a land flowing with milk and honey

This is how God describes Canaan to Moses at the burning bush, in Exodus 3:8, and again in Deuteronomy 6:3: "a good land and a large, a land flowing with milk and honey." The phrase is the promise held out to a people who have known only slavery and the desert.

The image is deliberately sensory rather than statistical. Milk means grazing herds and settled pasture; honey means wild abundance, sweetness that costs nothing. Together they paint a land so fertile it seems to overflow of its own accord.

English kept the phrase for exactly that picture of plenty. A land flowing with milk and honey is any place of abundance and ease — a boom town, a fertile valley, or, often with a note of irony, a promised paradise that turns out to be less generous on arrival.