Cox & Paulsell’s Lamentations and the Song of Songs (Belief, 2012) is a stylistically accomplished volume with genuine literary sensitivity and pastoral warmth. Cox rightly insists Lamentations gives permission to grieve without rushing toward resolution; Paulsell’s engagement with the allegorical tradition — Origen, Bernard, Teresa — is learned and generous. Readers should nonetheless be aware of some important limitations. Drawing on Ricoeur and Caputo, Cox argues that the book’s “protector/punisher” God represents a stage of faith to be outgrown — a post-theistic reading that finds no support even in critical commentaries: Berlin (OTL) calls the Deuteronomistic punishment framework simply “taken for granted” in the book; Salters (ICC) finds all five poems united in interpreting the catastrophe as divine punishment for sin; Goldingay (NICOT) warns that modern readers are tempted to mine Lamentations for its emotional authenticity while quietly setting aside its equally insistent claim that waywardness issues in God’s rejection — which is precisely what Cox does; and Dobbs-Allsopp (Interpretation), the most sympathetic to protest readings, is explicit that hope in Lamentations “has but one object, God.” Cox’s dismissal of the God of Lamentations as “not very nice” fares no better against Goldingay’s insistence that compassion and steadfast love are more central to God’s nature than wrath, and Hillers’s (AYB) grounding of the book’s hope in divine hesed. Paulsell’s section is more carefully exegetical, but her implicit affirmation that the Song speaks to same-sex relationships finds no support even in Exum’s OTL — the most progressive feminist-critical commentary available — which states flatly that the Song portrays “love between a woman and a man” and identifies the queer reading as “one of the most avant-garde readings to date.” She presents Trible’s Eden-reversal thesis as settled, yet Pope’s AYB preserves Trible’s own acknowledgment that the Song’s garden “cannot be the final word,” since it operates in silence about God, sin, and mortality — a qualification Paulsell omits. Most significantly, she bypasses the canonical wisdom framework that Childs and Murphy (Hermeneia) identify as built into the Song’s Solomonic superscription — “The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s” — establishing it as “wisdom’s reflection on the joyful and mysterious nature of love between a man and a woman within the institution of marriage,” and leaving her application of the Song to any form of human love without adequate textual foundation. Both authors write with real flair, but readers seeking theological reliability on either book will need to look elsewhere.

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