Song of Solomon4chapter 4

This chapter is a wasf — a head-to-foot praise song for the bride, a form well known from Egyptian love poetry and still used in Arabic wedding songs in the region centuries later. The comparisons are not meant to be pictured all at once; each one carries a single quality.

The images come from the countryside. "Thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead" — black goats moving down a hillside in a long shifting line. "Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing" — sheep were washed in a stream before shearing, so a newly shorn, washed flock is uniformly white and even, and "none is barren among them" means none missing, no gaps in the row.

"Thy neck is like the tower of David builded for an armoury, whereon there hang a thousand bucklers." Displaying shields on the outside of a tower or wall was an actual practice; Ezekiel describes Tyre's defenders hanging their shields on her walls. The comparison is to a bearing that is upright and adorned, not to a thick neck.

"Come with me from Lebanon… from the top of Amana, from the top of Shenir and Hermon, from the lions' dens, from the mountains of the leopards." These are the real peaks of the far north, and both lions and leopards lived in that country in the biblical period.

"A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed." A walled garden with its own water source was the highest luxury in a dry land — private, guarded, watered, and out of the public street. The spice list that follows — spikenard, saffron, calamus, cinnamon, frankincense, myrrh, and aloes — is a catalogue of the incense trade, hauled from Arabia, India, and beyond by caravan.