a land of wheat, barley, vines, fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of olive trees and honey;
Parallel Translations
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a land of wheat, barley, vines, fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of olive trees and honey;
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A land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive, and honey;
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a land of wheat and barley, and vines and fig-trees and pomegranates; a land of olive-trees and honey;
Cross-references (15)
Passages linked to Deuteronomy 8:8 in the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge, ordered by reader-vote popularity; verse text shown in World English Bible.
- John 6:13 So they gathered them up, and filled twelve baskets with broken pieces from the five barley loaves, which were left over by those who had eaten.
- Psalms 147:14 He makes peace in your borders. He fills you with the finest of the wheat.
- Deuteronomy 32:14 butter from the herd, and milk from the flock, with fat of lambs, rams of the breed of Bashan, and goats, with the finest of the wheat. From the blood of the grape, you drank wine.
- 2 Samuel 4:6 They came there into the middle of the house, as though they would have fetched wheat; and they struck him in the body: and Rechab and Baanah his brother escaped.
- 1 Kings 5:11 Solomon gave Hiram twenty thousand cors of wheat for food to his household, and twenty cors of pure oil. Solomon gave this to Hiram year by year.
- 2 Chronicles 2:10-15 Behold, I will give to your servants, the cutters who cut timber, twenty thousand cors of beaten wheat, twenty thousand baths of barley, twenty thousand baths of wine, and twenty thousand baths of oil.” Then Huram the king of Tyre answered in writing, which he sent to Solomon, “Because Yahweh loves his people, he has made you king over them.” Huram continued, “Blessed be Yahweh, the God of Israel, who made heaven and earth, who has given to David the king a wise son, endowed with discretion and understanding, who would build a house for Yahweh, and a house for his kingdom. Now I have sent a skillful man, endowed with understanding, of Huram my father’s, the son of a woman of the daughters of Dan; and his father was a man of Tyre, skillful to work in gold, in silver, in bronze, in iron, in stone, in timber, and in purple, in blue, in fine linen, and in crimson, also to engrave any kind of engraving and to devise any device; that there may be a place appointed to him with your skillful men, and with the skillful men of my lord David your father. “Now therefore the wheat, the barley, the oil, and the wine, which my lord has spoken of, let him send to his servants;
- Isaiah 7:23 It will happen in that day that every place where there were a thousand vines at a thousand silver shekels, shall be for briers and thorns.
- Jeremiah 5:17 They will eat up your harvest and your bread, which your sons and your daughters should eat. They will eat up your flocks and your herds. They will eat up your vines and your fig trees. They will beat down your fortified cities in which you trust with the sword.
- Ezekiel 27:17 “ ‘ “Judah and the land of Israel were your traders. They traded wheat of Minnith, confections, honey, oil, and balm for your merchandise.
- Hosea 2:8 For she didn’t know that I gave her the grain, the new wine, and the oil, and multiplied to her silver and gold, which they used for Baal.
- Hosea 2:22 and the earth will respond to the grain, and the new wine, and the oil; and they will respond to Jezreel.
- Micah 4:4 But they will sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and no one will make them afraid: For the mouth of Yahweh of Armies has spoken.
- Habakkuk 3:17 For though the fig tree doesn’t flourish, nor fruit be in the vines; the labor of the olive fails, the fields yield no food; the flocks are cut off from the fold, and there is no herd in the stalls:
- John 6:9 “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish, but what are these among so many?”
- Psalms 81:16 But he would have also fed them with the finest of the wheat. I will satisfy you with honey out of the rock.”
Cross-references from openbible.info (CC BY 4.0)
Explain this verse (8 sources)
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John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain Deu 8:8 A land of wheat, and barley, and…
Deu 8:8 A land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive, and honey;
Ver. 8. A land of wheat and barley.] Sumen totius orbis. Strabo basely slandereth this fat and fertile country as dry and barren; but Rabshakeh {2Ki 18:32} and Tacitus tell us otherwise. The testimony here given of it is above all exception.
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain Of olive oil, Heb. of the olive tree of…
Of olive oil, Heb. of the olive tree of oil, i.e. not of wild and barren, but of fruitful olive trees, which yield plenty of oil.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain A land wherein thou shall eat bread without scarceness,....…
A land wherein thou shall eat bread without scarceness,.... That is, should have plenty of all sorts of provisions, which bread is often put for:
thou shall not lack anything in it; for necessity and convenience, and for delight and pleasure:
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a land whose stones are iron; in which were iron mines:
and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass; both which are taken out of the earth and the stones of it, Job 28:2 and were to be found in the land of Canaan, and particularly in the tribe of Asher, as seems from Deu 33:25 and more particularly at Sidon and Sarepta, which were in that tribe; the latter of which seems to have its name from the melting of metals there, and the former is said in Homer (t) to abound with brass.
(t) . Homer. Odyss. 15. l. 424.
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain Verse 8. A land of wheat, c.] On the…
Verse 8. A land of wheat, c.] On the subject of this verse I shall introduce the following remarks, which I find in Mr. Harmer's Observations on the Fertility of the Land of Judea, vol. iii., p. 243.
"Hasselquist tells us that he ate olives at Joppa (upon his first arrival in the Holy Land) which were said to grow on the Mount of Olives, near Jerusalem and that, independently of their oiliness, they were of the best kind he had tasted in the Levant. As olives are frequently eaten in their repasts, the delicacy of this fruit in Judea ought not to be forgotten; and the oil that is gotten from these trees much less, because still more often made use of. In the progress of his journey he found several fine vales, abounding with olive trees. He saw also olive trees in Galilee; but none farther, he says, than the mountain where it is supposed our Lord preached his sermon.
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"The fig trees in the neighbourhood of Joppa, Hasselquist goes on to inform us, were as beautiful as any he had seen in the Levant.
"The reason why pomegranates are distinctly mentioned, in this description of the productions of the land of promise, may be their great usefulness in forming cooling drinks, for they are used among the Asiatics nearly in the same way that we use lemons; see vol. ii., 145.
"Honey is used in large quantities in these countries; and Egypt was celebrated for the assiduous care with which the people there managed their bees. Maillet's account of it is very amusing. 'There are,' says he, 'abundance of bees in that country; and a singular manner of feeding them, introduced by the Egyptians of ancient times, still continues there. Towards the end of October, when the Nile, upon its decrease, gives the peasants an opportunity of sowing the lands, sainfoin is one of the first things sown, and one of the most profitable. As the Upper Egypt is hotter than the Lower, and the inundation there goes sooner off the lands, the sainfoin appears there first. The knowledge they have of this causes them to send their bee-hives from all parts of Egypt, that the bees may enjoy, as soon as may be, the richness of the flowers, which grow in this part of the country sooner than in any other district of the kingdom. The hives, upon their arrival at the farther end of Egypt, are placed one upon another in the form of pyramids, in boats prepared for their reception, after having been numbered by the people who place them in the boats. The bees feed in the fields there for some days; afterwards, when it is believed they have nearly collected the honey and wax, which were to be found for two or three leagues round, they cause the boats to go down the stream, two or three leagues lower, and leave them there, in like manner, such a proportion of time as they think to be necessary for the gathering up the riches of that canton. At length, about the beginning of February, after having gone the whole length of Egypt, they arrive at the sea, from whence they are conducted, each of them, to their usual place of abode; for they take care to set down exactly, in a register, each district from whence the hives were carried in the beginning of the season, their number and the names of the persons that sent them, as well as the number of the boats, where they are ranged according to the places they are brought from. What is astonishing in this affair is, that with the greatest fidelity of memory that can be imagined, each bee finds its own hive, and never makes any mistake. That which is still more amazing to me is, that the Egyptians of old should be so attentive to all the advantages deducible from the situation of their country; that after having observed that all things came to maturity sooner in Upper Egypt, and much later in Lower, which made a difference of above six weeks between the two extremities of their country, they thought of collecting the wax and the honey so as to lose none of them, and hit upon this ingenious method of making the bees do it successively, according to the blossoming of the flowers, and the arrangement of nature.'"
If this solicitude were as ancient as the dwelling of Israel in Egypt, they must have been anxious to know whether honey, about which they took such care in Egypt, was plentiful in the land of promise; and they must have been pleased to have been assured it was. It continues to be produced there in large quantities: Hasselquist, in the progress of his journey from Acra to Nazareth, tells us that he found "great numbers of bees, bred thereabouts, to the great advantage of the inhabitants." He adds, "they make their bee-hives, with little trouble, of clay, four feet long, and half a foot in diameter, as in Egypt. They lay ten or twelve of them, one on another, on the bare ground, and build over every ten a little roof." Mr. Maundrell, observing also many bees in the Holy Land, takes notice that by their means the most barren places in other respects of that country become useful, perceiving in many places of the great salt plain near Jericho a smell of honey and wax as strong as if he had been in an apiary.
By Hasselquist's account it appears, that the present inhabitants of Palestine are not strangers to the use of hives. They are constructed of very different materials from ours, but just the same with the Egyptian hives. They seem to be an ancient contrivance; and indeed so simple an invention must be supposed to be as old as the days of Moses, when arts, as appears from his writings, of a much more elevated nature were known in Egypt. I cannot then well persuade myself to adopt the opinion of some of the learned, that those words of Moses, in De 32:13, He made him to suck honey out of the rock, and oil cut of the flinty rock, are to be understood of his causing Israel to dwell in a country where sometimes they might find honey-comb in holes of the rock. It is very possible that in that hot country these insects, when not taken due care of, may get into hollow places of the rocks, and form combs there, as they sometimes construct them in ours in hollow trees, though I do not remember to have met with any traveller that has made such an observation. But would this have been mentioned with so much triumph by Moses in this place? The quantities of honey produced after this manner could be but small, compared with what would be collected in hives properly managed; when found, it must often cost a great deal of pains to get the honey out of these little cavities in the hard stone, and much the greatest part must be absolutely lost to the inhabitants. The interpretation is the more strange, because when it is said in the next clause, "and oil out of the flinty rock," it is evidently meant that they should have oil produced in abundance by olive trees growing on flinty rocks; and consequently, the sucking honey out of the rock should only mean their enjoying great quantities of honey, produced by bees that collected it from flowers growing among the rocks: the rocky mountains of this country, it is well known, produce an abundance of aromatic plants proper for the purpose. Nor does Asaph, in the close of the eighty-first Psalm, speak, I apprehend, of honey found in cavities of rocks; nor yet is he there describing it as collected from the odoriferous plants that grow in the rocky hills of those countries, if the reading of our present Hebrew copies be right: but the prophet tells Israel that, had they been obedient, God would have fed them with the fat of wheat, and with the rock of honey would he have satisfied them, that is, with the most delicious wheat, and with the richest, most invigorating honey, in large quantities, both for eating and making agreeable drink. Its reviving, strengthening quality appears in the story of Jonathan, Saul's son, 1Sa 14:27; as the using the term rock to signify strength, c., appears in a multitude of places. The rock of a sword, Ps 89:43, for the edge of the sword, in which its energy lies, is, perhaps, as strange an expression to western ears.
I shall have occasion to speak of the excellence of the grapes of Judea in a succeeding chapter I may therefore be excused from pursuing the farther examination of the productions of this country, upon giving my reader a remark of Dr. Shaw's to this purpose, that it is impossible for pulse, wheat, or grain of any kind, to be richer or better tasted than what is sold at Jerusalem. Only it may not be amiss to add, with respect to this country's being well watered, that the depth, תהם tehom, spoken of in this passage, seems to mean reservoirs of water filled by the rains of winter, and of great use to make their lands fertile; as the second word תעלתיה tealotheiha seems to mean wells, or some such sort of conveniences, supplied by springs, and the first word; נהרתיה naharotheiha rivers or running streams, whether carrying a larger or smaller body of water. What an important part of this pleasing description, especially in the ears of those that had wandered near forty years in a most dry and parched wilderness! I will only add, without entering into particulars, that the present face of the country answers this description.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary 1859 · Public Domain Honey, extracted from dates. (Du Hamel) --- Almost all…
Honey, extracted from dates. (Du Hamel) --- Almost all the luxuries of the earth might be found in the promised land; so that it was justly said to flow with milk and honey. (Haydock)
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown 1871 · Public Domain A land of wheat, and barley--These cereal fruits were…
A land of wheat, and barley--These cereal fruits were specially promised to the Israelites in the event of their faithful allegiance to the covenant of God (Psa 81:16; Psa 147:14). The wheat and barley were so abundant as to yield sixty and often an hundredfold (Gen 26:12; Mat 13:8).
vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates--The limestone rocks and abrupt valleys were entirely covered, as traces of them still show, with plantations of figs, vines, and olive trees. Though in a southern latitude, its mountainous formations tempered the excessive heat, and hence, figs, pomegranates, &c., were produced in Palestine equally with wheat and barley, the produce of northern regions.
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honey--The word "honey" is used often in a loose, indeterminate sense, very frequently to signify a syrup of dates or of grapes, which under the name of dibs is much used by all classes, wherever vineyards are found, as a condiment to their food. It resembles thin molasses, but is more pleasant to the taste [ROBINSON]. This is esteemed a great delicacy in the East, and it was produced abundantly in Palestine.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain 8. wheat and barley] Not the most characteristic products…
8. wheat and barley] Not the most characteristic products of Palestine, but put first as the staple food of man and the principal distinction of the cultivated soil from the desert, the land not sown (Jer_2:2). On the distribution of wheat and barley in Palestine see Jerusalem, i. 298 f. These two grains are followed by four fruits.
vines and fig trees and pomegranates … oil olives] ‘Far more than any grain the staple products of the Judaean range have been its fruit-trees and especially the great triad of the Olive, Vine and Fig, the three which in the ancient parable the trees desire in turn to make their king’ (Jerusalem, 1:299 ff. which see for the distribution of these trees and their power as factors in civilisation and human wealth). Here the Olive is taken apart from its usual companions Vine and Fig either because of its importance or for the rhythm of the prose. Oil olives, lit. the olive of oil, the cultivated and grafted, as distinguished from the wild, olive. Cp. 2Ki_18:32 with the other word for oil, yiṣhar, used above Deu_7:13 (q.v.); here it is shemen.
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honey] See on Deu_6:3.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain "Palestine has been celebrated in all ages for three…
"Palestine has been celebrated in all ages for three products: corn, wine, and oil, which still continue to be its most valuable crops" (Ibid., p. 189). The principal corn crops were wheat and barley. The vine was largely and carefully cultivated; the olive required little cultivation, being almost a spontaneous growth, and forming one of the most valuable productions of the country; the fig was also indigenous in Palestine, and still grows there, both wild and cultivated, in abundance; that the pomegranate (firemen) also was very abundant may be inferred from the number of places named from this (cf. Jos_15:32 Jos_19:7, Jos_19:13; Jud_1:20:45, 47 21:13; 1Ch_4:32, etc.) Honey. The word so rendered (dbash) is used both of the honey of bees (Deu_32:11; 1Sa_14:26, etc.; Psa_81:1-7; Pro_16:24, etc.) and of the honey of grapes, a syrup obtained by boiling down the newly expressed juice of the grape to a half or third part of its bulk, and still known among the Arabs by the name of dibs (Robinson, "Bib. Res.," it. p. 442; Smith, Bib. Dict.," s.v. "Honey"). In the wilderness, the people had murmured that they had been brought into an evil place, no place of figs, or of vines, or of pomegranates; and where there was no water to drink. (Num_20:5) Moses here tells them that the land they were about to occupy was not such a place, but one abounding in all those things of which they had found the wilderness so destitute.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.