How You Take Your Tea

Coffee was available in my household of origin, but not for children, at least not straight up. Occasionally when I was a child, I'd be allowed a spoonful or two in a teacup of milk. Aren't we all?

By inclination, I might be more of a tea drinker. My timeline between and among coffee and tea is a rabbit hole for another time. How I take my tea, these days, whether caffeinated or not, is with a little honey and a splash of milk. 

Yes: I drink my tea with milk and honey.

That's a description that appears more than 30 times in Scriptures. Interestingly, almost all of the occasions are in Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Exodus: the history of the Hebrews, on their God-guided journey from slavery to freedom, from darkness to light, from individual to community. Invariably, it is as "the promise of the Lord," that they will dwell in a land of, or flowing with, milk and honey.

A couple of times we see it in the prophets, including Jeremiah and Ezekiel, as a past promise of the Lord. 

What does this mean, the land flowing with milk and honey? Sticky, as the tired joke goes. In the rich metaphorical poetry of scriptural Hebrew, it means something else. Jonathan Cohen, whose online profile describes him as "a poet, translator, essayist, and scholar of inter-American literature," provides a generally accepted "received definition" of it as a metaphor meaning God's blessings as well as the extraordinary fertility of the Promised Land. The original Hebrew verb zoov means to flow or to gush, and the Greek word zoe, meaning "life," is different from bios. Zoe means vitality, brim-fullnes. Dwelling in extravagantly fertile and abundant lands, in other words.

To this day, in some Jewish households, when a child is first taught to read and say the "aleph bet," the first two letters of Hebrew, the child gets a drop of honey on the tongue, that learning may be sweet.

What happens when you and I consume our tea, or toast, or anything of nourishment and sustenance as in a land flowing with milk and honey? Maybe it will serve as a reminder that God's promise to each of us is a promise of the journey from darkness to light.


*I am indebted to Jonathan Cohen, particularly to the following post:
https://www.uhmc.sunysb.edu/surgery/m&h.html