The Guru Granth Sahib was composed in and for the Punjab, an agricultural region whose year is organised around two harvests and the arrival of the monsoon between them, and the volume's imagery follows that year closely.
Several measures in it are seasonal, and the two twelve-month poems run the whole cycle. Beyond the explicitly calendrical compositions, the recurring images are of soil, seed, irrigation, the crop that comes up and the crop that fails, the merchant with goods to trade and the labourer with a wage to earn. The volume speaks about work more than most scriptures do, and about the particular work its audience was doing.
The theological weight this carries is not incidental. A tradition whose foundational teaching includes earning an honest living and sharing what is earned, and which rejects withdrawal from the world as a spiritual method, requires an idiom in which ordinary work is the right place for the teaching to land. The agricultural imagery supplies it.
It also dates and places the volume with some precision. A reader with no other information could locate this book in a wheat and rice growing region with a monsoon, a well-based irrigation system and a mixed trading economy, and could tell that the intended audience worked in it rather than living off it at a distance.