "What do women want-and how are they finding it?" Echoing the sociological, if salacious, tone of the nonfiction newspaper column that inspired it, "Sex and the City" -- which ends its run this weekend -- was supposed to explore (and revel in) the twists and turns of modern mating rituals.

Why the show struck a chord, however, may not be so modern: It pictured female sexuality as a search for perfection in a lover. It did so deliciously, candidly, and still after six years, controversially. But the show's themes are not so different from a famous biblical love poem, the Song of Songs. In the canon of television, "Sex and the City" became a Song of Songs for our time, fulfilling a deep human need to celebrate our sexuality.

The Song of Songs (also known as the Song of Solomon), which appears between Ecclesiastes and Isaiah in the Old Testament, was written as early as 3000 years ago. It chronicles the love affair of a young couple who long to be promised in marriage, but who are being kept apart. Their sexual relationship is "stunningly anti-patriarchal," says Dr. James B. Nelson, a retired Christian ethics professor and author of "Body Theology." "The woman in Song of Songs takes the initiative and pursues the relationship in a way that strongly critiques the male-dominated social structure of the time." Paging Carrie Bradshaw.

The Song of Songs so scandalized religious leaders that many Jewish and Christian interpreters insisted we not take the its metaphors literally. First-century Rabbi Akiba ben Joseph said even holding Song of Songs to read it "defiled the hands." Today most scholars accept the book for what it is-a secular love poem. But the question of how such an erotic book made its way into the Bible remains a mystery. "The easy answer is that it got into the Christian canon because it was already in the Jewish canon," says Hebrew scholar Michael V. Fox from the University of Wisconsin. "And the main criterion for Jews in deciding the sacredness of a certain book was its presumed antiquity."

Hebrew Bible scholar (and Beliefnet columnist) Renita Weems, author of the forthcoming "What Matters Most: Ten Passionate Lessons from the Song of Solomon," says the early attribution of the poem to Israel's revered King Solomon bolstered the love poem's status. "Also, by the time it came to settle on which books to include in the Christian canon, it was common to read Song of Solomon as an allegory of God's love affair with Israel or Christ's love affair with the Church."

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