ששיר השירים
in the press · chapter 1 · biblical hebrew

The Song of Songs

The Bible contains one book of pure love poetry — frank, sensual, and gorgeous — and most people have never read it slowly.

Press this book. Your gift commissions the Great Library’s word-by-word interlinear The Song of Songs — and the day it is made, it is free for everyone, forever. You are not buying a copy; you are paying for it to exist.

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A taste — every book reads word beneath word
τὰ
the
μέγιστα
mégista
greatest
τῶν
tôn
of the
ἀγαθῶν
agathôn
goods
ἡμῖν
hēmîn
for us
“The greatest of goods come to be for us through madness.” — a line of the finished Phaedrus

This is how every Great Library book reads, word beneath word. The Song of Songs’s own first lines appear here the day its pilot is pressed.

Read from our finished collection ›

Why this book

Two lovers call to each other through vineyards and city streets: gazelles, pomegranates, myrrh, a garden locked and then opened. It is frankly erotic and utterly tender, and it sits in the middle of the Bible asking to be read aloud.

It is also the perfect first Hebrew: only eight short chapters, concrete words — vine, fig, dove, fire — and lines that repeat like songs do. Word by word, right to left, you learn to read the language of the poets on its most beautiful page.

Why pressing it matters

Making an interlinear The Song of Songs is real work — freezing a scholarly source text, aligning every word to its dictionary form, glossing what resists translation, and proofing it all to a hard quality bar. Pressing a book is how that work gets funded. When enough readers press it, Chapter 1 gets made — and then it is free to read forever, for you and for everyone who comes after.

This isn’t a purchase. It’s a commission. You’re not buying a copy — you’re paying for the thing to exist, and putting your name (if you like) on the first true The Song of Songs that anyone can read for free.

You press the book with a contribution of any size.
When it’s funded, Chapter 1 is made, word by word.
It opens on the shelf — free to read forever.

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