The Work
Song of Solomon was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1977 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award that year. It was the work that established Toni Morrison as a major literary force, following The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1973). The novel is approximately 90,000 words, organized into two parts across thirteen chapters. Its title announces from the first page an intent to engage the biblical book known in the Hebrew Bible as Shir ha-Shirim - the Song of Songs - one of the most debated and beloved books of the canon.
The novel was selected by Oprah Winfrey for her book club in 1996, bringing it to a new generation of readers. It became central to the scholarly rehabilitation of African American literature during the 1980s and 1990s and is now universally taught in American universities. Morrison herself considered it the novel in which she found her fullest voice. It was a decisive factor in her receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Biblical Engagement
The engagement with the Song of Songs operates at structural, thematic, and rhetorical levels simultaneously. Structurally, the biblical Song is a dialogue between a woman and her beloved, with a chorus of daughters of Jerusalem, and Morrison's novel likewise organizes itself around voices calling to one another across distances of time, geography, and history. The very title locates the novel in a tradition of sacred erotic longing.
Song of Songs 1:2 ('Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine') introduces the novel's central theme: the yearning for intimacy - with a lover, with one's own history, with one's people. Milkman Dead's quest is framed as a love story not with a woman but with his own lineage, and the Song's vocabulary of searching and finding ('I sought him, but I found him not' - Song 3:1) governs his journey southward into family history.
The flying African motif - the novel's central mythic element - draws on two biblical sources. Ezekiel 1:4-28, the throne-chariot vision (the merkavah), presents a figure of transcendent mobility: a chariot that moves in every direction at once, carried by living creatures with wings. Morrison's ancestors who can fly - who lift off from the earth and return to Africa - are figured in the language of Ezekiel's vision of divine freedom. The freedom of God becomes the freedom of Black bodies that refuse to be held by the soil of enslavement.
Exodus 3:17 ('I will bring you up out of the affliction of Egypt into a land flowing with milk and honey') is the second biblical root of the flying motif. Morrison's ancestors who flew back to Africa perform a reverse Exodus: instead of being led through the wilderness to a promised land, they fly home to the land they were stolen from. This reframes the Exodus narrative from a forward-moving liberation into a circular one - the destination is also the origin.
The novel's onomastics - its extraordinary system of names - is deeply biblical. 'Pilate' carries the weight of Pontius Pilate (Matthew 27:24), the Roman who washed his hands of responsibility, but Morrison's Pilate washes nothing: she carries her dead father's bones in a bag around her neck, refuses to relinquish the past, and is the novel's most spiritually alive character. 'Macon' Dead recalls the biblical dead who are raised in Ezekiel 37's vision of resurrection. 'Guitar' - Milkman's friend who turns to murderous revenge - enacts Lamech's song of retribution (Genesis 4:23-24), escalating the violence of Cain.
Author and Context
Toni Morrison (1931-2019), born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, grew up in a working-class African American family steeped in folk tradition, oral storytelling, and Protestant Christianity. Her father sang during labor; her grandmother kept a dream book; her family's speech was saturated with biblical cadence from church attendance and Bible reading across generations.
Morrison studied at Howard University (BA in English) and Cornell (MA in American literature), writing her thesis on alienation in William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. She worked as an editor at Random House from 1967 to 1983, editing major works by Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, and Muhammad Ali. During this period she wrote her first four novels, including Song of Solomon.
In an interview with Thomas LeClair (1981), Morrison described her approach to the Song of Songs: 'I thought that if that book had the same power for me that it had had for others - including Solomon - then it was because it had something to do with what I was writing. Its imagery seemed to me the most powerful imagery available for talking about African American experience - the longing for home, the beauty of Black bodies, the searching for a beloved who is also a self.' The novel was also shaped by Morrison's reading of African American folk traditions, particularly the story of the Flying Africans - enslaved people who, according to folklore recorded by WPA writers in the 1930s, could fly back to Africa.
Plot Summary with Biblical Thread
Macon (Milkman) Dead III is born in a Michigan town on the same day that Robert Smith, an insurance agent, attempts to fly from the roof of Mercy Hospital. Milkman grows up in a prosperous but spiritually empty household dominated by his materialistic father, Macon Dead II. His Aunt Pilate lives nearby in spiritually rich poverty, surrounded by fermenting fruit and the memory of her dead father.
The first half follows Milkman's adolescence and his affair with his cousin Hagar, who eventually becomes consumed by obsessive love and dies - an inversion of Song 8:6 ('love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave'). The second half follows Milkman's journey south to Shalimar, Virginia, where he discovers the full history of his family: his grandfather Solomon was one of the flying Africans who took flight back to Africa, leaving behind his wife Ryna (whose lament echoes through the mountains) and twenty-one children.
The biblical thread runs through every layer. Milkman's journey follows the pattern of Wisdom literature - Proverbs 4:7 ('Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding'). He must abandon the surface quest for gold to find the deeper treasure of his own identity and heritage. His final act - leaping from Solomon's Leap toward Guitar - resonates with Job 13:15 ('Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him') and with the Song's closing cry: 'Make haste, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or to a young hart upon the mountains of spices' (Song 8:14).
Critical Reception
The novel received rapturous reviews. John Leonard in the New York Times compared Morrison favorably with Faulkner and Garcia Marquez. Reynolds Price called it 'a profound novel.' Scholarly reception has been equally enthusiastic. Susan Willis's essay 'Eruptions of Funk' (1982) analyzed its use of magical realism in relation to African American folk tradition. Joyce A. Joyce and Michael Awkward offered important early feminist and African American critical readings.
Theological readings have focused on Morrison's use of the biblical Song of Songs as a framework for reclaiming Black erotic life and spiritual identity from the depredations of slavery. Womanist theologians including Renita Weems and Emilie Townes have read the novel alongside the Song of Songs as a resource for Black women's spiritual life and dignity.
Theological Significance
The novel's theological argument is implicit but powerful: the liberation of African American identity requires recovering a sacred inheritance that has been deliberately obscured. The Dead family's name is the theological problem - someone has killed their past, and their freedom depends on resurrection. Morrison's engagement with the Song of Songs suggests that this resurrection is not primarily political or economic but erotic and spiritual: the fullest human life requires the recovery of beauty, longing, and the free movement of the soul.
The flying African myth translates the biblical hope of resurrection and liberation into a specifically African American idiom. To fly is to be free, to be fully human, to bear the image of God (Genesis 1:27). That Solomon's flight leaves his children behind - abandoned like Ishmael in the wilderness - is the novel's deepest wound. Liberation and abandonment are inseparably entwined, as they are in the biblical Exodus: Moses leads Israel out of Egypt, but those who die in the wilderness never reach the promised land.
Legacy
The novel established a template for subsequent African American literary explorations of the biblical inheritance, continued by Octavia Butler, Edward P. Jones, and Colson Whitehead. Its influence on womanist theology has been significant: it demonstrated that the Song of Songs could serve as a resource for Black spiritual identity rather than merely a love poem for allegorical reading. Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993; the committee cited her 'novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import' that give 'life to an essential aspect of American reality.'
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Song of Songs in its entirety, attending to the vocabulary of searching and finding (chapters 3 and 5), the affirmation of beauty ('I am black, but comely' - Song 1:5), and the closing image of flight (Song 8:14). Ezekiel 1 (the chariot vision), Exodus 3 (the call of Moses), Genesis 4 (Cain and Abel, Lamech's song), and Proverbs 4 (the quest for wisdom) all illuminate the novel's biblical architecture. Ezekiel 37 (the valley of dry bones) provides the context for Morrison's preoccupation with spiritual death and resurrection within communities shaped by historical trauma.
Further Reading
- Renita Weems, Song of Songs (New Interpreter's Bible Commentary, 1997) - the best womanist commentary on the biblical text the novel engages. - Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) - Morrison's own essays on the African American literary tradition and the whiteness that structures it. - Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory (2012) - on transgenerational memory and inherited trauma, applicable to Milkman's quest to recover stolen history.