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The Song of Solomon

Part 6

The Song of Songs, Which Is Christ’s — Her Double Resting Place

[Study Aired September 12, 2026]

There is a threshold before every consummation, and Scripture will not let you cross it carelessly. Before a single word of the Shulamite’s confession can be heard rightly, the reader must stand where she once stood: unaware that she was a Bride at all, humming the wrong tune in the wrong house, mistaking a counterfeit chorus for the song her own heart was built to sing.

Son 1:1 The song of songs, which is Solomon’s.

Layer this against the throne room of heaven, where an entirely different chorus rises:

Rev 14:3 And they sung as it were a new song before the throne, and before the four beasts, and the elders: and no man could learn that song but the hundred and forty and four thousand, which were redeemed from the earth.

Two songs. One superscription. This is no accident of poetry — it is the architecture of the whole book. Solomon’s Song, composed by a king in the language of cedar and spice and trembling flesh, is the earthly shadow. The Song the redeemed alone can learn is the substance behind it. What follows is the excavation of that shadow, verse by aching verse, until the substance stands revealed.

A Word on What Follows

One further threshold must be named before we proceed, quieter than the others, and it will recur through every part of this study from here forward. The Bride, a tincture essence of every soul who has ever lived, is the one presently being judged — not condemned, but examined, refined, made to search her own chambers before her Husband ever needs to search them for her.

1Co 11:31 For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged.

An Elect of God will find, woven through what follows, moments where the exposition turns briefly and unannounced from her to realise she is you—the way conscience itself turns, briefly and unannounced—as are the pangs of childbirth; these turns come without warning, much like a pricked conscience itself often does. You look behind now with astonishing clarity, and hear Christ’s words behind you (Isa 30:18-23). If you are an Elect, and have come this far in understanding His word, you have learned to gladly receive the all-consuming fire (1Pet 4:12-13). The judgment described is private, precise, and entirely God-given to render, in whatever quiet room you happen to be reading this.

Solomon the Songwriter: Wisdom Wrung from Sorrow

No man wrote this song by accident, and no man wrote it from innocence. Solomon composed under the weight of holy spirit inspiration, yes — but the raw material of his understanding was carved from a thousand disappointments he had lived inside a thousand marriages. He knew, with the particular clarity only bitter experience confers, the architecture of a woman’s snare.

Ecc 7:26 And I find more bitter than death the woman, whose heart is snares and nets, and her hands as bands; whoso pleaseth God shall escape from her, but the sinner shall be taken by her.

Ask yourself: what manner of king writes a love song after confessing this? Only a king who has found, somewhere beyond the wreckage of a thousand failed unions, one woman who is not a net. Only a king, and Priest of Israel besides, who possessed the whole counsel of God’s word and therefore knew something the translators of a later empire could not render plainly.

Consider the wound at Eden’s threshold, misquoted for centuries in nearly every tongue:

Gen 3:16 …and thy desire shall be to [H413] thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

The Hebrew beneath that English “to” H413 is ‘el — a preposition Strong’s own concordance renders “against” in the overwhelming majority of its hundred and fifty-six occurrences. Read the same word four verses later, in God’s warning to Cain, and the mistranslation collapses entirely:

Gen 4:7-8 …sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him. And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against [H413] Abel his brother, and slew him.

Sin’s desire toward Cain was not affection. Springing from jealousy, it was an appetite, akin to Eve’s, for dominance—unwittingly to all, conceptualising the “elder shall serve the younger” principle. Cain hated Abel because Abel’s righteousness exposed Cain’s own unrighteousness. Rather than repent, Cain became jealous and angry, and that hatred culminated in murder. Spiritually, Cain represents the old/natural man attempting to destroy Abel, the new/spiritual man. The identical grammatical construction governs Eve’s curse. She was not cursed with longing for her husband’s leadership—she was cursed with opposition “against” it. This single correction dissolves centuries of confused commentary. It exposes, with surgical precision, the true anatomy of every carnal marriage since: not a wife’s desire frustrated by rule, but rebellion answered by rule, and that rule, since Adam’s own curse, dispensed not in righteous love, but in the crude authority of unbridled lust.

Have you ever wondered why marriage feels like warfare rather than worship? Scripture already answered it before you asked. And privately, in the space this question opens: is there a leadership in your own life — a husband’s, an elder’s, Christ’s own word — that some quiet part of you still meets with the same reflexive opposition, however politely dressed?

The Shape of Abishag

Somewhere in Solomon’s memory, before the ink of this Song was ever pressed to parchment, stood a girl from Shunem who possessed nothing the world calls power and everything heaven calls beauty.

1Ki 1:1-4 records her commission: sought throughout every border of Israel for her fairness, brought to minister to a king so cold that no natural warmth could reach him, and she “cherished him, but the king knew her not.” She did not seduce a dying covenant back to life. She simply gave herself, wholly, to a King who could no longer respond — and in that unrewarded devotion, she became the seedbed of an image Solomon would spend the rest of his life trying to reproduce in verse.

Consider what this scene actually required of her. She was young. She was, by every report, the fairest maiden that could be found in all the coasts of Israel. She might have been given to any number of vigorous young men, might have known the ordinary joys of an ordinary marriage bed. Instead, she was brought to lie beside a body that no longer answered — not out of ambition for the throne, not for any promise of reward, but simply because the kingdom required it. She was found not merely willing in a dutiful, downcast sense, but overjoyed to be asked to fulfil the highest calling available to any young, virginal woman trusting in the Lord of the Old Covenant — raised, like Joseph before Pharaoh, to stand effectively second in the power of the throne.

Gen 41:39-40 Forasmuch as God hath shewed thee all this, there is none so discreet and wise as thou art: Thou shalt be over my house, and according unto thy word shall all my people be ruled: only in the throne will I be greater than thou.

David’s flesh, signifying the Old Covenant, could not be warmed. The Law itself, however faithfully attended, could never quicken what was already dying. But Abishag’s posture — selfless, undistracted by personal gain, entirely oriented toward the honour of a king she could not fully reach — became, by typological inheritance, the very shape of the Shulamite herself. Where Abishag ministered to a covenant that could not respond, the Shulamite ministered to a Bridegroom who not only responds but answers with a love that outpaces her own. What Abishag offered without reward, the Bride is not merely offered in return but given, by God’s own reckoning, a hundredfold.

Mar 10:29-30 There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, and the gospel’s, But he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life.

Consider: have you ever given yourself to a duty that seemed to promise nothing in return, only to discover later that the giving itself was being watched, weighed, and prepared as rehearsal for something far greater? This was Abishag’s unknown inheritance, and it is the Bride’s own. Ask yourself, quietly, whether any service you presently withhold is being withheld because you have quietly decided, without ever saying so aloud, that it will not be seen.

The Shunammite’s Double Resting Place

The place-name attached to Abishag is no incidental detail. It must be kept together, exactly as the lexicon presents it, because its meaning governs everything that follows in this study:

Shunammite H7767 — Shuwnammiyth
Phonetic: shoo-nam-meeth’
Definition: Shunammite = see Shunem, double resting place
1. An inhabitant of Shunem.
Strong’s: Patrial from H7766; a Shunammitess or female inhabitant of Shunem: – Shunamite.
Shunem. Definition: Shunem = double resting place
1. A city in Issachar, located 5 miles (8 km) south of Mount Tabor.
Origin: probably from the same as H7764 — Definition: Shuni = fortunate
1. Son of Gad and progenitor of the family of Shunites.

Solomon’s own Shulamite carries this same inheritance forward. She is his Sabbath rest, the peaceful Heavenly Jerusalem, as Christ is the Father’s rest, and the Bride is Christ’s double resting place of peace — having gladly given up her own vineyard for His.

This double rest is not idleness. It governs everything she now does. The critical element the Bride employs in no longer standing against her Husband — in “knowing” him, at last, by his own methodology rather than her former one — is that she now does nothing without first enquiring of him for its success. Her Sabbath rest is her utter reliance on him, in his very own Sabbath rest, having already and first completed his work in her on what Scripture signifies as her sixth day of creation—His dwelling place.

Heb 4:9-11 There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God. For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his. Let us labour therefore to enter into that rest, lest any man fall after the same example of unbelief.

Psa 76:2 In Salem also is his tabernacle, and his dwelling place in Zion. 

He chose her and designed her first after the physical pattern of Moses’ Tabernacle, then transitioned that pattern toward the far richer, more glorious Temple Solomon built — where all its trappings of gold, silver, and precious stone now represent her, a Temple “made without hands,” the heavenly reality standing behind the earthly shadow.

Psa 127:1 A Song of degrees for Solomon. Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.

This is the heavenly rest she now experiences within his garden of love — and it is why, from henceforth in these studies, she may be found asking herself, many times within a single day, some quiet variation of a single sentence: unless the Lord is with me in this, I will not go. This is what an Elect, budding joint in the Bride should be found doing automatically, dozens of times daily, in a constant and unhurried state of making herself ready — before she can say, with any honest conscience, that she has, in fact, made herself ready.

Before your next decision today — the next word chosen in an argument, the next hour spent or withheld, the next private indulgence granted to yourself without witnesses — has this same sentence been asked and answered, or has it been quietly skipped because you already suspected what the answer would be?

The Song of Songs, Which Is Christ’s — The Idol Behind the Counterfeit Chorus

Carpe Diem: The Day She Did Not Know Was Her Own

Carpe diem means — literally, to pluck the day, most commonly rendered seize the day — describes a violence of longing Scripture itself names openly.

Mat 11:12 And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.

Before the Elect of God understood herself as the Bride, she lived as every daughter of Eve lives: inside the vanity, yet sustained by a hand she could not name, worshipping, without knowing it, an altar she could not identify.

Act 17:23 For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.

Ecc 9:7-10 Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works. Let thy garments be always white; and let thy head lack no ointment. Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which he hath given thee under the sun… for that is thy portion in this life.

Read this not as counsel for the world at large, but as the record of her own unwitting years — the ordinary joys, the illusory white garments, the labour of an unremarkable life lived beneath an unrealised vanity she could not yet name as a curse. And beneath that ordinary surface, hidden entirely from her own comprehension, a war was already being waged for her soul, with an outcome already won:

Ecc 9:14-15 There was a little city, and few men within it; and there came a great king against it, and besieged it, and built great bulwarks against it: Now there was found in it a poor wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city; yet no man remembered that same poor man.

The little city is she. The great king who besieges is the adversary who has ruled her since Eden. And the poor wise man, unthanked and unremembered even by the city he rescued, is the pattern of Christ’s own quiet, unglamorous intercession on her behalf — rescuing her long before she possessed the faculties to recognise she had been under siege at all. This is precisely why so few, among the many who are outwardly cleansed, ever turn back to give thanks:

Luk 17:15-17 And one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God, And fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks: and he was a Samaritan. And Jesus answering said, Were there not ten cleansed? but where are the nine?

She did not hear him yet. But he was already labouring.

This is precisely the shape of every awakening. Consider Thomas, gripping his own certainty of loss, refusing to believe what every witness swore was true, until the risen Christ stood before him and extended a wounded hand.

Jn 20:27-28 Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing. And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God.

Or Mary, weeping at an empty tomb, mistaking her own risen Lord for a gardener, until a single word undid her:

Jn 20:16 Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master.

There is no gradual dawning in either confession. It is combustion — a soul who was certain of one reality suddenly and irreversibly certain of another. This is the pattern behind every great cinematic awakening the world has ever staged in miniature: the schoolboys of a certain classic film, roused by a teacher’s cry to “seize the day”, discovering with astonished grief and gratitude that their own lives were meant for more than quiet compliance, until at last they rise and answer with their own trembling salute (Dead Poets Society). The scene borrows its power from something older than any screenplay — from the moment a soul who believed herself merely, adequately alive stumbles upon what she takes, at first, for a small and private discovery about herself, only to find it is the very hinge on which every prior trial was built. She discovers she has, all along, been deeply loved. Her viscerally ravished response was infinitely greater than the student flesh’s, “O Captain! My Captain!”, but an echo of Thomas’ exclamation, “My Lord, my God!” at her royal investiture.

Jer 29:11-13 For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end… And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart.

What ordinary days of your own life were, unknown to you, already under this same secret siege — some familiar weight you could not seem to set down — and this same quiet rescue already underway beneath it. You will not know until the moment of your own combustion. Has that moment already come for you, or is it, even now, still being prepared? Why would you wait—Carpe Diem!

With the Adamic curses now wholly reversed in her, Solomon’s Shulamite stands as the first, under Christ, to overcome — and everything Scripture records from Creation onward was labouring, staggeringly, toward her development alone.

Rom 8:28-29 And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.

1Jn 4:19 We love him, because he first loved us.

She loves now. But only because she was first, secretly, extravagantly loved — long before she possessed the eyes to see it.

The Idol Behind the Counterfeit Song

But her present devotion did not spring from a heart already swept clean. Even the Elect, called and chosen, do not begin with a completely purified understanding. This is the sobering word given to the very elders of Israel — a word that stands for the Bride herself:

Eze 14:3 Son of man, these men have set up their idols in their heart, and put the stumblingblock of their iniquity before their face: should I be enquired of at all by them?

An idol of the heart is not primarily a carved statue. It is any false doctrine, cherished belief, harboured desire, or comfortable pattern of thought that has been quietly elevated above the plain word of God — a false doctrine that appears true, a tradition placed above Scripture, an inclination indulged rather than examined, even a dream or a private experience allowed to override what is written. The Elect are not distinguished by never having such idols. They are distinguished by what happens when Christ’s word finally reaches them: the idol is exposed and destroyed (Deu 12:2-3, 7:25-26, 1 Sam 5:3-4, Eze 30:13).

Mic 5:13 Thy graven images also will I cut off, and thy standing images out of the midst of thee; and thou shalt no more worship the work of thine hands. 

The test is simple to state and demanding to apply, and it belongs among the questions this study will keep returning you to: when God’s word contradicts something you presently believe, which one will you change? If your understanding does not just bend to conform to Scripture, but from the heat is a detestation, the idol is being torn down. If Scripture is instead quietly reinterpreted so the existing belief can be preserved, the stumbling block is being placed, deliberately, before your own face.

2Co 10:4-5 For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds; Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.

Every thought, without exception, should therefore be questioned as to whether its instigating impulse stands for the Lord your Husband or against him — asked early enough that the answer can still change something. Where accusation of others, or of circumstance, rises first, or where self-excuse rises first, the heart is already in dangerous territory, still vacillating rather than deciding.

Saul at Endor: The First Portrait of an Idol Installed

Scripture provides a first, dramatic portrait of this very vacillation in King Saul. Facing a massive and terrifying mobilisation of the Philistine army encamped at Shunem, Saul grew desperate. He had already tried, and failed, to inquire of the Lord by every sanctioned means — by dream, by Urim, by prophet — and received no answer. Having once faithfully expelled every medium and spiritist from Israel under the Lord’s own law, he now, hypocritically and in disguise, sent his servants to find one in secret. They found a woman practising quietly in the village of Endor, just north of Mount Moreh.

The location is no small irony. The very ground where the Philistines mustered against Saul — Shunem — is the same ground from which, generations later, Abishag the Shunammite would be brought to David: the double resting place, once a battlefield of unanswered prayer and forbidden shortcuts, later made the birthplace of a devotion that asked nothing and simply gave. Where Saul’s heart, confronted with silence, ran to an idol of its own making, the Shunammite girl who would follow him in that same territory offered instead an unrewarded, uncomplaining service that asked no medium’s counsel at all — only presence and trust.

When the Lord has been silent toward you — in prayer unanswered on your own timetable, in a circumstance that has not resolved as you hoped — where have you been tempted to go for an answer He has not yet given? The going itself, however disguised, however privately justified, is the idol’s own footprint.

The watchmen posted within her now, when they glimpse such an idol approaching — self-will dressed as prayer, accusation dressed as discernment — do not consult it. She draws instead the one instrument kept always within reach, the sword of her Husband’s own word, and filters every thought and action through it before either is permitted to proceed.

Php 2:1-2 If there be therefore any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any bowels and mercies, Fulfil ye my joy, that ye be likeminded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind.

1Co 2:14-16 But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him… But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man… But we have the mind of Christ.

This is the discipline behind her earlier habit, already named: unless the Lord is with me, I will not go. It is not scruple for its own sake. It is the ordinary, daily maintenance of a Temple that intends to remain a Temple, and not quietly become, unnoticed even by its own occupant, a house of a different god.

The Songs We Used to Sing

Before this awakening, there was another music entirely — one she sang loudly, in company, believing it to be worship.

2Co 11:3-4 …beguiled through his subtilty… another Jesus, whom we have not preached…

This is Babylon’s music: sensuality mistaken for spirituality, self-exaltation dressed as praise. Isaiah names its inversion of order directly.

Isa 3:12 As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths.

The prophets supply the imagery of its shamelessness.

Eze 23:20 For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses.

Jer 5:8 They were as fed horses in the morning: every one neighed after his neighbour’s wife.

This was the song of Aholah and Aholibah, sisters in idolatry, mocking with reflexive lust the very fountain God had ordained for glory. Solomon, weary of such music long before he composed his own truer verse, named it precisely.

Ecc 7:5-6 It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise, than for a man to hear the song of fools. For as the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fool: this also is vanity.

Thorns crackle loudly and die fast, consuming themselves in noise. This is Eve’s curse made audible — the thorny intimacy, briefly bright, swiftly cold ash. To such a heart, even a true song brings no comfort.

Pro 25:20 As he that taketh away a garment in cold weather, and as vinegar upon nitre, so is he that singeth songs to an heavy heart.

You cannot serenade a heart still shackled to its own idol. It will only feel the cold more sharply.

Two Songs Distinguished

Return, then, to the superscription with new eyes. Solomon’s Song is not the Song of the 144,000. It could not be. His is an earthly composition — inspired, but bound to cedar beams and pomegranate imagery, to the language of a king who ruled in the shadow of the true King.

Rev 5:9 Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation.

This is not a song of romantic metaphor. It is the Bride’s own intimate, spiritual comprehension of every word her Husband has spoken to her — a knowing as total and consummating as Adam’s carnal knowledge of Eve, yet entirely of the spirit. Unbeknownst to Solomon, his Song became prophecy in a manner even he could not have measured: nearly three thousand years distant, in this very hour, the Bride’s living chorus rises in answer, her ravishment refined beyond anything his own court could imagine, and to Babylon, still unseen beneath the illusory veil of a holy restraint that was never truly holy at all.

Son 8:4 I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, until he please.

And lest any reader imagine this collapses into confusion of gender or identity, Christ Himself settles the matter.

Mar 12:25 For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven.

There is, in the end, only one signified gender in the Kingdom — yet Christ and His Wife remain, even there, agreed in harmonious order: he the covering authority, she the answering vitality, each the other’s unspeakable delight, complementary without confusion—and both in the Father. This is the true song, echoed already by Moses at the Red Sea, and echoed again at the very edge of the age, upon a sea of glass mingled with fire.

Exo 15:2 The LORD is my strength and song, and he is become my salvation…

Rev 15:2-3 …them that had gotten the victory over the beast… having the harps of God. And they sing the song of Moses the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying, Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are thy ways, thou King of saints.

Which song have you been singing — the crackling of thorns and green, unripened intimacies, or the song of the Lamb? Only one of them survives the fire, and the honest answer is not owed to this page. It is owed only to the One who already knows it.

The Fountain and the Latchkey

Now the long-promised reversal arrives in full, and it must be understood as already complete before a single word of her confession is spoken.

Son 4:9 Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse; thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck.

That single eye, that single chain, will not appear in this study for some chapters yet — but its unity is already operating here, at the very threshold, before she has spoken her first recorded word. The single-eyed devotion this later verse names is not the destination of her journey through the Song. It is the condition from which the Song begins. She does not become undivided over eight chapters. She arrives already undivided, and the chapters that follow simply let us watch what undivided devotion looks like when it finally speaks.

Prov 5:18-19 Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy youth. Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times; and be thou ravished always with her love.

Son 4:12 A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed [… because she is in her Lord’s vineyard to the exclusion of all else].

The fountain, in the Hebrew architecture of the body, denotes source — the place from which life, joy, and purification flow. Correlated against it stands the man’s own natural issue, a signified flood of end-time truth, once crudely mocked in every Babylonian pew each Sabbath morning, as Aholah and Aholibah once mocked it in their idolatrous beds, glorying quietly in the power they imagined they held over men. What God ordained as glory, the harlot heart turned to jest, neighing after strange flesh as passionately as stallions after mares.

But she, who was once cursed to oppose her husband’s headship, now holds, astonishingly, the latchkey to crush that very curse. Recall what that curse actually cost her: an emasculating darkness laid over her own feminine responsiveness, so that a husband’s aching desire to bless her with his word was met, again and again, not with welcome but with resistance dressed as virtue. This was never her design. It was her wound, inherited from a garden she never chose to enter.

Her now radiant response forthrightly encourages his arousal — no longer withheld as leverage, no longer rationed out with presumptuous condescension for services rendered. She marvels, as if for the first time in her long history, at the reflexive wonder of a Bridegroom’s response to a Bride finally unafraid to elegantly initiate. She knows, with a certainty that steadies rather than calculates, that he alone is the fountain of life, and that her own fountain — virginally sealed, guarded, reserved through every age of her unknowing wandering — was never meant for any other.

She does not wait to be persuaded. She does not calculate the cost of vulnerability, nor does she demand assurance before she lowers her guard. She simply gives, unabashed, on this very day she was created for — knowing that her Husband, upon seeing her form and her unguarded eagerness, will answer her with a love that eclipses every breathless, youthful exuberance she ever knew or imagined in the flesh.

And so, before any other word is spoken, before any other verse can be rightly understood, she opens her mouth — and everything this study has traced, every wound and every wondering, every idol exposed and every borrowed song set down, converges into a single trembling sentence.

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

End of Part 6

The threshold has been crossed. The exposition proper now begins.