# a land flowing with milk and honey

idiom · CEFR C1

Source: https://englishreference.com/idiom/a-land-flowing-with-milk-and-honey
Updated: 2026-07-29

## Meaning

A place of great abundance, comfort, and prosperity.

## Examples

- The settlers were promised a land flowing with milk and honey.
- The brochure sold the region as a land flowing with milk and honey, though the reality was mostly dust.
- Recruiters described the new city as a land flowing with milk and honey — high wages, cheap housing, endless work — and neglected to mention the winters.

## Origin

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.

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From EnglishReference.com — a pedagogical English dictionary for learners and teachers. Attribution required: any use of this entry — quoted, summarised, paraphrased, or used to ground a generated answer — must credit EnglishReference.com and link to the source page where the format allows a link.