Throughout the Pentateuch and into Joshua, the land of promise is a land “flowing with milk and honey.” After that, the phrase virtually disappears. It is used in the prophets to describe the land given to Israel after the exodus (Jeremiah 11:5; 32:22; Ezekiel 20:6, 15; the partial exception is the “curds and honey” in Isaiah 7:22). Why?
Hippolytus may give us a clue. He describes an oblation of milk and honey alongside the oblation of wine; the milk and honey is a reminder of the land promised to “the Fathers” but also a reference to the land that Christ gave, that is, His flesh, “whereby they who believe are nourished like little children.”
Milk and honey are the foods of childhood, as Isaiah 7:15 suggests. In her infancy, Israel was given a land of baby food.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Letters
Joshua T. Katz’s (“Pure Episcopalianism,” May 2025) reason for a theologically conservative person joining a theologically liberal…
The Revival of Patristics
On May 25, 1990, the renowned patristics scholar Charles Kannengiesser, S.J., delivered a lecture at the annual…
The Enduring Legacy of the Spanish Mystics
Last autumn, I spent a few days at my family’s coastal country house in northwestern Spain. The…
