Song of Solomon6chapter 6

"I went down into the garden of nuts to see the fruits of the valley." The nut in view is the walnut, grown in watered valley ground, and "the fruits of the valley" are the green shoots that come up where there is enough moisture. Anyone farming the hills went down to the valley to see whether anything was thriving.

"Thou art beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem." This is a striking pairing. Tirzah was a Canaanite town in the northern hills, known for its setting; it later served as the capital of the northern kingdom after the split. Naming Tirzah as a byword for beauty alongside Jerusalem — rather than naming Samaria, which replaced it as the northern capital — is one of the honest arguments for an early, Solomonic date, since a later writer would more naturally have named the later capital.

"There are threescore queens, and fourscore concubines, and virgins without number." Royal marriage in the ancient Near East was diplomacy: treaties were sealed with a daughter, and the size of a harem measured a king's alliances. The song names the whole institution in order to set one woman above all of it — "my dove, my undefiled, is but one."

"Terrible as an army with banners" uses military language for a woman's presence. Armies marched under standards carried on poles, visible from a distance, and the sight of them coming over a ridge was the most awe-inducing thing an ancient villager ever saw.