So I have come down to deliver them from the power of the Egyptians, and to bring them to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanite and Hittite and the Amorite and the Perizzite and the Hivite and the Jebusite.I honestly never really understood the imagery of a land flowing with milk and honey. Maybe the cultural background for an American is too far separated from the time, but I just don't see someplace with huge abundances of milk and honey to be a good spot to live. Milk would be okay, except for it to be flowing means a huge overabundance of livestock taking up all the nice places to live. And flowing with honey would be fine, except that means having a huge number of bees around, which I hate.
Also, this verse caught my attention because of the description of the land's current inhabitants. Normally, when we hear of the Promised Land, we hear it described as the land of Canaan. Maybe it's because I just finished a Sunday School class on Joshua, but it's passages like this that really show the significance and size of the land they're going to take. Here you're talking about 1 nation (Israel) taking over the land that's held by at least six nations. In the time of city-states and tight clan relationships, one nation isn't normally very big. But when you start listing off the peoples you're going to remove, you get a feeling of how big a place this will be, and also the huge power that you will have to have to defeat them. After all, it's not likely they'll just decide to sell out to you and move elsewhere. So God's setting Moses up with a not-insignificant task here.
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