The daughter of Zion. Not "the faithful Church" (Kay), but the city of Jerusalem, which is thus personified. Comp. Isaiah 47:1, Isaiah 47:5, where Babylon is called the "daughter of the Chaldeans;" and Lamentations 1:6; Lamentations 2:1, Lamentations 2:4, Lamentations 2:8, Lamentations 2:10, where the phrase here used is repeated in the same sense.
More commonly it designates the people without the city (Lamentations 2:13; Lamentations 4:22; Micah 3:8, Micah 3:10, 13; Zephaniah 3:14; Zechariah 2:10; Zechariah 9:9, etc.). As a cottage; rather, as a booth (Revised Version; see Le 23:42).
Vineyards required to be watched for a few weeks only as the fruit began to ripen; and the watchers, or keepers, built themselves, therefore, mere "booths" for their protection (Job 27:18). These were frail, solitary dwellings—very forlorn, very helpless.
Such was now Jerusalem. As a lodge in a garden of cucumbers. Cucumber-gardens required watching throughout the season, i.e. from spring to autumn, and their watcher needed a more solid edifice than a booth.
Hence such gardens had "lodges" in them, i.e. permanent huts or sheds, such as those still seen in Palestine. As a besieged city. Though not yet besieged, Jerusalem is as if besieged—isolated, surrounded by waste tracts, threatened.