A Land of Milk and Honey

And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey: unto the place of the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites.

-- Exodus 3: 8 (KJV)

Addressing Moses from the burning bush, Yahweh announces his plan to bring Israel out of Egypt to a "land flowing with milk and honey." God means Palestine, the land he promised to Abraham (Genesis 12) and again to Jacob (Genesis 28).

He doesn't mean, though, that milk and honey wash over the land -- as "flowing" might suggest -- but rather that his people can look forward to a booming economy. (They could also look forward to unfriendly natives, but that's another story.) Milk and honey were dietary staples for the semi-nomadic Israelites of biblical times, so Palestine would indeed be a promising home, abounding in goats and swarming with bees. The soil would be fertile, too, nourishing grapevines and date trees, whose syrup was also called "honey" in Hebrew.

Though the medieval British diet must have differed considerably from the ancient Israelites', the phrase "land of milk and honey" is one of the earliest biblical expressions to have made its way into English (ca. A.D. 1000), via Aelfric's rendering of Numbers 16: 13. "Flowing with milk and honey," however, had to wait for Wyclif's 1382 translation of Ezekiel (20: 6). The phrase had apparently embedded itself in English speech by the time William Tyndale used it in translating the present passage, for he claimed never to have glanced at Wyclif or any other English version of the Bible.

As you might imagine, writers have seized upon Aelfric's phrase and wrested it out of context to describe whatever locale happened to catch their enthusiasm, whether or not goats and date trees abounded. Once upon a time Englishmen viewed America in particular as a "land of milk and honey," but all that has changed, even for Americans. John Steinbeck captured the native disillusionment in The Grapes of Wrath (1939), where a once-hopeful immigrant to California wryly observes that "this ain't no lan' of milk an' honey like the preachers say" (chapter 20).

 
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Michael Macrone is Associate Site Producer of GraceCom and the author of nine books on language, literature, and ideas, including the best-selling Brush Up Your Shakespeare!