WHY MILK AND HONEY
WHY MILK AND HONEY BY JONATHAN COHEN Your lips distil nectar, my bride; Honey and milk are under your tongue "Song of Solomon" * S PRING is the season that recalls the biblical image of a perfect land so fertile its green hills flow with honey dripping from its hives, like liquid gold in the sunlight. A spacious land covered with pink hawthorn, red cyclamen, and white rockrose. There are the flowers of its myriad wild fruits, and the warm valley air smelling of their nectar. And gushing — somehow — from the land itself, there are springs of pure milk white as snow, and bright streams of it flowing through the hills, as if the milk of an eternally vibrant earth mother in her fruitful cycle of multiplication. It is, according to the Bible, "the beauty of all lands" — a paradise whose people would lack nothing. This curious, supernatural image is evoked every year in the spring by celebrations of the Exodus, which for millennia have alluded to the ...