Quite often, I find myself turning to the Bible and other ancient texts for many values and lessons. In those pages, I learn how to treat others, how to reap my fields, what to do in case of an upcoming famine, why to chill on Friday nights and Saturdays, how to decorate a Holy Temple and with whom I am permitted to engage in sexual relations. The Bible often refers to sex within and outside of marriage, but rarely explicitly associates sex with love.

There are no explicit details about our foreparents loving each other, except for Genesis 24:67, where we read that Isaac “took Rebecca as his wife. Isaac loved her and thus found comfort after his mother’s death.” However, some of our modern commentators inform us that even this love perhaps was not romantic, and that Isaac saw Rebecca as a replacement mother figure.

The first five books of the bible certainly do not provide any blueprints for romance or love. To find models of romantic love, we often have to turn to modern media. The soap opera world coined the term super couple in the eighties, with Luke and Laura’s wedding on General Hospital in 1981 as the highest rated hour in soap opera history. Soap operas are a place of romantic love, with candles, and lingerie and champagne.

The term love is used slightly more frequently in the Nevi’im, the prophetic writings, which make up the middle part of our Bible. In the book of Judges we encounter Samson, the man who was only as strong as his hair was long; and a man who made a pattern out of falling for the wrong woman. His first wife bribed him, while saying to him “You really hate me, you don’t love me” (Judges 14:16). But she was playing him for the fool and it is doubtful whether they had a true romance. About Samson’s second wife Delilah we read “he fell in love” (Judges 16:4). However the enemy Philistines used her to get to Samson. She too used love as a weapon and says “how can you say you love me, when you don’t confide in me?” (Judges 16:15). While the text uses the word “love”, in neither of these situations did both parties feel the same sense of love.

The archetypal Biblical love stud is King David, who was loved by many, both men and women. He engaged in a very serious relationship with Jonathan, the son of Saul, whom David would succeed as King. In 1 Samuel 18:1, the biblical author writes that “Jonathan’s soul became bound up with the soul of David; Jonathan loved David as himself”. Jonathan’s sister Michal also falls in love with David (1 Samuel 18:20) and they marry. However, we only read about Jonathan and David kissing. David has many other wives, but the term love is absent from their relationships. Keeping with the family tradition, David’s son Solomon who also becomes king, went down in history as a man who “loved many foreign women” and he “clung to and loved” them (I Kings 11: 1-3).

As much as romance is hard to find in the Bible, marriage is everywhere. Almost everyone gets married in our ancient texts, often more than once. There is an expectation that marriage is enjoyable: in the words of Proverbs, “find joy in the wife of your youth” (5:18). Marriage might have been prevalent among our ancestors, but it was not type of marriage is not the kind we strive for today. Most of the time husbands and wives lived in separate quarters; constant intimacy, either emotional or physical was not part of the equation.

Marriage was a legal transaction, complete with a contract. The rabbis of the Mishna and the Talmud devoted large sections of legal analysis to the development of documents that created and dissolved marital unions. In tractate Yevamot, we are taught that men are supposed to get married and then have at least one boy and one girl. Our rabbis believed that anyone who did not have a wife lived without happiness, blessing and without goodness and Torah. But romance rarely entered their scrutiny.

Our ancestors did write about romance, but almost always in the context of the love between the Jewish people and God. That is the big romance we can find and trace throughout thousands of years of the written word. The champagne and rose petal relationship is between us and the divine. According to rabbinic interpretation, the entire book of Song of Songs is a metaphor for that relationship, hidden behind corporal language. Duties of the Heart, a twelfth century work written by Rabbi Bachya ben Joseph ibn Paquda, climaxes with a chapter on the love of God.

Being a Jew in the modern world, I often look to our texts to determine how to interact in society. However, when it comes to engaging in popular romantic initiatives it often seems far easier to learn from Grey’s Anatomy or Jane Austen or Bronte or other literature of the past two hundred years. But I rarely seek out the easy option. Instead, I look deeper into the ancient texts of our people. I look for what is not written, I look for what is insinuated and what I can infer from the text.

Our texts are full of familial love, with Jacob’s love for his son Joseph probably being the most obvious, but most ideas of romantic love can only be inferred by what is not written in the sources. When Sarah and Abraham conceived and have Isaac after Sarah has stopped menstruating, was there loving foreplay involved, or did they simply do the deed in order to keep their side of a covenant? When Jacob agrees to work an extra seven years for Laban, in order to take Rachel as his wife, it was not because he needed the money. My understanding of these stories is to show us pure unadulterated romance, and not the teenage version that Hollywood tends to provide for us.

We can find everything in our texts, but sometimes the white spaces on the page tell more than the black letters.

The author is a Rabbi-in-Residence at the Chicagoland Jewish High School.