Song of Solomon5chapter 5

The scene at the door only works if you know the hardware. A house door was barred from the inside with a wooden bolt slid into a socket. Some doors had a hole cut above the bolt so that a person outside — or the owner with a key, which was a hooked stick — could reach a hand through and work the bar. "My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door" describes exactly that, and "my hands dropped with myrrh… upon the handles of the lock" means he left perfumed oil on the bolt where he touched it.

"I have put off my coat; how shall I put it on? I have washed my feet; how shall I defile them?" She is already in bed with her outer tunic off, and the floor of a house was beaten earth. Getting up means getting dirty again. The excuse is small, ordinary, and costly.

"The watchmen that went about the city found me, they smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took away my veil from me." The night patrol treated a woman alone in the streets after dark as suspect, and stripping her veil was a public shaming. This is the danger of the search made explicit.

Her praise song for him is built from palace and temple craft: a head of fine gold, locks black as a raven, eyes like doves by rivers of water washed with milk, hands as gold rings set with beryl, a body of ivory overlaid with sapphires, legs as pillars of marble set on sockets of fine gold. Statues of gods and kings were made this way — a wooden core sheathed in gold and inlaid with stone, standing on a fitted base. She is describing him as a figure of that scale.