Biblion Bible Commentary
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Awesome as an Army with Banners
Song of Solomon 6:4-10
4 You are beautiful, my love, as Tirzah, lovely as Jerusalem, awesome as an army with banners. · WEB
Her beauty is compared to two capitals and an army, the old praise returns unchanged after the failure, and the court itself concedes.
Beautiful as Tirzah, lovely as Jerusalem — he praises her by the two most splendid made things his world offered: cities, and specifically the twin capitals, Tirzah in the north and Jerusalem in the south. Then past cities to power itself: awesome as an army with banners. Her beauty does not merely please; it routs. The next line surrenders: turn your eyes away, for they overwhelm me.
Verses 5 to 7 then do something a first-time reader misses and the Hebrew makes measurable: they repeat the praise of the first great poem — the goats descending Gilead, the ewes coming up from the washing with none missing, the pomegranate temples Song of Solomon 4:1–3 — nearly word for word, one term changed. After her refusal at the door and everything it cost, he says the same words about her as before. Constancy is performed rather than claimed: the failure changed nothing in the inventory.
Then the arithmetic of the court. Sixty queens, eighty concubines, maidens beyond counting — and against the whole roster: my dove, my perfect one, is one. Not first in the ranking; outside it. Her mother's only one, and — the poem's quiet coup — the queens and concubines themselves saw her and praised her. The competition concedes the category.
Their words close the scene, climbing the sky as they go: who is she, looking forth like the dawn, fair as the moon, clear as the sun — and the army line returns, now in the harem's own mouth Song of Solomon 6:10.
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