a lattice: the narrow slats or slits in the wall of a house, an opening small enough that a person can only peep through it.
This word turns up only once in the whole Bible, in Song of Songs 2:9, and it names a piece of ordinary house-building. The young man has come down over the hills, reached the outside wall, and put his eye to the slats to look in at the woman. Hebrew already had a general word for a house window (חַלּוֹן); this rarer word names something finer, the narrow screen of slats set into the opening, or the chinks between them.
No one is quite sure where the word came from, but the sense is not really in doubt, because four different kinds of evidence line up behind it:
- it sits in the same line of poetry as the ordinary word for a window, so it must name something in the same family
- the oldest translators reached for words meaning cross-bars, gratings, or woven netting
- Aramaic and later Hebrew kept the word for a small chink, deliberately contrasted with a wider window
- houses of the period had very few outside openings, and the ones they had were small, high slits, often screened with wood or reed for privacy and air
The verse's own wording fits that picture exactly. The man first gazes in at the windows, then peeps through the slats: the second verb is the one you use for pressing an eye to a crack. The whole line narrows like a camera closing in, from hills to wall to windows to slats, and stops at the thinnest barrier left before the invitation that follows in the next verses.
That narrow opening carries more weight than its size suggests. Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible it is women who look out through windows, and it never ends well: Sisera's mother waiting for a son who will not come, Michal watching David and turning bitter, Jezebel thrown down from hers. Here the woman is the one inside, and she is the one speaking and watching, while the man is the figure framed at the slats. Many readers hear that as a deliberate flip of a familiar scene.