What Does “A Land Flowing With Milk and Honey” Mean? God’s Promise of Canaan

A land flowing with milk and honey is how God described Canaan, the land he promised to Abraham’s children. He first said it to Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3:8). The milk came from goats, sheep and cattle on good pasture, the honey from dates, figs and wild bees: a country that could feed a whole people well.

Think who first heard it. God spoke of milk and honey to a people making bricks for Pharaoh, who did not own a single field. The words promised what any family could live on: milk from the herd every day, and something sweet from the trees. The land is Canaan, later called the land of Israel. Of the twenty Old Testament verses that use the phrase, from Exodus to Ezekiel, all but one describe it. The exception gives the phrase to Egypt, and it is the saddest verse of them all.

What does “land of milk and honey” mean in the Bible?

The Bible’s wording is a land flowing with milk and honey, in the King James Version often “a land that floweth with milk and honey”; most of us remember it as land of milk and honey. In Hebrew it is eretz zavat chalav u-devash, a land that flows with milk and honey.

Milk meant flocks and herds. Proverbs speaks of “goats’ milk enough for thy food, for the food of thy household” (Proverbs 27:27), and Deuteronomy of “Butter of kine, and milk of sheep” (Deuteronomy 32:14). Milk that flows comes from animals with plenty of grass, so the word speaks of good grazing. Honey meant sweetness from the land itself, from fruit or from bees (more on that below). A country that gave both had pasture for herders and orchards for farmers, or, as Rabbi Ari Zivotofsky sums it up in the Orthodox Union’s magazine Jewish Action, “the commingling of animal products and vegetation, of herders and farmers.”

Moses sets the new land beside the one Israel had left. Egypt was a place “where thou sowedst thy seed, and wateredst it with thy foot, as a garden of herbs”, but the new land “drinketh water of the rain of heaven: A land which the Lord thy God careth for” (Deuteronomy 11:10–12). So the milk and honey are the ordinary food of a people at home, and the rain that made them comes from God. A land God cares for: that is the gift.

Jewish tradition has heard praise of the land’s fruit in the phrase as well. The Talmud (Ketubot 112a) takes it to mean a land whose fruit is “as fatty as milk and as sweet as honey”. It tells of a rabbi who came to Bnei Brak, saw goats grazing under fig trees, and watched the fig honey and the goats’ milk drip and run together (Ketubot 111b).

Where does the Bible first mention a land flowing with milk and honey?

At the burning bush, while Israel was still enslaved in Egypt. Before the people owned a single field, God named the food their children would eat. “I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows,” he says, and then: “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 3:7–8). He saw, he heard, he knew, and he came down.

The land itself had been promised centuries earlier. When Abram reached Canaan, “the Lord appeared unto Abram, and said, Unto thy seed will I give this land” (Genesis 12:7). At the burning bush God tells the slaves what that land would be like to live in.

How many times is “milk and honey” in the Bible?

The exact words “milk and honey” stand in twenty verses of the King James Version, all in the Old Testament, and every one is the phrase about a land: nineteen about Canaan, one about Egypt. Fifteen of the twenty fall in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, on the road from Egypt to Canaan, and God himself speaks eight of them. Here they are in Bible order, with who speaks and what is happening:

If your Bible includes the deuterocanonical books, you will find it twice more. The Douay-Rheims has Sirach praise Joshua and Caleb, who brought the people “into the land that floweth with milk and honey” (Sirach 46:10; 46:8 in most modern Bibles), and Baruch confesses that God brought the fathers out of Egypt “to give us a land flowing with milk and honey” (Baruch 1:20).

Why did Dathan and Abiram call Egypt a land of milk and honey?

Because they wanted to go back. Dathan and Abiram had joined Korah’s rebellion against Moses, and when Moses sent for them, they refused to come: “Is it a small thing that thou hast brought us up out of a land that floweth with milk and honey, to kill us in the wilderness, except thou make thyself altogether a prince over us?” They took God’s own words for the promised land and gave them to Egypt, the house of their slavery, and then accused Moses of failing to deliver the real one: “thou hast not brought us into a land that floweth with milk and honey” (Numbers 16:13–14). The desert had made the past look sweet.

The same doubt runs through the spies’ report. They agreed the land was good, “surely it floweth with milk and honey; and this is the fruit of it”, and then added: “Nevertheless the people be strong that dwell in the land” (Numbers 13:27–28). Joshua and Caleb answered with the same words, as a reason to trust God: “If the Lord delight in us, then he will bring us into this land, and give it us; a land which floweth with milk and honey” (Numbers 14:8).

Was the promise tied to obedience?

In Deuteronomy the land is a gift already sworn, and keeping God’s law is how Israel would live well in it: “Hear therefore, O Israel, and observe to do it; that it may be well with thee, and that ye may increase mightily, as the Lord God of thy fathers hath promised thee, in the land that floweth with milk and honey” (Deuteronomy 6:3; compare 11:8–9). Moses also warns that plenty can be dangerous. When the people “shall have eaten and filled themselves, and waxen fat; then will they turn unto other gods” (Deuteronomy 31:20). And the book of Joshua records the cost of unbelief: the men who came out of Egypt died in the wilderness “because they obeyed not the voice of the Lord”, and never saw “a land that floweth with milk and honey” (Joshua 5:6). Their children went in.

Once inside, the phrase became a prayer. A farmer bringing his firstfruits was to say that God “hath given us this land, even a land that floweth with milk and honey” (Deuteronomy 26:9), and after the tithe: “Look down from thy holy habitation, from heaven, and bless thy people Israel, and the land which thou hast given us” (Deuteronomy 26:15). The promise spoken to slaves came back to God as thanks from farmers.

Was the honey bees’ honey or date honey?

Both readings have support, and the Hebrew word allows either. Devash can mean bees’ honey, and the Bible has wild honey in two famous stories. Samson found “a swarm of bees and honey in the carcase of the lion” (Judges 14:8), and in the woods during Saul’s war with the Philistines “the honey dropped”, and Jonathan “dipped it in an honeycomb” with the end of his rod (1 Samuel 14:26–27).

Many Jewish commentators read the honey of the land as the syrup of dates or figs. Rashi, the medieval commentator, explains the honey of the phrase as flowing from dates and figs (at Exodus 13:5, as Zivotofsky cites him), and in the Talmud the honey of Bnei Brak drips from fig trees. Moses’ own list of the land’s produce ends “a land of oil olive, and honey” (Deuteronomy 8:8), where honey stands among the fruits. Christian commentators were divided over the honey in Hezekiah’s firstfruits (2 Chronicles 31:5): Joseph Benson took it as dates, “as the Hebrew writers generally understand the word”, while the Pulpit Commentary thought the reading “dates” rested “on very insufficient title”.

Archaeology has added weight to the bees. In 2007 the Hebrew University of Jerusalem announced that excavations directed by Amihai Mazar at Tel Rehov, in the Beth Shean Valley, had uncovered an apiary from the tenth to early ninth centuries BC: three rows of hives made of unbaked clay and straw, more than thirty found and perhaps a hundred in all. Beekeepers who visited estimated they could have produced as much as half a ton of honey a year. When it was announced, it was the earliest apiary found in any excavation in the ancient Near East, and it shows that people in Israel kept bees on a large scale in the time of the kings.

What does “butter and honey” mean in Isaiah 7?

Isaiah uses a related pair in the sign of Immanuel: “Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good” (Isaiah 7:15). A few verses later the same food marks a land emptied by invasion, where a man keeps “a young cow, and two sheep”, and “butter and honey shall every one eat that is left in the land” (Isaiah 7:21–22), because the fields have gone back to pasture and wild bees. Here the old words of plenty describe a ruined country, where only a few are left to eat. The longer story of that sign is told in what butter, honey and curds symbolize.

What do milk and honey symbolize on their own?

Apart from the land, milk in the Bible is mostly the food of beginners. “I have fed you with milk, and not with meat,” Paul tells the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 3:2). Hebrews scolds readers who still “have need of milk, and not of strong meat” (Hebrews 5:12). Peter uses it gently: “As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby” (1 Peter 2:2). You will find more in what milk means in the Bible.

Honey on its own stands for sweetness, and above all the sweetness of God’s word: “How sweet are thy words unto my taste! yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth!” (Psalm 119:103). The verses that use it are gathered in Bible verses about honey. And the prophets keep the picture of plenty for the future: in the day of the Lord “the hills shall flow with milk” (Joel 3:18).

How do Christians read the promise of milk and honey?

The New Testament never uses the phrase. Christians read the promise of the land through the letter to the Hebrews, which says that the rest Joshua gave Israel in Canaan was not the last word: “For if Jesus had given them rest, then would he not afterward have spoken of another day. There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God” (Hebrews 4:8–9). The “Jesus” of verse 8 is Joshua, whose name the King James Version writes in its Greek form. Of Abraham and the patriarchs, Hebrews says, “now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly” (Hebrews 11:16).

The early Church carried the image on. Clement of Alexandria read the milk as the word of God, “the Word being figuratively represented as milk”, and wrote that for this reason “the same milk and honey were promised in the rest” (The Instructor 1.6).

Why were the newly baptised given milk and honey?

In some churches of the early centuries, people coming up from the font were given milk and honey to taste. Not every church order has the custom, and the writers who record it give their own reasons. Tertullian, writing in the same years as Clement, describes it: when the baptised are taken up from the water “as new-born children”, “we taste first of all a mixture of milk and honey” (The Chaplet 3). He mentions it again among the plain things of creation Christ uses in his sacraments, “that union of honey and milk wherewithal he gives them the nourishment of children” (Against Marcion 1.14).

The church order known as the Apostolic Tradition, traditionally credited to Hippolytus of Rome and dated by its translator Burton Scott Easton to about 217, explains it as the promised land fulfilled. At the first communion of the newly baptised, the bishop gives thanks over bread and wine, and over “milk and honey mixed together for the fulfilment of the promise to the fathers, which spoke of a land flowing with milk and honey”, that is, Christ’s flesh, by which believers are fed like infants, “he making sweet the bitter things of the heart by the gentleness of his word” (chapter 23 in Easton’s translation). A council at Carthage in 397 was still giving rules for blessing the milk and honey offered at the altar. A Christian who had just passed through the water tasted, on the first day of new life, the food God had promised to slaves at the burning bush.

Does “land of milk and honey” promise wealth?

In everyday English a land of milk and honey means any place of easy prosperity. The Bible’s phrase is narrower. It names one land, given to one people as a gift, with rain that came from God and a warning that a people who have eaten their fill may turn to other gods (Deuteronomy 31:20). It promises enough and more, food for a household and something sweet besides, and Scripture never offers it as a pledge of riches to every believer.

What it does hold out to every believer is the country the patriarchs were walking toward, the one Hebrews calls “a better country, that is, an heavenly” (Hebrews 11:16).

Related reading

• What Milk Means in the Bible: a Good Land, and What Beginners Drink
• 20 Bible Verses About Honey
• What Do Butter, Honey, and Curds Symbolize?
• Why Was Moses Not Allowed to Enter the Promised Land?
• Pomegranates in the Bible: What They Mean and Where They Appear
• Wheat in the Bible: What Does It Symbolize?