Av 8 – It Truly Flows with Milk and Honey

Av 8, 5785; from sunset August 1, 2025, to sunset August 2, 2025

(The eighth day of the fifth month)

This is the name “Mosheh” (מֺשֶׁה – Moses) as seen in the Dead Sea Scrolls, written over two thousand years ago.

Today in the Bible, according to tradition, the spies which Moses dispatched 40 days ago have now returned to camp. They brought with them a huge cluster of grapes and baskets full of other delicious fruits. The men recounted scary tales of great giants in the Land at the same time they spoke highly about its giant fruit. Their conclusion? “We are not able to go up against them.” Caleb, however, silenced the crowd and said, “”Let us go up at once and take possession, for we are well able to overcome it.”

And they returned from spying out the land after forty days. Now they departed and came back to Moses and Aaron and all the congregation of the children of Israel in the Wilderness of Paran, at Kadesh; they brought back word to them and to all the congregation, and showed them the fruit of the land.

It truly flows with milk and honey

Then they told him, and said: “We went to the land where you sent us. It truly flows with milk and honey, and this is its fruit. Nevertheless the people who dwell in the land are strong; the cities are fortified and very large; moreover we saw the descendants of Anak there. The Amalekites dwell in the land of the South; the Hittites, the Jebusites, and the Amorites dwell in the mountains; and the Canaanites dwell by the sea and along the banks of the Jordan.”

Then Caleb quieted the people before Moses, and said, “Let us go up at once and take possession, for we are well able to overcome it.”

But the men who had gone up with him said, “We are not able to go up against the people, for they are stronger than we.” And they gave the children of Israel a bad report of the land which they had spied out, saying, “The land through which we have gone as spies is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people whom we saw in it are men of great stature. There we saw the giants (the descendants of Anak came from the giants); and we were like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their sight.”

So all the congregation lifted up their voices and cried, and the people wept that night. – Numbers 13:25-14:1 (NKJ)

The events above set into motion of series of judgments against the children of Israel. Please join us again tomorrow as we recount what the Bible says happened next and remember other calamities which befell the Jewish people on the 9th of Av.

The date palms of Megiddo.
Photo credit: Today in the Bible

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