Let my beloved come, &c. The Shulamite, continuing this beautiful apostrophe, responds: “If my person really resembles such a paradise, this garden is yours; yours are all its productions.” ‏פְּרִי מְגָדָיו‎, literally the fruit of his deliciousness, i.e. his delicious fruit. When a compound idea is expressed by one noun followed by another in the genitive, a suffix which refers to this whole idea is sometimes appended to the second of the two nouns. Comp. ‏אֱלִילֵי כַּסְפּוֹ‎, his silver idols, Isa. ii. 20; Gesen. § 129, b; Ewald, § 291, b; ‏גַן‎ being of a common gender, the suffix in ‏מְגָדָיו‎ may either refer to garden, or to beloved; it is more in keeping with the construction to refer it to the beloved, just as the suffix in ‏גַּנְּוֹ‎ refers to him. The fruit is the beloved’s because the garden is his, and therefore he may enjoy it. 1. I am coming into my garden, &c. The shepherd, as he embraces his beloved, expresses his unbounded delight in her charms. The perfect forms, ‏בָּאתִי שָׁתִיתִי‎, ‏אָכַלְתִּי‎, ‏אָרִתִי‎, are used for the present, Gesen. § 126. Eat, O friends, &c. Some sympathizing court ladies, at a distance, seeing the mutual happiness of the lovers, urge them to take their fill of delight. The explanation of Rashbam and others, that this address is to the companions of the beloved to partake of a friendly meal; or, as others will have it, that it is an invitation to the marriage feast, is against the context. The expression ‏אִכְלוּ‎, eat ye, must be taken in the same sense as ‏אָכַלְתִי‎, I eat; and it would be most incongruous to suppose that the beloved, who enjoys the charms of his loved one, would call on his friends to do the same. Dr. Geddes, who is followed by Dr. Good, alters the text into ‏אכל רעי שת ושכיר דודי‎, Eat, O my friend! drink, yea, drink abundantly, O my beloved! and puts it into the mouth of the Shulamite; thus making it an answer to what the beloved said in the preceding clause. But such conjectural emendations ought to be repudiated. It is most in accordance with the context to take these words as an epiphonema of some sympathizing court ladies. The parallelism and the accents require us to take ‏דוֹדִים‎ as a concrete, synonymous with ‏רֵעִים‎, friends; so the Sept., Vulg., Syr., Rashbam, Ibn Ezra, Rashi, Mendelssohn, &c.