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A Mystery Hidden from the Ages and Generations: How Not to Be Bitter Against One’s Wife and How Not to Make a Husband Bitter – Part 3

[Study Aired July 29, 2023]

“Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord. 
  Husbands, love your wives, and be not bitter against them” – Col 3:18,19 

The torturous search for the mystery of an outstandingly loving marriage is found in the almost ridiculous simplicity the Shulamite elegantly announces in the Song of Solomon.

Son 1:2 Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.

It is really that simple, for the most part (mental or physical abuse notwithstanding), to physically restore ailing marriages! With such a spirited wife, why would any husband be bitter against her? 

Our Lord designed the end from the beginning by giving his Bride an experience of evil flesh to look back upon her forebear’s experiences to know that it is impossible without his spirit for a wife, representing the Church to not be bitter against Him and all husbands in the flesh to be bitter against their wives.

Outstanding connectivity in marriage should result from a Shulamite detailed devotion to one’s spouses’ mind and body that corresponds to the mind-blowing spiritual consummation! That adoration should significantly inspire an unbelieving spouse’s arousal to know the Christ, yet, without his kisses interpreted by him, she will remain inert.

1Pe 3:1 Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands; that, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the conversation of the wives; 

1Pe 3:7 Likewise, ye husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life; that your prayers be not hindered.

Should husbands and wives refuse or lethargically, like Leah, the Laodiceans and the woman of Mt Agar, to give each other deeply passionate love, they both have to fight not to be bitter against the other. The greater weight of potential bitterness rests on the husband since he is rejected sexually, as was Christ spiritually by Israel.

Possibly no greater act for a righteous wife to win her unbelieving husband is for her to spontaneously build up ingenious anticipatory arousals in him; that is the Shulamite’s creative methodology for her already eager Lord. It is much harder, as the Lord of the Old Covenant knew, for him to similarly arouse his fickle wife since she is already cursed with an unreliable desire to be aroused by his word. His New Covenant Bride unashamedly arouses him to his immense delight depicted by Solomon.

Pro 5:19 Like the loving deer and pleasant doe, let her breasts satisfy you at all times, and be ravished always with her love.

For the retiring and demure womenfolk’s timidity, please note that the biblically seemingly over-focus on a wife’s breasts, and as previously stated, are the first significant origin of her heart’s arousal after other more delicate and elegant titillations that stimulate anticipation. The emphasis on breasts is a means of understating her other, more private blazings and for this study’s cause, particularly spiritually.

Rev 3:14 And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write; These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God; 
Rev 3:15 I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. 
Rev 3:16 So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. 

To the spiritually astute Saint, the foundation of this study is about us all having been unwitting dull-eyed harlots, unconsciously in the wilderness and Babylon asking our Lord, ‘Are you nearly finished?’

Hosea married a known ‘run-around-Sue’ (the title of a crappy song by Dion in 1961) type of girl typifying Christ marrying Israel; a pretty but flighty girl who believed she was too good for Him, elevating herself and noting her neighbours overtly lewd arousals was tremendously more satisfying. Christ, like Hosea, knew they were marrying harlots. Israel soon became a ‘run-around-Sue’ girl like Aholah and Aholibah (Ezekiel 23).

Aholah, Aholibah, Gomer, Israel, and we combine all our harlotry characteristics, making us one harlot. Clearly, any husband would be bitter against such a wife.

Having designed men guaranteed to be bitter about our wife’s intrinsic apathetic awakenings, our Lord seems to rub salt into their wounds by saying,

Col 3:19 Husbands, love your wives, and do not be bitter against them.

Of course, by understanding Eve’s curse, wives naturally tend to feel exceptionally relieved that they have an escape route to justify their Leah-like eyes; that attitude is the continued embodiment of harlotry. Husbands respond with the immutable word of God in hand to soundly crush their wives by rubbing their faces in her curse ~ which is bound to arouse marital intimacies! And so, around and around goes the deadly loop. No matter how much washing of her by the word of God he splashes, she digs in her toes to his humiliating actions and now gross arousals; both behave like ‘snotty’ Queen Vashti and refuse to try the Shulamite’s methods of arousing the intrinsically sluggish sexual and spiritual nature of the woman. 

A lukewarm wife deeming her condition inherently insoluble with covert bias against her husband leads to both spouses’ inevitable resentment and a husband’s potential bitterness. That condition is the same as Babylonian Christianity thinking; ‘Nobody can completely understand the Bible; we all are saved, and we have a husband, so what’s the problem? He’ll (physical husband will) get over it.’  Even though Christ wasn’t looking forward to the cross, He effectively couldn’t wait to return to the Father’s glory. Likewise, it’s a bitter-sweet thing that an unrighteous fleshy husband frequently ponders his marriage “more bitter than death” (Ecc 7:26). Such an indifferently thinking church will land her in the Lake of Fire.

I have a musty-smelling insightful book written in 1958 named “The Power of Sexual Surrender” by Marie N. Robinson, MD. It resonates deeply with what the contemporary Australian Sexologist Bertina Arndt has discovered regarding only psychologically sound and unabused women’s growing avoidance of sexual intimacies after the honeymoon and childbearing urges of marriage. And wouldn’t you know it, subsequently, their husband’s enduring melancholic bitterness against them.

Col 3:18 Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord. 
Col 3:19 Husbands, love your wives, and be not bitter against them.

Arndt discovered from scores of private interviews that intimacy-avoidant people, a bit too broadly and unfairly termed “frigid” in Robinson’s late 1950s book, surprisingly regained or, for the first time, found their desire by persistently ‘just doing it’. The wives discovered that their desire was amplified first by arousal.

Of paramount importance, they unintentionally discovered the first key was to build Shulamite-like anticipation cunningly over hours, even days, before elegantly committing the incurable coup de grâce. Unless the husband is an uncouth beast, that formula IS the key to knowing His kisses are better than wine!

One study found that 65% of women’s greatest fantasy was being dominated, submissive and controlled. I’d be scripturally confident that if the remaining 35% looked honestly into their hearts, they all unwittingly desire to be submissive to an honest, morally sound guy who stealthily becomes good-looking, just as a spirited wife to him becomes more beautiful.

Of course, by design, Jesus was far from being the classically good-looking guy; only a Shulamite could see within him the hidden treasure of unfathomable price. If anyone should be bitter against his wife, Christ and Hosea are prime contenders embodying most husbands.

Isa 53:1 Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed? 
Isa 53:2 For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.
Isa 53:3 He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: [His wife hated him] and we hid as it were our faces from him [His wife evaded and despised his arousals for her]; he was despised, and we [the church] esteemed him not. 
Isa 53:4 Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted [… and was not bitter against her!].
Isa 53:5 But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are [being] healed [sexually and spiritually].

1Co 7:2 Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. 
1Co 7:3 Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband. 
1Co 7:4 The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife.
1Co 7:5 Defraud ye not one the other, except it be with consent for a time, that ye may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again, that Satan tempt you not for your incontinency.

The quality of marital bedroom intimacies reflects the day-to-day merit of a husband and wife’s physical and spiritual relationship. We can easily prophesy the outcome if it is as lacklustre as Israel’s was with her Lord.

By the Lord’s design, the harsh reality is; a disgruntled wife (church) who despises bedroom intimacies even loathes her righteous husband’s spiritual ‘light bread’ (Num 21:5) yet abides by the letter of “Defraud not one another” [1Co 7:1-16 (YLT)], he is deserted, and she is a wooden marionette, to him, little more than a masturbation mannequin and the interaction effect is admissible rape (i.e. any form of unwanted sexual or spiritual intimacy). Withholding enthusiastic engagement is defrauded and no different from what old Israel forced on Christ. The antithesis is an unrighteous husband who, brutish in his spiritual understanding for its physical equivalence by not engaging in Shulamite (God-given) designed anticipatory arousals, is a rapist.

It naturally grates on the Lord’s people’s sensitivities to understand that those pitiless self-assigned responses our Lord experiences were required to highlight His humiliations when married to old Israel, and they didn’t stop there. Furthermore, he was married to a whore. After that appalling understanding, we automatically want to protect our Lord and husband from those distressing confrontations with our shock and outrage, like Peter protecting him from the Jewish high priest’s vigilantes and Christ foretelling His death (Joh 18)… ‘This will never happen to you, Lord!’ ~ and by design and foreshadowed by Hosea, it did.

The vast difference in not directly committing whoredom and rape is that our Lord designed His wife in the default of “evil flesh” to fulfill her part of desolating their marriage, whereas he went above and beyond righteously fulfilling His marital dues. The Lord sanctioned Satan to put her in that position, and the Lord took responsibility for the entire affair.

Pro 16:4 The LORD hath made all things for himself: yea, even the wicked for the day of evil.

Mat 16:21 From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his disciples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day. 
Mat 16:22 Then Peter took him, and began to rebuke him, saying, Be it far from thee, Lord: this shall not be unto thee. 
Mat 16:23 But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.

Mat 23:37 O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!
Mat 23:38 Behold, your house is left unto you desolate.
Mat 23:39 For I say unto you, Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.

Our Lord has given his Bride a downpayment of His inflaming spirit, the fullness of which is given upon the First Resurrection and His consummative marriage.

Luk 22:16 For I say to you, I will not any more eat of it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God. 
Luk 22:17 And He took the cup and gave thanks and said, Take this and divide it among yourselves. 
Luk 22:18 For I say to you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God shall come. 
Luk 22:19 And He took bread and gave thanks, and He broke it and gave it to them, saying, This is My body which is given for you, this do in remembrance of Me.

Christ came in the form of sinful flesh without committing sin. Engaging His wife in the deliberately vain hope of igniting a Shulamite-like spark was disheartening and unsatisfying, yet it wasn’t a sin but one of many unclean acts of sinful flesh that diminished the marriage to the eventual point, “Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he (she) that cometh in the name of the Lord.” 

The Lord of the Old Covenant could file a divorce bill for her ‘uncleanness’, but not so a man in the spirit of the New Covenant if she is happy to dwell with her husband. He remained doubly ungratified by his wife’s spiritless absence, reminiscent of Hosea’s wife whose validating arousals were elsewhere (Hosea).

Deu 24:1 When a man hath taken a wife, and married her, and it come to pass that she find no favour in his eyes, because he hath found some uncleanness in her: then let him write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house.

This paper is hoped to stir up the gift of the holy spirit as typified by its inflaming sexually.

2Ti 1:6 Therefore I remind you to inflame [1. to kindle up, inflame one’s mind, strength, zeal. 1. into the midst, in the midst, amidst, among, between] anew the gift of God, which is in you by the putting on of my hands. 
2Ti 1:7 For God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind. 
2Ti 1:8 Therefore you should not be ashamed of the testimony of our Lord [or your love for your husband or wife], nor of me His prisoner. But be partaker of the afflictions [for this paper’s cause, “bitterness”] of the gospel according to the power of God, 

2Ti 1:9 who has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace which was given us in Christ Jesus before the eternal times [in downpayment before the full complement at the resurrection].

What is God’s gift, what does it mean to “inflame anew the gift of God”, and what does it mean to have a “spirit of fear?”

John 14:15 If you love Me, keep My commandments.
John 14:16 And I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another comforter, so that he [God] may be with you forever,
John 14:17 the spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it does not see him nor know him. But you know him, for he dwells with you and shall be in you.

1Co 3:16 Do you not know that you are a temple of God, and that the spirit of God dwells in you? 

John 4:24 God is a spirit, and they who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth.

1Co 2:14 But the natural man does not receive the things of the spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

1Th 5:19 Do not quench [1. to extinguish, quench a. of fire or things on fire {opposite to inflame] the Spirit. 

God is spirit, the holy spirit who dwells in us and increases His truth of growing grace and knowledge, exhibiting His good works as our works until we are fully changed into Him at the First Resurrection.

To the Elect of God, it is foundationally recognised that the ‘natural comes before the spiritual’. So, to understand how to inflame our Lord’s spirit, we must be the opposite of being dull and slothful for the ‘kisses of his word that are better than wine’ (Son 1:2). The Lord is the spiritual reality of a fleshy man. All fleshy husbands are immediately and delightedly aroused by their wife’s bright and purposely inflaming intimacies. She is skilled at stirring up and inflaming him physically to engage her Shulamite love-making, knowing his unstoppable response will cast out of her land, little by little, all resistance and submit to his delight in her mind and body. Her slower responses, she knows, will exhilarate anticipation exponentially as they, like Solomon, are depicted with his bride. In the ‘natural’, they are inflaming their sensual intimacies. 

So, as the Lord’s bride, we inflame him, the holy spirit, by being a pretty bright-eyed and enthusiastic young woman purposely pursuing His word and living by it that is designed to rapidly inflame His spirit! As should spousal bedroom intimacies, His dynamic spirit becomes an unstoppable fiery eye-to-eye interactive passion that will not return to Him void ~ and hopefully forever.

Dan 10:6 His body also was like the beryl, and his face looked like lightning. And his eyes were like lamps of fire, and his arms and his feet in colour were like polished bronze, and the voice of his words like the sound of a multitude. 

Psa 104:4 He makes His angels spirits, His ministers a flaming fire.

Isa 55:10 For as the rain comes down, and the snow from the heavens, and does not return there, but waters the earth, and makes it bring out and bud, and give seed to the sower and bread to the eater; 

Son 7:12 Let us rise up early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine flowers, whether the tender grape appears, and the pomegranates bud forth; there I will give You my loves. 
Son 7:13 The love-apples give a scent, and over our doors are all pleasant fruits, new and old, which I have laid up for You, O my Beloved.)

Isa 55:11 so shall My Word be, which goes out of My mouth; it shall not return to Me void, but it shall accomplish what I please, and it shall certainly do what I sent it to do.
Isa 55:12 For you shall go out with joy, [following bedroom dynamic submissiveness that spiritually is us with our Lord] and be led out with peace; the mountains and the hills shall break out before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. 
Isa 55:13 Instead of the thorn, the fir tree shall come up; and instead of the brier, the myrtle tree shall come up; and it shall be to Jehovah for a name, for an everlasting sign which shall not be cut off.

Why would any husband or wife wish to sensually quench that spirit!? The Bride of Christ is singularly focused on inflaming her Lord as he is for her, and their fire will be everlasting and not cut off.

Isa 26:8 Yea, in the way of Your judgments, O Jehovah, we awaited You; for Your name and for Your memory is the desire of our soul.
Isa 26:9 With my soul I desired You in the night; yea, with my spirit within me I will seek You early; for when Your judgments are in the earth, the people of the world learn righteousness. 

The Bride’s treasure is being single-eyed to expressly inflame her Lord’s spiritual ardour. She knows, as any wife elegantly skilled in husband arousals, that her bright smile and Shulamite-like anticipatory planning will cause him to overpower her for her (ecstatically submissive) and his immeasurable delight.

Mat 6:21 For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. 
Mat 6:22 The light of the body is the eye. Therefore if your eye is sound, your whole body shall be full of light. 
Mat 6:23 But if your eye is evil, your whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!

In the negative, if a wife (as did Israel in the wilderness) continues to submit to Eve’s curse and not dynamically respond and or plan her husband’s unquenchable desires for her, her eye is evil, and indeed, her whole body will be full of darkness and bitter moaning as was given Leah.

2Co 12:8 For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. 
2Co 12:9 And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. 
2Co 12:10 Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong. 

Eze 16:45 You are your mother’s daughter, who despises her husband and her sons. And you are the sister of your sisters, who despise their husbands and their sons. Your mother was a Hittite [H 2865 – 1. to be shattered, be dismayed, be broken, be abolished, be afraid], and your father an Amorite [H 550 – to say, speak, utter; to say, to answer, to say in one’s heart, to think, to command, to promise, to intend]. 

For the Elect’s sake, it is a harsh and bitter curse! From that scripture, we see that Israel, married to our Lord, was a fickle woman who depicts all women (the church) since mother Eve! She broke submission and her vow to God’s ordinances by shattering His commandments. She despised the kisses of His vow and, by design, left Him dismayed and crushed. She was likewise dismayed by her Lord’s chastising responses. The emotion in her eyes was equally a dispassionate, desolate wilderness, demonstrating a non-connected mannequin tediously suffering her husband’s (a righteous husband) impassioned love ~ a harlot, collaborating self-pleasuring. Under the Old Covenant, the Lord got immensely humiliated and hurt ~ even “jealous” since he showed her all the treasures of his house… bar his spirit.

Note that this woman’s daughter and sisters are alike in their hatred for righteous leadership and a husband’s eagerness to wash his wife by the word. To varying responsive degrees, every aspect of a woman’s body is a sensory organ. Washing her with the Lord’s word to him is sensually highly arousing and carried forward spiritually in our Lord! He is delighted by her animated sensual (spiritual) responses, just as we enjoy another’s bright interactions.

The Lord’s true word is intentionally seductive for the Bride alone! When engaged in Shulamite-like interactions, the encounter is unwitting spiritual foreplay for which the Body of Christ is delightfully incontinent.

1Co 7:5 Defraud ye not one the other, except it be with consent for a time, that ye may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again, that Satan tempt you not for your incontinency. 

Prolonged, vivacious and deeply meaningful spiritual interactions with any member of the Lord’s Body induce profound connection and spiritually inflamed arousals that curiously correspond totally unconsciously, a little biologically with our pudenda. Without spelling it out, only folk with acute anatomical awareness and naturally elevated emotional responses, with socially fragile amusement, would notice that very private oddity. It is a natural biological response to all deeply passionate Christs. Its spiritual correlations prepare our minds for His word’s easy and excitable engagement. Non-believers are not the least bit aroused to receive His truth, and for Christ to proceed enthusiastically to force conviction is outright rape. It is a beautiful and fascinating aspect of “Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual” (1Co 15:46).

The Lord designed those sensual responses to correspond to spiritual stimulus when one finds spiritual gold that deeply secures ‘joint’ adhesion and growth (Eph 4:16). Outwardly, for example, it happens every time, particularly between young single men and women delighting in any deeply connecting conversation, notably if both parties contain some beguiling quality. Warmly engaging conversation and being one mind,  particularly between a man and woman, rapidly advances ravishing likeability between the two, as it does between Christ and His Bride, who ravish each other. It is a God-given phenomenon for ‘the’ Christ’s deeply and jealously guarded fusion of spirit and body.

Amo 3:3 Can two walk together, except they be agreed? 

Gen 17:1 And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am the Almighty God; walk before me, and be thou perfect.

2Co 6:14 Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? 

Of course, Christ is always beguiling to His Bride, which is why the Shulamite yearned for His kisses. 

Christ outrageously arouses His Bride, and she, Him. To embarrassingly deny our biological responses that reflect the spiritual is akin to denying our Lord’s passion for us. 

Mat 10:33 But whoever shall deny Me before men, I will also deny him before My Father in Heaven. 

His deeply ravishing connections with us engage Him as our God, just as deliberately seductive arousals outside marriage connect a man with an Ashteroth-like god; yet, within marriage, a wife’s outrageously designed preparations for her husband’s arousals IS the key to her delightfully slower responses for her immeasurable joy!

Exo 20:3 You shall have no other gods before Me.
Exo 20:4 You shall not make to yourselves any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in the heavens above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 
Exo 20:5 You shall not bow yourself down to them, nor serve them. For I Jehovah your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons to the third and fourth generation of those that hate me, 
Exo 20:6 and showing mercy to thousands of those that love Me and keep My commandments [As does the Bride of Christ].

A god above God is anything you hold in greater esteem than the God; its often innocuous perishing corruptness, you believe, will give you a more pleasurable life and eminence than He can. If we love a husband, wife, sex or anything more than God, that thing can become a god.

The Lord was true to His word. Under the Old Covenant, he eventually ditched his dull-eyed wife; as such, she never became an Astheroth, a god to him. Rather, he gave His love to a wife who was given to dynamically plan daily her spiritual arousals for their never-ending mutual love. Under the New Covenant, the converted spouse practices peace and is always in a state of forgiveness for his or her unconverted spouse’s condescension towards bedroom intimacies. Nonetheless, he (or she) lawfully infrequently engages his insipid spouse-mannequin for his ironic ‘frequent incontinence’. He doesn’t engage in fornicating thoughts of another woman, and his dispirited intimacies are temporarily alleviated (effectively an act of self-pleasuring); the humbling trial drives him too long for Christ.

Our Lord’s experiences with Israel were precisely the same for him to long for the Father. He is also rapturously ‘incontinent’ for the truth that he inherently is, as is the Father (Joh 14:6). Our Lord made for himself a wife who would seek Him with her entire heart. Christ’s incontinence is royally established in His Bride’s unity of incontinent truth; it is what makes them blissfully “one”.

Num 21:5 And the people spake against God, and against Moses, Wherefore have ye brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? for there is no bread, neither is there any water; and our soul loatheth this light bread.

Today, God’s people must be careful not to be lifeless, loathe our Lord’s burning interactions with us where his flocks rest at noon, and humiliate him for his ardour.

Isa 26:9 With my soul have I desired [H183 – covet, wait longingly, wish, sigh] thee in the night; yea, with my spirit within me will I seek thee early: for when thy judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness.

Mal 1:2 I have loved you, saith the LORD. Yet ye say, Wherein hast thou loved us? Was not Esau Jacob’s brother? saith the LORD: yet I loved Jacob, 
Mal 1:3 And I hated Esau, and laid his mountains and his heritage waste for the dragons of the wilderness. 

Deu 7:6 For thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God: the LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth. 

Under Eve’s curse, and starkly typified by Vashti’s swift dismissal, it is too often irksome for a wife (Israel) considering her husband’s desire for the entirety of her body, mind and heart, symbolised by a focus on her breasts; universally she disdains it as groping; a term guaranteed to humiliate a husband into forced abstinence and possible cheating, especially for the incontinent unbeliever. 

The fundamentally vital key the Shulamite knew, as sequentially portrayed in the Song of Solomon, is her bright, sensual and cunning development of anticipation, designed tantalisingly hours, even days (maybe weeks) away from her ‘main menu’, for the intensity of mutual escalation of tensions. She thus “builds her house”.