Whence-a-Word?: “A Land Flowing with Milk and Honey”

A land that flows with milk and honey is one that provides an abundance of nourishment and rich food. Although a similar formulation appears in an ancient Ugaritic text about the Canaanite god Baal (“The heavens rain fat; the wadis flow with honey”), the phrase entered common usage through the Hebrew Bible. There, it almost always applies to the Promised Land, a new homeland that Yahweh pledged to give his people suffering under Egyptian bondage. In that usage, the phrase refers specifically to Canaan and concerns uncultivated grazing land, where milk is acquired from goats, and honey comes from either wild bees or the syrup from dates and figs.^a As the Talmud explains, “there was honey oozing from figs, and milk dripping from the goats … This is the meaning of the verse ‘A land flowing with milk and honey’” (b. Ketubot 111b).

In Exodus 3:8, Yahweh says to Moses, “I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey [’erets zavat ḥalav u-devash].” The phrase then appears 19 more times, including in Numbers 14:8, where Joshua exhorts the people not to rebel against Yahweh so that he may give them the land, and in Deuteronomy 31:20, where Yahweh predicts that the people will break his covenant after Moses’s looming death. In these and other contexts, the biblical promise of a land flowing with milk and honey is expressly contingent on people’s loyalty to Yahweh. Ironically, the Hebrews complained to Moses during their desert wandering, “You have brought us up out of a land flowing with milk and honey to kill us in the wilderness” (Numbers 16:13).

In Christian interpretation, the true homeland takes on an eschatological, heavenly dimension (Hebrews 11:13–16; Revelation 21). As a token of a far greater inheritance than a piece of fruitful land, this “better country” (Hebrews 11:16) is a matter of resurrection and eternal life, which is with Jesus.

Although in their biblical setting, milk and honey represent basic subsistence for a pastoral society, in other contexts they have been used to connote the lush fertility of a land suitable for farming. The national mythology of the Slavic Czechs, for instance, includes a legend, first recorded by Cosmas of Prague in his 12th-century Latin Chronicle of the Czechs, that has the fabled forefather declare to his people upon their arrival in Bohemia, “This here is the land that I’ve been promising to you … a land moist with honey and milk.”