And this is the instruction The laws and rules that Adonai your God has commanded [me] to impart to you, to be observed in the land that you are about to cross into and occupy, so that you, your children, and your children's children may revere Adonai your God and follow, all the days of your life, all God's laws and commandments that I enjoin upon you, to the end that you may long endure. Obey, 0 Israel, willingly and faithfully, that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly [in] a land flowing with milk and honey, as Adonai, the God of your ancestors, spoke to you. (DEUTERONOMY 6:13)

THIS SECTION OF Parashat V'aetchanan, which immediately follows a reiteration of the Ten Commandments (in Deut. 4:445:30), serves as reminder that if the Israelites obey the instruction imparted by Moses, great reward will ensue, and they will enter and occupy a land flowing with milk and honey. What exactly is this land of milk and honey that the Israelites are waiting to receive And why is it that we do not in fact enter the land at the end of the Book of Deuteronomy Moses dies before his people enter the land, and indeed, the Book of Deuteronomy ends before we ourselves have witnessed the eretz zavat halav udevash, "a land that flows with milk and honey." The narrative ends before we have been satisfied, and we are left awaiting entry into the fertile territory that we are told will nourish and sustain us.

The image of a lush agricultural environment is enticing for a nation that has been wandering in a dry desert for forty years. The phrase "a land flowing with milk and honey" is found in five other places in the Book of Deuteronomy itself' Generally, commentators see in the phrase the concept of abundance. This is indeed a sensible explanation, considering that owning a milk producing herd of goats and having the ability to produce honey, whether through gathering it in the wild or rendering it from various fruit syrups, would have indicated agricultural success in biblical times. It is most likely that the usage of the words "milk" and "honey" may be seen as metaphors for fertility and wealth rather than as literal categories. Contemporary commentator Jeffrey Tigay summarizes this perspective:

"A land oozing milk and honey" came to be a proverbial description of the fertility of the land of Israel, representing the products of animals and the earth, of herders and farmers. It is not merely a neutral descriptive phrase, but carries positive overtones. It Is not always meant literally. The scouts who toured the Promised Land brought back grapes, pomegranates, and figs as a confirmation that it was indeed "a land oozing milk and honey" (Num. 13:23, 27). Since they did not bring back milk products, they must have meant the phrase as a general reference to fertility rather than specifically to milk and honey. 2

Metaphors of milk and honey, while certainly correlated to the notion of abundance, may also be viewed as allegorical tools that sexualize the land, portraying it (her) as a female body. The virgin territory awaits the virile influence and consumption of the Israelites. It is a ripe land, a land that gushes like a surrealistic breast, and its honeyed orifices are anticipating the acts of occupation, even penetration, and then conceiving and multiplying for its masters. As Moses prepares the Israelites to enter the land by instructing them in God's laws and commandments, they are also preparing to become newly masculated after being cared for by God as if they were infants when they were wandering in the desert.

The Hebrew root zwv (Deut. 6:3), "flow, ooze, gush," supports this reading. Tigay states that "the Hebrew verb refers to bodily organs leaking fluids and, in poetry, to water gushing" (see Lev.15 and Ps. 78:20). This same word refers to the issue of blood from a menstruant woman, a discharge of semen from a man, and the gushing of the intestines when a person is pierced with a sword.'

The root zwv refers not only to the flow of bodily fluids, but also can refer to a liminal state of one form or another. Each time the term appears, it is with reference to the threshold between life and death. In the case of the person who has been pierced with a sword, the threshold between living and dying is rather obvious. Perhaps the threshold is less perceptible in regard to semen and menstruation. The discharge of these two fluids does not represent a situation of imminent life and death. They are, however, the fluids that symbolize the human ability to create life, and each time that they are visible represents a loss of that procreative possibility sperm or an egg that has failed to create new life is in essence a small death. Flowing water, too, not commonly found in the middle of the desert, is a conspicuous biblical reminder that water truly is a fluid that bestows and maintains life, and without which death is certain.

The flow of sexual fluids is not treated casually in biblical or rabbinic tradition. This is indicated not only in the biblical texts on semen and menstruation, but also in the laws of family purity and proper sexual conduct discussed in later rabbinic sources., it is important to ask, therefore, why the word root zwv, while often associated with the flowing of the "forbidden" fluids of bodily discharge, would be) juxtaposed with the enticing fertility of the Promised Land. Why is a word with a connotation of sexual distress, inappropriateness, or prohibition used to discuss the land that is meant to embody the loftiest object of the people of Israel's desire? Perhaps the use of the root zwv, in this particular context, is indicative of ambivalence toward desire itself

It is not only this word root that may signify sexual overtones in Deut. 6:3. As previously mentioned, the usage of the words "milk" ~alav) and "honey" (devasb) also convey sexual content. It is without question that these words in Song of Songs 4:11 and 5:1, for example, are laden with sexual and sensual meaning: "Your lips, 0 my bride, drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under your tongue, and the scent of your garments is like the scent of Lebanon" (Song of Songs 4:11); 1 am come into my garden, my sister, my bride: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice; I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my e, however, the fluids milk. Eat, lovers, drink be drunk with love" (Song of Songs 5:1). Fe, and each time that Clearly, the honeycomb, the honey, and the milk are the fluids of creative possibility female sexual response.

Having ascertained that "a land flowing with milk and honey" connotes a feminized land, discussed in terms that evoke images of female bodily emissions, let us return to the issue of the amalgamation of desire and ambivalence, communicated through the language of our text. Anne McClintock, in her essay "The Lay of the Land: Genealogies of Imperialism," discusses a similar issue later on in the historical spectrum. Although the historical periods and social settings are entirely different, parallels may certainly be drawn between the two texts being explored. McClintock analyzes Columbus's comment during his exploration of 1492, that the earth was shaped like a woman's breast with a nipple. She states, "Columbus' breast fantasy draws on a long tradition of male travel [and territorial conquest] as an erotics of ravishment."' McClintock's thesis is that the ferninizing of land and the usage of female images as boundary markers inherently coincide with male anxiety:

What is the meaning of this persistent gendering of the imperial unknown? As European men crossed the dangerous thresholds of their known world, they ritualistically feminized borders and boundaries. Female figures were planted like fetishes at the ambiguous points of contact, at the borders and orifices of the contest Zone. Sailors bound wooden female figures to their ships' prows and baptized their ships as exemplary threshold object swith female names. Cartographers filled the blank seas of their maps with mermaids and sirens. Explorers called unknown lands "virgin" territory. Philosophers veiled "Truth" as female, then fantasized about drawing back the veil. In myriad ways, women served as mediating and threshold figures by means of which men oriented themselves in space, as agents of power and agents of knowledge. 7

McClintock posits that the establishment of feminized boundaries and borders is a kind of compensatory gesture, countering a male loss of boundary by overemphasizing a ritualization of boundary, which is often paired with military violence. While we cannot entirely overlay McClintock's conclusions onto the biblical text, we are able to verify that cities are often personified as women in the Hebrew Bible in discussions of war. Nahum 3:1 and 3:56 are examples of the destruction of a city being described as a female victim. Pamela Gordon and Harold C. Washington, through looking at Nah. 3:56 and other prophetic texts, refer to rape as a biblical military metaphor that still has relevance in contemporary times.8

A biblical tradition that personifies land and borders as women who are to be sexually desired and/or occupied is a challenge for our feminist sensibilities. Deuteronomy 6:3 personifies the land as female, and creates a scenario wherein the masculinized Israelites desire, and consequently ready themselves to move in and occupy, the female body/land. The ambivalent attitude toward desire as expressed in the language of Deut. 6:3 hints at the duality of desire and repulsion inherent in the male construct of femininity. The fact that the land is feminized, and thus the female objectified, naturally results in an incomplete picture of woman. We see the female as passive, as something to be entered, crossed into, and occupied. This equation of women and land, and consequent objectification of women, creates a situation whereby we see women as able to be either desired or reviled. Either option is equally possible when we do not see her as a whole being, as who she is rather than what she is. The (female) land's boundaries are there to be desired or conquered. The linguistic association of "forbidden fluids" with the delicacies of milk and honey (zwv) in Deuteronomy points directly to this friction.

If the phrase "a land flowing with milk and honey" linguistically evokes an image of male arousal and of revulsion, an image of the need to occupy the female body, an image of violence and boundary crossing, then the notion that the Israelites never do enter the land at the end of the Book of Deuteronomy leaves us with a powerful message. On some level, we may claim that the Book of Deuteronomy is unwilling to have us enter the land under these circumstances. Until the body is seen in her wholeness, we are not considered ready to enter her. Our entry must be a partnership, a gentle and mutual ingathering. In the meantime, until we can see the land in this way, we are left standing outside, in the desert.