‘If the exegesis of the Song of Songs has been greatly debated and its allegorical significance, based on prophetic teaching confronted by contemporary history, has often been misunderstood, it is because the study of its genre and its literary structure has too often been neglected.

The vocabulary of the poem is directly and consistently biblical. The most classical themes are used: king, shepherd, flock, vineyard, garden, Lebanon, blossoming springtime, night, awakening; all with eschatological significance and grouped around the central motif, already developed by Hosea, Jeremiah, and III Isaiah: the unfaithful wife (Israel) taken back by her husband (Yahweh) as though he had just married her. The constant reference to the biblical motifs and the dramatization and reinterpretation of the event and aspirations of the period after Nehemiah indicate that this is pure midrash.'

in Approaches to Judaism: Theory and Practice, ed. W. S. Green, Brown Judaic Studies 1 (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1978), 41.

Anyone else think that there may be interesting links between midrash and interpretive maximalism?