The Promised Land is repeatedly described as “a land flowing with milk and honey.” It sounds like a simple promise of abundance. But for the Israelites, food carried a deeper meaning. Food was the reason their ancestors ended up in Egypt.

Three times in Genesis, famine strikes Canaan. Abraham leaves for Egypt. Isaac faces another famine but is commanded by God to remain. When famine comes in Jacob’s generation, his sons go to Egypt for grain. Eventually the entire family follows. They go because their land cannot feed them. They stay long enough to become slaves.

Seen against that history, “a land flowing with milk and honey” is more than a promise of fertile soil. It is a promise of independence. You will have a land that can feed you. You will not have to leave it to survive or depend upon another nation for the food that keeps you alive.

Deuteronomy makes the promise explicit: “a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing.”

The Exodus therefore does not really end when Israel leaves Egypt. Nor does it end in the desert, where the people remain dependent upon manna falling each morning. It ends when they can live from their own land.

That makes the report of the spies remarkable. They enter Canaan and find exactly what God promised. They return carrying its enormous fruit and concede: “It indeed flows with milk and honey.” They cannot say the land will not feed Israel. So they invert the warning. “It is a land that eats its inhabitants.” Eretz ochelet yoshveha. A land that eats those who live in it.

Genesis presented the danger of a land that could not feed the Jews, forcing them to leave. The spies imagine the opposite danger. The land will produce abundantly, but the Jews who enter it will be consumed.

The Promised Land will become their tomb.

The dispute is therefore not really about agriculture. Everyone has seen the fruit. It is about whether Jews can survive in their own land. Joshua and Caleb believe they can. The other spies do not. They can imagine Jews surviving in Egypt, even as slaves. They have watched Jews survive in the desert through miracles. What they cannot imagine is Jews entering their own land, defending it, cultivating it and sustaining themselves there.

Jewish history would give that argument an extraordinary afterlife.

Jews established themselves in the land, lost their sovereignty and spent centuries living among other nations, dependent upon those nations for permission to remain. They were welcomed and expelled, protected and persecuted. Again and again, Jews had to leave one place and seek survival somewhere else.

The modern return to Israel was therefore a return not merely to territory, but to the promise behind the milk and honey: Jews would once again sustain themselves, defend themselves and build a society that did not depend upon another country’s willingness to shelter them.

They succeeded beyond what the spies could have imagined. A poor and vulnerable country became one of the Middle East’s most advanced economies, producing food, technology, medicine and military power and selling its innovations around the world.

Yet the ancient question has not disappeared. Israel still depends upon alliances, foreign markets and imported goods, as modern nations do. It worries whether its most talented people will remain and build there. It receives substantial American military support while hostile powers seek increasingly dangerous weapons and some openly call for the destruction of the Jewish state.

Self-sufficiency does not mean isolation. No modern country survives alone. The deeper promise is that Jews should possess enough economic, military and human strength that they are never again forced to abandon their home simply to survive.

For centuries, Jews were forced to leave one country after another. They finally returned to the land their ancestors had feared entering and built a country capable of feeding, defending and sustaining them.

Yet the spies’ fear still hovers over the Jewish state: could the land in which Jews finally learned to defend themselves also become the place where their enemies destroy them? The question is as old as the spies and as current as Israel itself.

Will the land feed us—or eat us?