A land of milk and honey: Aspirational allegory or udderly bee-lievable?
Temple Avodat Shalom, River Edge, Reform
Parshat Eikev continues Moses’s Deuteronomic theme that following or not following God’s laws leads to blessings and curses respectively. And if the Israelites do follow the mitzvot, the portion offers an additional sweetener, as it were, to the reward. If the people follow appropriate religious practice and ethical behavior, then they will enter a promised land that is “not like the land of Egypt from which you have come,” but “a land flowing with milk and honey.” The line appears in a poetic section starting with Deuteronomy 10:12. Moses enjoins the Israelites to revere God and to act ethically like God, staying away from favoritism and corruption and to uphold the cause of the needy.
Then comes the description of the land, and “flowing with milk and honey” is just the beginning. Moses describes a land that God “looks after…keeping God’s eye on from year’s beginning to year’s end…granting rain in season…providing grass for your cattle…and you shall eat your fill.” In other words, it will be the proverbial good life, as long as “you obey the commandments that I enjoin upon you this day.”
Across millennia of Jewish life, both in the diaspora and in the land of Israel, a traditional takeaway from this and similar sections of Deuteronomy is straightforward: by following God’s commandments to live Jewish lives and to behave ethically, we can experience the metaphorical sweetness of the Promised Land, and possibly bring it forth to the world as a messianic age.
But why is this represented by milk and honey? And what milk and what honey are we talking about, and is it flowing literally or allegorically? The answer, as with many Torah study questions, is “yes!” The Torah never specifies, despite the phrase appearing 14 times, leaving us to fill in the gaps.
The primary interpretation has always been date honey and goat’s milk, reflecting bounty in both agriculture and livestock. Goat milk and goat cheese was a prevalent domestic product, and date honey was a prevalent export from Israel in regional trade. But that wasn’t all! There were cows (as mentioned in this Torah portion) and cow dairy products, and there was farmed bee honey — you can visit the 3,000-year-old bee farms in Israel. But even with the new archaeological finds showing us how ancient Israelites lived, we keep coming back to dates and goats. These (very) educated guesses are based primarily on economics. Date honey was on a larger production scale than bee honey, and an export for which Israel was regionally known. And goat dairy products were more common than cow products because goats are cheaper and require less land. Rashi and archaeologists agree: goats and dates. (And also figs, but fig honey is mostly an interpretation of diaspora rabbis for whom figs were a more symbolic fruit to write about. The real product was date honey.)
Then we have the allegorical flowing.
From a mystic perspective, there must be more to a phrase appearing so many times in the Torah, beyond the literal food products. Nachmanides teaches the true meaning is “praising the land that it is good, which is to say that the air is good and lovely to people, and that all good will be found of it. And it is wide, so that all of Israel will be able to live there.” And if that sounds like the messianic age in which bayom ha’hu yihiye Adonai echad u’shemo echad, “on that day Adonai will be one and the Name will be one,” that’s because it is. The phrase “flowing with milk and honey” and other biblical descriptions of the promised land gained new meaning over time as metaphors for the beauty of olam habah, the messianic world to come. These come from writings both in the diaspora and in Israel, as the concept of a return to the Promised Land became more allegorical, or if one were to be fully kabbalistic, even metaphysical. (This is, of course, separate from the miracle of our modern state of Israel, achieved through the hard work of Zionism, which continues to need our support more than ever.)
But also, literal flowing.
I saved the best for last. Truly, no interpretation is too strange for the Talmud. Almost as a competition, rabbis make claims of “going with the flow.” In Ketubot, Rami b. Ezekiel sees honey flowing down a fig tree, onto a goat that was flowing with milk, and the two flows mingled with each other. Then, R. Ya’akov b. Dostai said he waded through three miles of milk and honey. But Reish Lakish said he saw a span of 16 miles by 16 miles, 256 square miles, covered in milk and honey. And in the final one-upsmanship, Rabba bar bar Hana said: I myself saw the entire region flowing with milk and honey over all of the land of Israel.
Ultimately, the symbolism is what took hold in our culture and tradition. What do you think of first when you hear, “a land flowing with milk and honey”? Probably not an agricultural product debate. But rather, we think of the aspirational, of the good life, of being at ease with safety and prosperity. And we could all certainly use some more of that in our own lives and in our communities. Ken yehi ratzon.
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