"...a link discussing the discovery of beehives showing a beekeeping industry going back to First Temple times."
When this article was shown in DIGG, one comment was that they must have been MaccaBEEs.
That was Second Temple times. Perhaps the beehives belonged to Devorah HaNeviyah...
As a related aside, I once heard a speaker claim that "z'vat" could be read (in the midrashic sense, not the pshat one) as "zayit," which would make the phrase "olives, milk, and date-honey" which does strike me as a pretty decent summary of Israeli native agriculture...
Maybe so, but how do you get from a bet to a yod?
I don't know about a midrash, but it does appear that way in the second (less sung) stanza of the well known Tu B'Shvat Higiya song:
ניטע כל הר וגבע
מדן ועד באר-שבע
וארצנו שוב נירש
ארץ זית חלב ודבש
what about צוף
"The phrase ארץ זבת חלב ודבש ("land flowing with milk and honey") in the Torah is clearly referring to honey from fruit trees, as it is praising the agricultural bounty of the land."
what is agricultural about חלב?
"it refers to date or fig honey in all but two references"
what about the references in gen. and isa. given below?
a) Well, milk comes from animals that feed off the land.
b) One of the points of this post was to disprove that claim in the quoted article.
Commenting by HaloScan
